The Stonemaier Games Gen Con 2026 Experience
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Transcript
Listen, it's just vibes. It's literally just vibes.
We have a game that fits so many different variables and so many different genres that check it out. You might find your new favorite game.
You just gave me my whole video. Thank you so much.
Absolutely.
Ringsman is the game that started our horror game obsession.
Hey, I'm Dave with Stonemer and I'm here at Gen Con 2026. We've got a great setup with our partners, Meeple Source. We've been doing it for years now. Uh, right behind us over there is our booth and just behind me we've got our event space. We are running dozens of games of the brand new Wingspan Pocket. It is the perfect place to come try it out, give it a play, give it a couple plays, and when you love it, you can head to the vendor hall and pick it up from our partners at Naples Source and get a copy for your friends, too. I'm I'm Alex uh Alex Schmidt. I'm the COO at Stonemire. Uh which means in a small company that means I'm doing some of our uh sales especially like uh B2B with like distributors and things like that. Um I also work with all of our logistics and I work some with our finance as well. Yeah. So it's it's a few different things. So one is it's a place where gamers want to come together, want to experience games.
And so it's a place where a lot of our fans are um and a lot of potential fans are right. People are here to here to learn about games. It is a celebration of gaming. We want to be part of that celebration of gaming. We want to share uh the joy of play with gamers, with fans.
I'm thrilled to be here at Gen Con with Stonem. I've been coming personally since 2012 and it is one of my favorite shows of the year. It's the perfect spot to see the brand new games on the table, whether they're released or upcoming. When you're here at Gen Con playing a Stone Meer game on on the table, know that these games, they're brand new. We just announced them a few weeks ago. They are here available to buy at the show. You can take them home now. It's not a hey, this is a preview and it's coming out in 6 months or it's on Kickstarter and might come out in a year. It's it's here now and it's ready to be on your tabletop. So, instead of me,
so I'm Darren Roy, lead Gen Con GM for Stonemire Mele Source here at our events at Gen Con. Uh, so today I'm talking about Duel of Melo. Uh, Duel of Melo. Uh, so Melo is sort of an extra planer creature who wants to see a duel. He's pulled people through time and space. He's pulled them from the board game Scythe and Expedition. So, one from each world, and they are in a duel to go ahead and win the conflict. Uh, it's a nice blend of the two for sure. Um, it's just interesting to see how they're going to further interact. I mean, we just did start, so but it seems like a good balance between the objectives of expeditions and then your objectives of Scythe. Um, I'm really actually excited to kind of blend the two games together once we get this to the table with all the other stuff that this is owned.
So, Wingspan Pocket here is going to go to be a condensed and distilled version of the game where you're going to spend about 20 to 30 minutes where the entire purpose of it is going to be grabbing your resources from your resource pile over here, being able to also grab a couple birds from your marketplace, and then using those resources to entice the birds to go and live in your nest. Now, the cool part about that is once those birds are in your nest, you'll be able to go ahead and explore your nest and they'll give you some really cool benefits for it, building your engine throughout the time frame for every round. So, that once you go ahead and have the first person to hit six birds in their nest, you'll be able to go ahead and start your end of goal, which is going to be a full round to go ahead and complete it. So, everybody has the same amount of turns. After that, you get to go ahead and count all of your victory points up. either from the birds, any tucked cards, or any of the eggs that might go ahead and be on those birds. And then you'll see your overall global modifier goals here, which you can go and add victory points per egg with any kind of bird that has one of these modifiers on it.
You'll count all of your victory points up, and whoever has the most amount of points has the best nest in the game. It's really easy. It's from one to five players, and you can go ahead and pick it up over here for 20 bucks. We also have upgrade kits for just $6 to be able to go ahead and grab for your birds as well.
Thanks for coming out to play Wingspan Pocket. Can y'all hear me? So, thank you for making this happen as well. And um he asked me to talk a little bit about like how Wingspan Pocket happened and then I will do a super quick teach. I'm Elizabeth Hargrave and I designed Wingspan and Wingspan Pocket. The inspiration came from a couple different directions. We had already done things with Wingspan like adding the Swift Start guide to make it more accessible to people who aren't traditionally playing a lot of board games and I felt like there was still a group of people that could use something even more accessible. And at the same time, we hear from people just that like they love to travel with Wingspan and would love something smaller and a little quicker. So, we're trying to hit both of those things at once.
