Board gamesOct 29, 2026
Stonemaier games, unboxed: wingspan's publisher still writes the tabletop playbook in public
Official homepage: https://store.stonemaiergames.com Board game stores usually sell boxes. Stonemaier Games publishes a worldview and then writes about how it did it, in public, on a blog that readers visit more often than the store itself. The company began in 2012 when Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone crowdfunded Viticulture, a wine-making worker-placement game, on a shoestring; three years later Scythe raised $1.8 million and defined a genre; four years after that, Wingspan a bird-collecting engine builder designed by Elizabeth Hargrave sold more than a million copies and pulled an entire generation of new players into the hobby. The twist is that the direct storefront is almost an afterthought: roughly 99.9 percent of Stonemaier product moves throu …