About Jaimie
Jaimie Walansky has over 20 years of experience in the games industry, with a career spanning major brands and mass-market hits. She’s worked as a sales rep bringing games into stores like Target and Barnes & Noble, and has helped launch titles like Shopkins, Catan, Ticket to Ride, Bananagrams, and Exploding Kittens. She even worked with Justin to bring You Gotta Be Kitten Me to market. In this episode, Jaimie shares what it takes to succeed in a crowded space, how to build teams you can trust, and why knowing when to let go of a project can be just as important as seeing one through. If you care about the business of games—especially the part that happens after the prototype—this conversation is packed with sharp insights and real-world experience.
Justin’s Ah-Ha Moments:
Trust the People Around You: One of the hardest parts of creative work is taking hits. Feedback, failure, and ideas that looked brilliant on paper and flopped in practice will all punch you in the gut. What makes those punches survivable is who’s around you when they land. This episode is a reminder that success doesn’t come from avoiding pain. It comes from surrounding yourself with people you trust enough to tell you the truth, and strong enough to hold you up when the truth stings.
The Future Looks a Lot Like the Past: Mass-market card games are everywhere—and that’s the problem. With so much saturation, it’s harder than ever to stand out. What excites me is the shift back to tactile, nostalgic experiences. Think physical pieces, simple mechanics, and visual languages that evoke the board games we grew up with. This isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s a deeper trend toward experiences that feel grounded, personal, and real—something digital games can’t fake.
Curate Your Intuition Good designers trust their gut. Great designers know how to curate it. Every podcast you listen to, every game you play, every weird rule interaction you explore is data. Your job is to pay attention. When something clicks—or nags—you need to listen. That’s how you build an intuition that doesn’t just feel right, but actually leads you to better work. It’s not magic. It’s pattern recognition with practice.
Show Notes
“Everything that I do terrifies me... but I’ve failed before and I’ve done so many things.” (00:05:20)
Jaimie talks about how fear shaped her creative path and how repeated failure gave her the courage to keep going. Instead of trying to eliminate risk, she learned to walk toward it. That mindset doesn’t make the gut punches disappear, instead it makes them survivable. If you’re creating something worth doing, fear is part of the job. So is learning how to move anyway.
“They're so overwhelmed by the big guys... it’s getting harder and harder for what we call one-item vendors to get in.” (00:14:44)
Mass-market retail is more crowded than ever, and Jaimie has seen firsthand how difficult it is for new games to break through. Big brands dominate buyer attention, and stores are less willing to take chances on unknown titles. For smaller publishers or one-product creators, the bar to entry keeps getting higher. If you’re trying to get into retail, you need more than a good game—you need a strategy, a relationship, and a deep understanding of how the system works.
“We get to now create these experiences that bring and create the new friendships out there.” (00:38:17)
Jaimie reflects on what decades in games have really given her great relationships. From friendships formed on the Magic Pro Tour to watching team members celebrate 10-year anniversaries, she’s seen how games create connection. The lesson is about what happens after the box is opened like shared memories, lifelong bonds, and the kind of joy that keeps people coming back to the table.
“Your brain perceives and takes in so much more information than you’re consciously perceiving… your intuition does process it.” (00:44:44)
Jaimie defends intuition as unconscious intelligence. For analytically-minded creators, she offers a reframing: don’t treat intuition as magic, because it’s not—it’s data your brain already absorbed but hasn’t verbalized. If you give it space, it will speak through your feelings, through tension, through clarity. Creative breakthroughs often come not from thinking harder, but from listening more carefully.
