Will US Tariffs Kill Creativity in Board Game Design?

A community best known for its creativity, diversity, and innovation is now facing the specter of financial ruin. Jamey Stegmaier, the designer behind some of the board game industry’s most popular recent titles like Scythe and Wingspan, opened up this week on the sudden and unexpected news that a 54 percent tariff would be placed on goods manufactured in China and shipped to the U.S.

“The future looks grim,” Stegmaier wrote in a blog post. “I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff.”

For the creator of games that have found devoted followings across the globe, it was an unusually emotional and personal post, but also one that all but any other board game publisher could relate to.

China and the Game of (Tables)

The vast majority of the American board game industry manufactures its goods in China. There are board game factories elsewhere, including in Germany, which has a special place in modern tabletop culture lore as its homegrown design renaissance occurred in the last century. But for mass-printed cards, custom-poured plastic miniatures, wooden tokens, die-cut boards, specialty dice, and the like, China is the world’s final destination for most products in the industry.

It is possible to create all those components domestically. But as Stegmaier (and many other game designers and publishers) point out, it’s prohibitively expensive to do so. He noted in his blog post that he had once been quoted $10 by an American manufacturer…just for an empty game box to be made.

In China, that same $10 will produce and package an entire game.

It’s this extreme cost of doing business that makes the newly announced tariffs so upsetting for American board game companies. For publishers (especially small- and mid-sized ones), the profit margins are already thin. The board game industry as a whole has no cushion for the extra cost and no grace period before the changes go into effect.

“The situation has gone from bad to catastrophic in about 72 hours,” Stegmaier noted.

Others in the industry have similarly taken to social media to decry the change. Meredith Placko, CEO of Steve Jackson Games, which makes a popular line of party games like Munchkin, has been speaking up about the tariffs for some time now. The reasons for using Chinese manufacturing are the same as everyone else’s in the industry, Placko explained.

“Some people ask, ‘Why not manufacture in the US?’ I wish we could,” Placko wrote in a recent company blog post. “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.”

It’s not just a shift in logistical planning for Placko and her company. “This isn’t just a policy change,” she wrote in another statement on the topic. “It’s a seismic shift for our industry.”

Rob Daviau, co-founder of Restoration Games and designer of games like Pandemic Legacy, has also been sounding the alarm for some time. Speaking with BoardGameWire about the tariffs, Daviau said that he had even been talking with many of his industry colleagues for months and months, saying that “almost every business meeting I go to is turning into an existential crisis about our industry.” Daviau himself went further than most in his predictions, saying that if tariffs like the 54 percent change were enacted, it could lead to “a great collapse in the hobby gaming market in the US.”

Retail Gamers Could Also Be Harmed

Customers may also be affected by the change. It’s not hard to imagine how that might play out. Some companies will no doubt pass the increased cost of production along to consumers in the form of higher retail prices. Other companies may look to cut costs in areas other than manufacturing (not a good look, leading to cheaper quality games). It’s also likely that some companies will simply not release games at all in a move to avoid higher costs. Gamers who were planning on getting new games in the coming months and years may simply shift their buying habits to older games already on their shelves. (The “shelves of shame” is what those games that you own but haven’t played yet are often known among tabletop fans.) Gamers could also shift their buying to retailers who source games directly online from outside the U.S. to get better prices. That’s not good for local game stores, either, who are already losing ground to internet-based retailers.

“The short-term impact will be chaos,” Stegmaier predicted. Within a few months, US companies will lose a lot of money and/or go out of business. And US citizens will suffer from extreme inflation.”

Possible Solutions (Sort Of)

The obvious workaround for many publishers in the industry seems to be sending shipments to non-U.S. distributors (EU markets and the like seem the least affected by the change, for example), but that doesn’t solve much if your primary sales are domestic. (According to Stegmaier, 65 percent of his company’s sales are to U.S. customers, and he points out in his blog post that the price increase is therefore a major one for his company and others like it.)

One other sore point that Stegmaier (among other publishers) has raised is that even if your game is still in the conceptual stages and hasn’t been produced yet, there is a major difference between something already printed in China and en route to the U.S. and one still being planned. For companies still in the design or prototyping stage, those cuts could conceivably be shifted around to account for the lost costs, even though the numbers involved for most board game companies are hardly trivial. (For something already printed, however, there is no way to avoid the 54 percent tariff.)

Chris Solis, head of Solis Game Studio in the San Francisco area, spoke to the difficulty for his company in an interview, noting that “I have 8,000 games leaving a factory in China this week and now need to scramble to cover the import bill.”

A Fight to the (Finish) Game

The trade association that represents board game manufacturers (the GAMA, or Game Manufacturers Association) has long been fighting these tariffs and opposing them with every legislative tool at their disposal. (The group has also gotten the support of the American Game Retail Association in fighting the tariffs as well.) So far, little headway has been made.

For now, the community is left waiting, wondering, and, in all likelihood, bracing for what will hopefully not be a dire future. For an industry that seems to exist on the sheer goodwill and affability of those who work in it, the future has never looked quite so uncertain.