Love Of Gaming A Success Story For McKinley Principal

ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- A St. Cloud principal's love of gaming led him to create his own game. McKinley Area Learning Center's William Sininger self-published the card game Flapjacks and Sasquatches locally at Palmer Printing in 2008. Sininger says he has been playing games his entire life and while he was working, he wasn't doing anything creative so thought he could design a game. Sininger says his first attempt wasn't so good:

"And my original attempt was a farming game in space where you're like growing things and trying to get it and I was like man no one is going to want to play that farming games that's horrible."

Sininger says he got the idea for Flapjacks and Sasquatches from the Jack Link's Beef Jerky commercial about messing with Sasquatch and he just kind of went from there:

"You know, we just started building the game. I looked at all the other games out there, kind of figured out probability like what you need to do the, to actually be able to chop all that stuff how many of this card do you need how many of this card and we just started. I had a friend who actually worked for the St. Cloud Times, was a really good artist he drew everything up for me."

He says he printed about 1,000 copies, then went around to local game stores to see if they would sell it, and the game just kind of took off.  Sininger says once the game started selling  he knew he needed to get a distributor and they were surprised at how well the game was doing:

"And the thing I heard the most of all was like you can't self print that doesn't work like  it doesn't happen what'd you sell like 100 games and we're like ah no like 700 and they're like what?"

Once he had the fulfillment lined up Sininger says he worked on improving the game components and then did a crowdfunding campaign which was going slow until an unsolicited endorsement from Will Wheaton got it rolling:

"And yeah like I said I had sent it to him saying hey I designed this game I thought you might like it, you know, that was it and it didn't tie to this at all and like this was a year later and all of a sudden he just put out there he's like hey this is on Kickstarter, I really like this game you guys should go back it and we jumped like $7,000 in one day."

He says Flapjacks has sold about 10,000 copies worldwide the the kids at his school think it is pretty cool when they find out he designed it. Sininger sold his game company, Prolific Games, in 2021 but says he still has some game designs that he plans to develop once he retires. Sininger has published 7 other games and 2 expansions for Flapjacks and Sasquatches as well.

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