Board gaming, which during the 2010s was an ascendant medium and an industry finally finding its feet after decades of being seen as child's play, was rocked in 2020 by the pandemic, whose disruptions to manufacturing and shipping costs sent a lot of companies to the wall. Five years later, those challenges seem quaint compared to what's coming in the wake of the Trump administration's tariff announcements.
Like most other businesses around the world, many board game companies have been using Chinese manufacturing for years now. In most countries it's the only way to get components made for commercial purposes, since local manufacturing capabilities--or at least those capable of operating at the scale necessary to keep costs down--simply don't exist.
The imposition of a 54% tariff on goods imported from China will have a cataclysmic effect on the entire industry. A statement put out by publisher Steve Jackson Games earlier today puts those numbers into context:
On April 5th, a 54% tariff goes into effect on a wide range of goods imported from China. For those of us who create boardgames, this is not just a policy change. It's a seismic shift.
At Steve Jackson Games, we are actively assessing what this means for our products, our pricing, and our future plans. We do know that we can't absorb this kind of cost increase without raising prices. We've done our best over the past few years to shield players and retailers from the full brunt of rising freight costs and other increases, but this new tax changes the equation entirely.
Here are the numbers: A product we might have manufactured in China for $3.00 last year could now cost $4.62 before we even ship it across the ocean. Add freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution margins, and that once-$25 game quickly becomes a $40 product. That's not a luxury upcharge, it's survival math.
Extrapolate that math--$40 games going to $60, $60 games becoming $90 games--and you can see how quickly this gets away from both publishers and retailers. That’s something the industry representative group in the US, The Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), is all too aware of, saying in a statement today that "The latest imposition of a 54% tariff on products from China by the administration is dire news for the tabletop industry and the broader US economy. As an industry highly dependent on producing goods overseas and importing them into the US, this policy will have devastating consequences."
Those consequences won't just hit publishers and retailers; Polygon's Charlie Hall broke down how an entire ecosystem of board game businesses could now face extinction, from distributors to studios who have Kickstarted a game recently but are yet to manufacture their game to TTRPG companies who are already cancelling production runs.
Even companies outside the US are in trouble; like so many other industries, from cars to electronics, the United States is one of (if not the) single biggest market for board games. Even studios and publishers based in Europe could be looking at huge drops in sales, whether because of tariffs placed on their own exports, or just because Americans are about to have a lot less expendable income to spend on things like board games.
I know board games aren't going to be grabbing the headlines in the same way cars and electronics will be amidst all this political chaos, but seeing how deeply these proposed tariffs will impact even your hobbies shows how destructive they're going to be, not just to the wider American economy, but your downtime as well.
