John Coveyou, 33, a Wash U graduate, former engineer and U.S. Army Veteran, with a family including two small children, quit his day job to design board games about four years ago. It’s turned out pretty well. He and his wife are now owners of Genius Games, LLC with a house in Maplewood.
He got the idea to design science themed games while teaching a science class at St. Louis community College. He was teaching the class, seeing that his students were intimidated by the subject. At the same time he was playing board games with friends — that’s when it clicked that games themed around science concepts could be popular.
He said at first he realized he wasn’t a good game designer, so he designed his own curriculum to learn, which included playing and designing lots of games.
In October 2014, with his first game — a DNA card game — he realized most publishers weren’t interested in science games, so he decided to publish it himself, launching his first Kickstarter. He raised $12,000 with that one so he decided to keep going.
He raised $17,000 with a Kickstarter for his second game, Peptide, a protein building game. At that point he realized he might have something to make money on.
He said he came home from work, talked to his wife, and they decided to sell their home in St. Charles and both cars and put money into game designing. They moved to two-bedroom apartment in St. Louis city.
“It was little insane actually,” he said. “We used one car. We minimized cost for a year and a half.”
He’s now published six science-based games and six children’s books on science.
His current fundraiser, for a seventh game, has hit $100,000 raised through Kickstarter and he’s going for $200,000. His goal was $12,000.
“It’s probably the geekiest game on Earth,” he said. “It’s called Subatomic: An Atom Building Game. It is totally gamer-approved and accurately themed around the intersection of particle physics and chemistry.”
From his reputation as a game designer and crowd-source fundraiser, Webster University hired him to teach both, and a class on entrepreneurship.
He said they chose their Maplewood because it was affordable and they could walk to Aldi and downtown Maplewood.
We have copies of some of their books at The Book House! We had a children’s science activity event on Sunday and hope to do more of these. We can take orders as well. We have their picture books for preschoolers about Women and Science and Physics which are really cute and they rhyme!
The Book House
7352 Manchester Rd
Maplewood, MO 63143
314-968-4491
This is fabulous! How do we get your games?
Awesome, man. How about a periodic table game. That would be fun!