So, now we're about to play Wingskin Pocket with I don't know how many people. A lot of people. I think we're It's like 40 games at once at least. This is a picture of some ladies playing at the Indiana Dunes Birding Festival who invited me up a few years ago. Um, super fun event. If y'all are burers, more Indiana. Um they catch all the birds as they're migrating across the the Great Lakes. Um and they had two events at this birding festival. They had an event for everyone that wanted to just come play Wingspan cuz they love it and people brought all their wingspan bling and it was really fun. And then they had a workshop to teach people how to play Wingspan. And there were people at that event whose minds were blown by the fact that you had to choose which of the four actions to do on your turn because they're used to the dice telling them what to do, right? So that event was part of the inspiration for Wingspan Pocket.
A quick selfie.
Of course,
Wingspan is the game that started our board game obsession.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Feel like I'm at a wedding.
You're a beautiful bride.
Thank you so much.
Good thing. Thanks for coming out.
Big fan of your games.
Can I help? this play a bird. I have to be able to feed it to play it.
You have to be able to feed it this start a discard pile just over that.
Yeah.
I always do food up cuz you're usually spent and I do it that way to keep it straight. Yep.
That's smart.
And then you also get to use it
unlike in Wingspan because you do this and this and this and this every turn.
So you can draw a bird or you can tuck a bug under a bird, but you don't have a bug.
Okay.
So go ahead and draw a bird. any of those
powers are all options.
How special does it feel that we have a room full of people enjoying new game?
Oh, it's always such a joy to see people playing. I mean, that's why we make games. So, yeah, I love it.
So, I'm just going to restock some of these wingspan pockets here. You know, we've been replacing them about as fast as we can sell them. So, one of the things I do during the day is kind of just follow around to all of the different stations and get as many more of these onto the stacks as we can. And there's a lot of times the day that I find um by the time I do a round, I come back and get another arm load and they've already sold that many of them.
My name is Sam Atwell and I'm from Indiana. I got all kinds of wingspan expansions. I think everyone I think I got every wingspan expansion. Why did you get every expansion?
It is my wife's favorite game. She loves it. And uh we don't get to play a lot because they we normally have more than six people, but this or more than five people, but this expansion will let us play six people. So, I got it and I got the rest of them and we'll be able to play more often. It's not my favorite game, mostly cuz I lose all the time. My wife's really good at it, but she's she loves any of those games where it's like, you know, like the resource generating like strategy kind of combo games like that. She's big on those. Uh, well, we like the birds. Yep. The
and the fish and the dragons and everything.
The flavor text at the bottom of the cards that tell you a little bit about the birds are really nice.
Yeah, we like the engine building mechanic of the game where you can create really good systems that are working to make some awesome plays.
Uh, the the eggs are fun. I like the eggs. Like laying the eggs and stuff is cool. And it's just it's not too heavy of a game, but it's also has a really high replayability. Uh, we like that because we like games where we can go keep going back to them and have an interesting new experience every time.
And all their expansions add like that with new cards and things, too.
They got an emu. This is awesome.
This is great.
Why is this your favorite bird?
Uh, just when I use it in our Arc Nova, it's awesome.
I'm picking the bald eagle cuz I'm getting this for a friend and this is her favorite bird. So, got to get it out.
I don't know if it's the great horned owl, but my favorite is the owl.
I think I might want the black swan. the Natalie Portman
to go with to go with the Natalie Portman.
Of them. Yeah. Some of them have no babies and some of them have babies. I have this set. I love this one.
I I am I'm going to pick the Dodo cuz the fact that you guys have one in here. Love it.
Yeah. Stonem is pretty crucial to my identity as a gamer. It's the reason I'm even here because of Euphoria. I run a podcast because of all my experiences here. Uh yeah, Stonemire games are very important to me and who I am honestly at this point. So Stonemire is a company that tries to be accessible and approachable where yes, we have heavier weight games like Worms Span, but we also have really approachable things like Wingspan Pocket over here. And the important thing is it is going to make sure that if you are at the table around this game that you are able to be at the table. it. They want you to be here. At no point is a Stonemire game going to sit there and say like, "Cool. Here's a bunch of negative interaction. Get out of here. There's no player elimination, anything like that." They really try to foster high theme where they can, high inclusion and high player interaction.
The games are great. It's fun to do all the shopping and playing games, but honestly, this is why I'm here. I love the people I work with, and I love being able to teach games that I love. Well, thank you uh thank you for uh trusting us with your money. Uh thank you for trusting us with your uh your time and money to have fun. Like we all have, you know, a limited amount of of hobby money and the fact that you want to uh spend that and use that to play things that we've created. That is that's exciting and that's humbling. Uh so thank you for doing that and genuinely I just thank you for playing games and I hope that you get to share that with other people.
I think wingspan's okay but not that good.