The CEO who tells you not to buy another one of his games

Jamey Stegmaier is not a designer with a sudden epiphany. In 2011, he was working in marketing at Washington University in St. Louis, had maintained a personal blog since 2008, and discovered Kickstarter. His first attempt was a publishing project for $250, which raised half that amount and failed. Not a perfect tool. A man who would learn how to build a community before asking for money.

A year later, in August 2012, he launched Viticulture — a worker placement game set in Tuscany, among vineyards and barrels. Goal: $25,000. It closed at $65,981 from 942 backers. Small by today's standards, enormous for 2012. But Jamey didn't quit his job. He went to his boss and asked to reduce his hours by 80%: four days a week, 20% less salary. A year of testing. Only when he realized that Stonemaier Games was truly viable did he resign.

Stonemaier was founded in St. Louis, Missouri — and remains there. Not Minneapolis, nor Seattle, nor the East Coast, which are the capitals of American boardgaming. St. Louis is the agricultural heartland of the United States, a thousand kilometers west of Washington, on the Mississippi. Today, fourteen years later, the company has eight employees. Eight. Scythe, Wingspan, and Viticulture are all in the global top 50 on BoardGameGeek. That calm energy of someone who publishes a mistake before success — and manages to do so without anxiety — is what distinguishes him when you meet him in person at a convention. He doesn't sell. He tells a story.

In 2014, Jamey discovered the work of a Polish illustrator, Jakub Różalski, on Kotaku. Paintings that seem to have come out of Bruegel or Renoir, with peasants reaping hay in the foreground — and rusty war mechs in the background. Różalski calls that world "1920+", an alternate post-World War I Europe. Jamey contacted him. Not to illustrate one of his games. But to build a game around his art.

Scythe launched on Kickstarter in October 2015 and raised $1.8 million — four times Stonemaier's previous campaign. It became one of the best-selling games of the decade, a fixture in BoardGameGeek's top 20, translated into dozens of languages. But the truly significant data point is another: Scythe is Stonemaier's last Kickstarter. After that success, Jamey decided to leave the platform that had created him. No more promises to strangers, no more year-long waits. Only direct sales and distribution.

That decision in 2015 — to leave the platform at the peak of success — tells the whole story of the Stonemaier method. Not maximizing. Not chasing hype. Selling when the product is ready, to those who truly want it, through distributors and physical stores. Scythe is not their best-selling game — that's Wingspan with over a million copies — but it is their most distinctive game. Without Scythe, Stonemaier would be a different company.

On January 7, 2026, Jamey did something unprecedented in the industry: he announced Stonemaier's entire line-up for the year in a YouTube livestream, Nintendo Direct style. An hour-long video, over twenty-four thousand views. Amidst the new releases — a small-box version of Wingspan, expansions for Finspan and Expeditions, the re-release of Namiji after acquiring the Tokaido IP from FunForge — there was a significant detail. Stonemaier's 2026 is almost entirely made up of expansions, reprints, and small boxes. Only one new game, towards the end of the year.

The industry's initial reaction was predictable: defensive strategy for Trump tariffs. In 2025, Stonemaier paid about half a million dollars in extra duties without raising consumer prices. It's logical to think they're cutting back. But when BoardGameWire asked him, Jamey denied it: "These products were simply ready now." Not strategy, but timing. And then he added the phrase a CEO should never say about their product.

There's also a colder reading. Stonemaier's 2026 is largely made up of expansions — Wingspan, Finspan, Viticulture, Expeditions — which are only sold to those who already have the base box on their shelf. Saying "play what you have" is not just philosophy: it's the condition for selling what comes next. A publisher that thrives on expansions needs customers who don't abandon old games. So yes, it's a counter-intuitive phrase. But it's also, mathematically, the only phrase an expansion publisher can say.

Whether it's sincere philosophy or commercial calculation — probably both — the gamble is clear: while CMON burns twenty million and returns to Kickstarter to save itself, while Leder splits in two, while Asmodee signs a 250-million acquisition, Stegmaier bets on the opposite of growth. Fewer new boxes, more time on already sold games, more sales through physical stores. If it works, it proves that you can build a hundred-million-dollar publisher by asking customers to consume less and play more.