Board Game Designers Call for Urgent Policy Reversal on Tariffs

It’s an industry known for creativity, community, and, to an extent, a paucity of profit. The board game industry is thus reeling from the news that was announced this week: U.S. President Donald Trump’s 54 percent tariff on goods produced in China and imported into the United States.

Award-winning designer Jamey Stegmaier, best known for creating the worldwide hit game Scythe as well as other popular titles such as Wingspan, published an update on his company’s website earlier this week outlining his state of mind this week.

“It’s really hard to work on a new game and create something for the future when that future looks so grim,” Stegmaier wrote. “I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff.”

The Design Icon Shares Frustrations

Stegmaier is not just any designer. He is responsible for some of the most popular board games of the past few years, with a reach that extends around the world. The post he published was, by his standards, remarkably personal and raw.

“This is hard for all of us at Stonemaier Games,” Stegmaier continued. “It’s hard because our industry, already one of the least profitable trades in existence, will be on the verge of a tipping point.”

A World of Games Produced in China, Disrupted

The heart of the problem is one with which most in the U.S. board game industry are only too familiar: The production of new games in the U.S. is currently primarily outsourced to Chinese factories.

Germany has a number of board game manufacturing operations of its own, and German game makers are responsible for much of the industry’s modern renaissance in quality and popularity, but for the most part, Germany acts as an exporter of games rather than a manufacturer.

China, on the other hand, can take care of the entire process for board game production. Everything from printed cards to custom plastic miniatures, wooden tokens and tiles, die-cut boards, and even specialty dice can be produced and packaged in China.

Doing the same in the United States is, theoretically, possible, but in no way practical or, to use the word often used in Stegmaier’s blog post, sustainable. “The earliest estimate I can find for the simplest of production in the United States is $10 from a U.S. manufacturer,” he wrote. “$10 for the standard empty game box we ship our games in!”

In China, that $10 could cover the cost of producing and packaging a complete game.

That’s why, for most in the board game industry, the newly announced tariff is catastrophic. The industry—especially small and mid-sized publishers, which make up the majority of companies—runs on such low margins that absorbing this sudden increase without an opportunity to prepare or a period in which to phase it in will simply be untenable for many.

Industry Voices Concern

If Meredith Placko, CEO of Steve Jackson Games, and her industry peers are to be believed, many publishers are already at a breaking point. The company, which is known for such titles as Munchkin and Robinson Crusoe, and is a member of both GAMA (The Game Manufacturers Association) and the Board Game Association, relies on offshore manufacturers for the same reasons as most other U.S. publishers.

“I have been feeling down lately,” Placko wrote in a recent blog post. “A lot of my energy and focus has gone into rallying support from the rest of the industry and trying to head off these ridiculous tariffs. Some people ask, “Why not manufacture in the US?’ I wish we could. 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.”

For Placko, it’s more than an operational problem. The company’s entire business model is built around a worldwide network of hobbyists, retail stores, distributors, and manufacturers who exist in a finely-tuned ecosystem. She called the newly announced tariff “not just a policy change” but rather “a seismic shift in the very foundation of our industry.”

Rob Daviau, co-founder of Restoration Games and designer of the popular Pandemic Legacy series, is one of the most prominent people in the industry who has been sounding the alarm. Daviau, who has been tweeting about this issue to a large audience for several months, claimed earlier this week that almost every business meeting he’s had in the past few months has become “an existential crisis about our industry.”

The industry is at a crossroads, Daviau said. If tariffs like this go into effect, the “entire economic structure underpinning our hobby will change, and there will be a great collapse in the hobby gaming market in the US.”

Consumers Will Be Hurt, Too

It’s not just publishers and designers who will be hurt. Gamers, too, are likely to be impacted.

The price of new games, for one, will almost certainly rise. Some publishers will try to absorb the cost and produce at a lower quality to maintain the status quo, while others will simply hold back new releases to avoid increasing the retail price.

That may impact the already-struggling local game store scene as well. Game stores are struggling in many communities as gamers buy more and more online, and gamers who are unable to buy a wider variety of games at retail may well end up playing the titles they already own but never got around to playing, or buy new games online for a better price.

“Within a few months, US companies will lose a lot of money and/or go out of business,” Stegmaier warned. “US citizens will suffer from extreme inflation.”

There’s Not Much Game Companies Can Do

Publishers may try to work with distributors or other partners to route their games through a non-U.S. warehouse to avoid the tariff (European markets, for example, have not been nearly as hard-hit by the news), but even then, it’s a workaround rather than an actual solution for U.S.-based companies. As Stegmaier pointed out in his post, 65 percent of his own company’s sales are made in the U.S., and a loss of profit on that 65 percent could be devastating.

For games that have already been produced and shipped, there is no workaround to avoid the tariff. The U.S. tariff is on top of Chinese tariffs (which, as of this writing, stand at 25 percent) and was announced very recently, meaning that some companies still have to pay the Chinese tariff but will also get stuck with the newly announced 54 percent U.S. tariff. “This past week, I shipped a box of the games I designed and produced for a Chinese company to the United States,” California-based Chris Solis, who heads Solis Game Studio, told me in an interview. “I have 8,000 games leaving a factory in China this week and now need to scramble to cover the import bill.”

A Community Speaking Out

One major organization speaking out on behalf of publishers is GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association. The group represents hundreds of board game publishers and manufacturers in the United States and has been very active on the issue in recent days. As of this writing, the group has been to some extent successful in rallying industry support, but its efforts have thus far not made any apparent difference with the Trump administration.

We’ll be following this story as it develops and will provide updates. In the meantime, it’s an issue to keep a close eye on for board game fans, not only in the United States but around the world.