We’ve had a busy year at Stonemaier Games! Now that we’re done releasing new products for 2025, I thought I’d reflect on the major lessons learned from the product design and marketing of these products. Here’s what we launched this year:

• Vantage: Open-world cooperation for 1-6 players on a vast planet.
• Origin Story: Superhero-themed tableau-building and trick taking for 1-5 players.
• Finspan: Dive underwater in this language-independent Wingspan-inspired game for 1-5 players.
• Wingspan Fan-Designed Birds: 6 packs, each with 25 brand-new birds.
• Tokaido Expansion & Playmat: Crossroads, Matsuri, and promos in one box.
• Wyrmspan: Dragon Academy: More cards and fledglings (dragons to train).
• Tokaido Duo: Draft dice and race to be the first to complete a traveler’s goal.
• Smitten 2: Tiny cooperative puzzle for 1-2 players.
• Tokaido: Traverse across Japan as far forward on a path as you dare.
• Between Two Castles Essential Edition: Work together with your neighbors to build castles, but there’s only one winner (1-7 players).

Overall, as much as I love these games and expansions, I feel like we packed too much into 2025 from a marketing and customer service perspective. Our goal is to shine the spotlight on a select few products each year so we can best serve you, and I don’t think we accomplished that goal by letting 2025 get so crowded. Next year will be more focused.

As for specific products that have provided takeaways for product design (not game design) or marketing:

• Vantage: I’m really glad that I broke from tradition and started posting design diary updates well before the launch, as it both gave me time to tell the story of this 8-year passion project and gave curious followers something big to anticipate. As for the product design, now that I’ve seen the effectiveness of the optional Rulepop digital storybook (and rule support) web app, I wish I had worked with Rulepop in advance rather than after the launch so people would see it mentioned in the rulebook.
• Origin Story: We aimed to put a big game with a ton of replayability in a smaller box, which served as a great reminder of how much the box size can impact a game’s manufacturing cost (and thus the final consumer price). Using a Wingspan-sized box would have added close to $10 to this game’s MSRP and added freight shipping costs. However, we did something with the box that I’d do differently in the future: Because the box is double-sided (both the front and back have full illustrations), we added a disposable piece of paper to the back of the box with retailer-focused product information. Our manufacturer put a touch of removable glue on the paper so it wouldn’t shift when the box goes through the shrinkwrap machine, but the glue leaves a small bubble when removed.
• Finspan: My main takeaway is for me to add more of a buffer to the quantity certain components, especially when an upgrade pack is involved. People run out of school tokens at higher player counts more often than expected when playing Finspan.
• Wingspan Fan-Designed Bird Promo Packs: I wish I had pursued these last year and release them in batches of 3s instead of 6 all at once–it’s a more palatable expense that way. In the future if we make more of these, we’ll most likely release them in sets of 3, similar to what we did with Rolling Realms promo realms.
• Tokaido Expansion: When I first starting working on combining Crossroads and Matsuri (which were originally separate expansions), I was a bit daunted by the rulebooks, which totaled 12 pages between them. But then I realized that they were actually rather elegant expansions with a ton of content in the rulebooks that could instead be on other tiles and cards in the game (and easier to reference that way). The final result is a single-page rulebook (printed on both sides) that much more accurately conveys to players how easy it is to add the new content to Tokaido.
• Wyrmspan: Dragon Academy: By far the biggest surprise about this expansion has been the incorrect assumption that the included tray is designed to hold ALL Wyrmspan cards. As an expansion tray, it’s actually designed to hold just the expansion cards. There wasn’t a plastic tray in Wyrmspan’s first printing, so we thought we could better serve fans of the game by including an expansion tray to hold at least some of the components (and if you want to store all cards in trays, the tray is sized so that the box also fits a second tray, which we offer discounted on our webstore). Perhaps the lesson is to include an organizer tray in the base game from the start and don’t try to retcon it later.
• Tokaido Duo: Before we acquired the Tokaido brand, all the marketing I’d seen about this Antoine Bauza dueling game seemed to gloss over two major features that I’ve tried to highlight: One, it’s a dice drafting game (meaning that both players are involved in every turn). Two, it’s a race to complete one of several goals, ala the designer’s other incredibly popular 2-player game, 7-Wonders Duel.
• Smitten 2: We tried to make the packaging for this sequel more retailer friendly by adding a hangtag and using a box instead of an envelope. The result is fine, but I’ve found that it sacrifices some of the ease-of-access of the original packaging.
• Tokaido: My biggest lesson learned is to be incredibly wary of making late-stage graphic design choices, and if I do, I need several sets of eyes to ensure that there aren’t any unintended consequences. What I’m referring to is a change we made early in pre-production to make the score track wrap around the board (which is good). However, during the process of changing this, a layer shifted in InDesign, resulting in the path shifting by a few millimeters. It doesn’t impact gameplay, but it was an embarrassing, aesthetically unpleasing way to introduce Tokaido to the Stonemaier brand. (And yes, we’re fixing it for future printings, and it’s fixed on the rubber playmat.)
• Between Two Castles Essential Edition: This combines the core game with the expansion into one seamless product, and I have few notes other than maybe we made slightly too many copies. In the past we’ve seen a pretty big bump from retailers when we give a product this “essential” treatment, but I think there are so many new games, spinoffs, sequels, and second editions on the market these days that they don’t have quite as much appeal as in the past. Despite the slight over-forecast, it’s still sold well enough to justify the Essential Edition.

Those are my primary product design and marketing lessons learned from our 2025 releases. What do you think, and what would you like me to learn from these products so we can better serve you in the future? I love questions, so feel free to ask if you don’t know the full facts or backstories behind a product design or marketing decision.

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See also: Insights from Our Projects

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