US Board Game Sales Under Threat With New Trade Policy

The board game industry is one of the most innovative in gaming and one of the closest-knit. It is also not a very lucrative one, with profit margins often hanging in the balance. Industry creators say the latest financial hit risks taking those margins into the red and could force some of them to shutter in the future.

Last week, several board game industry leaders decried the recent announcement of a 54 percent tariff on all goods coming to the US from China. “I tried to work on a new game I’m brainstorming last night,” designer Jamey Stegmaier tweeted, “but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim.” Stegmaier, who designs and publishes games through his studio Stonemaier Games, has made several recent hit titles, including Wingspan and Scythe.

In a follow-up blog post, Stegmaier elaborated on his initial reaction. “I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff,” he wrote. “I designed Scythe. Like, a lot of people like Scythe. I designed and published Wingspan. For real.” Stegmaier went on to describe the situation as “career-threatening” in both his personal and his company’s finances. That’s an uncharacteristically personal and vulnerable statement for a designer whose games have been played and loved by thousands around the world.

A Global Supply Chain Comes Apart at the Seams

The current structure of the American board game market is a global one. Board games are manufactured in China. Most board game companies in the US and Europe send their product there for production.

While countries like Germany, and to an extent France and the UK, also have board game manufacturing facilities in-country (Germany, for historical and cultural reasons, is sometimes considered the spiritual home of the modern tabletop game), in terms of end-to-end game production China is where most designers and publishers go for everything from printed cards to custom plastic miniatures, wooden tokens and game pieces, die-cut game boards, and specialty dice.

You could conceivably have these things made in the US or Europe, but the simple fact of the matter is it’s not economically viable to do so at the volume, scope, and price-point that Chinese manufacturers provide. Stegmaier said in a recent interview that he once got a quote of $10 from an American manufacturer for a single empty game box. The same $10 could cover the production and packaging of an entire game in China.

It’s that imbalance that has Stegmaier and others like him howling in protest. It’s not that they aren’t already used to lower profit margins than other gaming industry sectors; it’s that there’s no ramp-up period to account for. The tariff just goes from zero to 54 percent. Small and medium-sized publishers in the US and other non-Asian countries have “zero time to pivot or come up with an alternative,” Stegmaier wrote. “We were already living paycheck to paycheck in a lot of ways.”

What Others in the Industry Are Saying

Meredith Placko, the CEO of Steve Jackson Games, the creator of such board games as Munchkin and Black Hack, wrote on her company’s site about the implications of the new tariff as well. SJG, like most other game publishers in the US and Western Europe, outsources manufacturing for the same reason everyone else does: Infrastructure and capacity for end-to-end board game production simply do not exist in the US or Europe. Placko wrote, “Some people ask ‘Why not manufacture in the US?’ I wish we could,” she wrote. “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.”

Placko wrote that, for her, the move “isn’t just a policy change. It’s a seismic shift for our industry.” Rob Daviau, co-founder of Restoration Games and designer of the Pandemic Legacy games, put the issue this way in an interview with BoardGameWire: “The market will be subjected to a great collapse in the hobby gaming market in the US, if any of these tariffs are ever applied.”

Consumer Pain, Retail Damage

The damage, of course, doesn’t stop at publishers and designers. Gamers will also be on the frontlines of the tariff’s effects. Expect new games to start going up in price. Expect some companies to look at ways to cut quality to save money, so prices don’t have to rise. Expect others to simply stop releasing new titles.

Local game stores are also in danger. There is already great pressure on brick-and-mortar game shops from online shopping. If gamers start drawing on their collections more (plenty of gamers have long-unplayed titles they jokingly refer to as their “shelves of shame”) or shopping online for new games for the first time, local stores will likely take a hit.

“You should expect, within a few months, US companies will lose a lot of money and/or go out of business,” Stegmaier said. “And US citizens will suffer from extreme inflation.”

Workarounds? Limited

Publishers are looking for possible workarounds. There is some talk that US publishers can route goods through European distributors. The European market is largely untouched by the tariff (especially if the distributor is in Europe), but that doesn’t help American companies. As Stegmaier tweeted, “65% of my company’s business happens in the US.” It’s still a financial hit, and the books still don’t balance.

Further frustrating, depending on how you look at it, is that some companies can at least delay production or absorb the hit for games that haven’t yet left the drawing board or a prototype stage. But goods that are already produced and en route from China now have no way around the tariff. Chris Solis, head of the California-based Solis Game Studio, tweeted out his concerns in the same way Stegmaier did in the original tweet: “I have 8,000 games leaving a factory in China this week and now need to scramble to cover the import bill.”

The Bigger Picture

The Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), the trade group that represents board game publishers, has been working to get ahead of the issue. GAMA has been lobbying and speaking out against the tariffs, so far to no avail.

What remains to be seen is what this latest shake-up will mean for a sector of the games industry that, while perhaps small in the grand scheme, has come to define what gaming has become. The future, for an industry that for decades has had its roots in love, creativity, and community, looks perilous.