Trump tariffs terrify board game designers

Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan—the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood. "Last night I tried to work on a new game I'm brainstorming," he wrote in a blog post yesterday, "but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US." Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it's far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. "I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes," Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount. Meredith Placko is the CEO of Steve Jackson Games, which produces titles like Munchkin, and she had a similar take. "Some people ask, 'Why not manufacture in the US?' I wish we could," she wrote in a post yesterday. "But the infrastructure to support full-scale boardgame production—specialty dice making, die-cutting, custom plastic and wood components—doesn't meaningfully exist here yet. I've gotten quotes. I've talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labor, and timelines simply aren't." Massive new tariffs, therefore, implemented without providing any runway to adjust operations and without offering government supports for US manufacturing investment, are causing dread within the board game community—which is not known for having high margins or large paychecks. Placko called the new policy "not just a policy change" but "a seismic shift." Rob Daviau, who helps run Restoration Games and designed hit games like Pandemic Legacy, has been writing on social media for months about the fact that every meeting he's in "has been an existential crisis about our industry." Expanding on his remarks in an interview with BoardGameWire late last year, Daviau added that he was a natural pessimist who foresaw a "great collapse in the hobby gaming market in the US" if tariffs were implemented. Gamers aren't likely to stop playing, but they might stick with their back catalog (gamers are notorious for having "shelves of shame" featuring hot new games they purchased without playing them... because other hot new games had already appeared). Or they might, in search of a better deal, shop only online, which could be tough on already struggling local game stores. Or games might decline in quality to keep costs lower. None of which is likely to lead to a robust, high-quality board gaming ecosystem. Stegmaier's forecast is nearly as dark as Daviau's. "Within a few months US companies will lose a lot of money and/or go out of business," he wrote, "and US citizens will suffer from extreme inflation." The new tariffs can be avoided by shipping directly from the factories to firms in other countries, such as a European distributor, but the US remains a crucial market for US game makers; Stegmaier notes that "65 percent of our sales are in the US, so this will take a heavy toll." For games still in the production pipeline, at least budgetary adjustments can be made, but some games have already been planned, produced, and shipped. If the boat arrives after the tariffs go into effect—too bad. The US importer still has to pay the extra fees. Chris Solis, who runs Solis Game Studio in California, issued an angry statement yesterday covering exactly this situation, saying, "I have 8,000 games leaving a factory in China this week and now need to scramble to cover the import bill." GAMA, the trade group for board game publishers, has been lobbying against the new tariffs, but with little apparent success thus far.