A Unique Strategy for Creating and Crowdfunding Games: 6 Questions for Best With 1 – Stonemaier Games

A Unique Strategy for Creating and Crowdfunding Games: 6 Questions for Best With 1

2 July 2026

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guest post<br>interview

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Yesterday we announced Wingspan Pocket, a new standalone 1-5 player game that distills the Wingspan experience down to a lighter, shorter, streamlined experience that has each player activate a single row of cards on each of their turns (even on the same turn you play a bird). The cards are all double sided: a food side and a bird side. Bird powers are primarily indicated by icons instead of text, and they include a new type of power, ongoing (green) benefits.

On Monday I have an article about the in-depth pre-production copy testing process of Wingspan Pocket, but I haven’t posted the corresponding design diary entry yet, so today I have an interview about a completely different game from another publisher!

Gabe Barrett runs Best With 1 Games, and over the last few years I’ve seen him adapt a really interesting strategy for creating and launching games. With their latest game, Stonefall, in its final days on Gamefound, Gabe was kind to take some time to answer some questions about his methods.

As far as I can tell, you’ve run solo-coop game campaigns once a month every month for several years now. Is that correct? How many games are we talking, and what are the biggest hits so far in terms of the campaign and retail?

That’s correct. Since January of 2024, I’ve run a solo game campaign every single month on Gamefound. Through those campaigns, I’ve shipped around 60,000 games so far with another 8,000 set to go out in the next few weeks.

The biggest hits have been Rome: Fate of an Empire, Radiance, and Small Time Heroes.

Do you manufacture and ship each game independently, or do you have any overlapping production runs and fulfillment (i.e., so multi-campaign backers can pay shipping once for multiple products)?

Each game is sent to the factory independently, but there have been a few instances where the queue line got backed up to the point that several games were printed and shipped at the same time. However, I use a fulfillment company based in China that ships worldwide and charges by the gram, so there are no cost-savings in bundling.

Games ship as soon as they’re completed, and there’s no crossover between campaigns from an admin level – every campaign is a separate spreadsheet.

How have you found the project management puzzle for juggling so many projects? Any key tips or tools that you’ve found work well? Is there something specific about solo games specifically that enables you to have so many projects in the works?

I wish there was some secret or magical piece of software that I could share, but I’ve found that a basic checklist is the best tool overall. I’ve used Trello and other project management apps, but nothing works as well as a good, old fashioned checklist with every aspect of a game’s production broken into line items.

Then, you just work the list and check things off as they’re completed.

The “magic” comes from realizing the checklist needs improvement over and over and over again until you finally get something that works best. And when you run a campaign every single month, you get a lot of opportunities to make revisions.

Nothing about publishing solo games specifically makes things easier, but standardizing as much as possible helps a great deal. I only offer a couple different box sizes which makes designing, publishing, manufacturing, and shipping everything much simpler as I’ve removed all but a few variables. It also allows me to order certain things in bulk and get a better price – shipping boxes and foam, for example.

Are you happy with the current pursuit of 1 game per month, or have you considered spacing out campaigns (e.g., every 2-3 months)? I’m curious about what you view is the advantage of 1 game per month. 12 new games a year seems like a lot for you and for customers–what drives that quantity versus any other quantity of games per month/year? Is that based on what backers have told you they want, sheer momentum, company finances, etc?

"Solo Game of the Month” has a nice ring to it. “Solo game of the quarter” or “solo game of the fortnight” just doesn’t sound quite right.

But once the right systems are in place, and you find great people to work with, twelve games a year is really not that hard to get your arms around. We’ll probably end up doing around 20 new games this year in total. Most of those will be Gamefound campaigns, but others will be direct-to-retail.

However, these aren’t expensive games. Most are $25, and a lot of the “extra” games we’re working on in the background are $15. I don’t think it would be possible to do 12 traditional crowdfunding style games that are $100+ and contain boxes upon boxes of minis and content. The customer base would burn out quickly, most people’s monthly budgets...