St. Louis is hotbed for ‘designer’ games

ST. LOUIS — The bookcases at Marni Romano’s St. Louis Hills home don’t have an inch to give. Reading material has been forced out.

The games have taken over.

The family’s collection of 150 or so are organized by heft. On the upper left shelf, there are boxes — five of them! — of gothic Revolutionary War-era heroes fighting to save monster-infested villages. On the lower right, it’s the sketch-and-guess game Telestrations. Romano likes them all.

“There are some days that I just want to shut off my brain and do something fun. There are some days I want to sit down and spend an hour setting up a game and then spend two hours bringing my husband to his knees in sorrow,” she said. “It depends.”

Tabletop games of all types have been booming for the past decade; the number of products released each year has nearly doubled in that period, to about 5,000. The pandemic further accelerated sales, with families desperate for at-home diversions and far-flung friends connecting via livestream matchups. Dealing cards, rolling dice and sorting plastic pawns feels like an act of resistance to the pervasiveness of technology, players say.

The St. Louis area has become a hotbed of gaming, home to a larger-than-usual number of designers, publishers and shops, plus an annual convention, Geekway to the West.

“Designer” games — compared to mass-produced favorites like Monopoly or Clue — are more expensive, averaging $40 to $60. They boast higher-end components like elaborately illustrated boards, wooden dice and gold-foiled playing cards.

The market expansion has been propelled in part by heavily themed concepts, often with science fiction elements, that create their own intricate worlds. Devoted fans on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter — where tabletop games are the most popular category — open their wallets to support established designers and upstarts. An adventure-mystery offering called Frosthaven broke records last spring with a $12.9 million launch.

“It’s a great way to be social with people in an old-fashioned way,” said Geekway co-founder Jay Moore of Webster Groves.

Moore discovered Settlers of Catan, a landmark strategy game from Germany, in the late 1990s. That was his access point. He made an account on boardgamegeek.com, found his tribe and started a collection that ballooned to 500 games.

In 2005, he helped plan a humble get-together of 20 enthusiasts playing in a friend’s basement. At the most recent Geekway to the West, in 2019, thousands flocked to St. Charles Convention Center to form armies of mini figurines, collect special powers and escape the constraints of time and space.

Moore enjoys a contest with some complexity, but not an all-day commitment.

“The sweet spot is the two-hour time frame,” he said.

A game a week

In 2012, Jamey Stegmaier of St. Louis turned to Kickstarter with an idea about cultivating vineyards in premodern Tuscany. He was working at Washington University; Stonemaier Games was born as a side project with partner Alan Stone.

“I always loved playing tabletop games,” Stegmaier said. “I never thought it would become more than a hobby.”

The success of Viticulture — it surpassed its $25,000 funding goal by almost $40,000 — helped fuel momentum the following year for the $300,000 launch of Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia. By then, Stegmaier was ready to make games his full-time job.

Stonemaier, based in the Central West End, now sells direct to distributors and retailers, and publishes games from outside designers as well as its own concepts. Its bestseller, Wingspan, has sold 600,000 copies in two years and brought a subset of hobbyists — birders — into the gaming community, said Stegmaier.

Amid mounting competition, appealing to a niche customer base can help a publisher carve out an identity.

John Coveyou, founder of Genius Games in Webster Groves, had noticed plenty of games that hinged on wormholes and parallel universes, but none that focused on his favorite topics in biology or chemistry.

“Science was always something I was inspired by,” he said. “It was therapeutic to me.”

Coveyou dove into gaming as a distraction during military deployments. After he left the Army, he earned an engineering degree but gave himself his own assignment: to create a new game every week.

In 2014, Coveyou published his first product, Linkage, which asks players to replicate and mutate DNA strands. Games based on atoms, peptides and the periodic table followed.

Last year, even with a few new releases left in limbo by a backed-up supply chain, Genius Games’ sales grew by a third. Coveyou added two employees.

Weird for a living

The name recognizes that “starting a game company is kind of like taking a leap off a cliff,” said founder Molly Zeff.

She had been traveling all over, introducing her brainchild, Wing It, at trade shows and knocking on shop doors to find shelf space for her competitive exercise in “extreme storytelling” when everything shut down in the spring.

Zeff moved back home to Clayton from New York, took out a loan to extend her advertising reach, and set her focus on her second baby, Million Dollar Doodle. The hustle has been worth it for the lifelong game fan.

Her Wing It predicaments — which players have to talk their way out of, earning points from a judge for creativity and presentation — sprung from late nights with her friends around the kitchen table. What if you were chased by carnivorous rabbits? What if you ran out of oxygen at a mermaid birthday party?

“Essentially, I decided I want to be weird for a living,” Zeff said.

Shane Myerscough, owner of Grey Fox Games in Fenton, focuses his efforts on “middleweights”: more involved than the fantastical scenes from Wing It but less intense than elaborate battles for control of the planet.

“How intimidating is it when you drop it on the table?” Myerscough said. “You have to make sure people love it. It’s not enough to like it, because the competition is fierce.”

Grey Fox sifts through more than a hundred design submissions a year, publishing about three. The games have to be fresh, but not so original that the learning curve is impossible to ascend.

There’s something out there for every age and personality, according to Myerscough.

“If you find someone who doesn’t like board games,” he said, “it’s that they haven’t found the right board games.”