As Trump Moves Tariff Pieces Around the Board, Tabletop Games Face Calamity

CNET

4 days ago

I've been playing board games for decades, from crowd-pleasers like Settlers of Catan and Sushi Go to King of Tokyo and Descent -- and in recent years, I've seen them show up in even my most mainstream social gatherings. In a world overrun by digital screens, tactile games are a novelty that gather people around a table rather than in tiny squares on a Zoom call.
With bold, vibrant art styles and creative pieces to play with, tabletop gaming has expanded beyond mainstream favorites like Monopoly and Settlers of Catan with ever more intriguing games like Gloomhaven and Hive. It's these physical components that set board games apart, as their makers think up creative scenarios that players engage with using well-designed pieces. Picking up and moving these parts around is core to the magic of tabletop games, of ideas rising out of the board and fitting in players' hands.
But the Trump administration's tariffs are crashing hard into that domestic scene, with dire financial consequences for businesses that depend on the import of custom physical pieces. From custom miniatures of creatures and vehicles to the boards the games are made on to the boxes they come in, the vast majority of tabletop products come out of specialized factories in China with decades of experience. Board games are created in volumes and shipped at times that make selling such unique productions profitable.
Tariffs have affected many other industries that source products from China, like tech and gadget makers, but those may be manufactured in other areas. The board game industry sources its pieces from specialty factories in China that can handle small-scale batches of very specialized parts. Amid the tariffs, the board game industry has scrambled to find production alternatives in other countries, but the specificity of its products has made it difficult.
If they're forced to keep making games in China, they may need to raise prices, which would be passed on to the consumer.
The tariffs haven't just paused imports -- they've thrown the rest of the year's schedule into disarray. As a longtime board game player, I'm now facing the prospect of store shelves being empty around Christmas. Now is when board game makers put in their orders for games to ship in time for the holidays. But a dizzying uncertainty -- most recently with a federal court blocking many of Trump's tariffs before an appeals court reinstated them the next day -- might lead them to limit or cancel their orders, leaving store shelves empty around Christmas.
"The next three weeks will be telling if we're going to have a holiday season or not, and then we'll know who's in business next year -- because if they can't make the holiday season, they may have to close up," John Stacy, executive director of the Game Manufacturers Association, a trade organization representing about 1,700 companies in the industry, said in early May.
Many board game makers are small and medium-size businesses with a dozen or fewer full-time employees, making this especially devastating. Their slim margins rely on tight timelines for order and delivery to retailers and consumers to survive. These tariffs have threatened the financial outlook of anyone bringing games into the US and led the entire industry into an existential crisis.
Cephalofair Games COO Price Johnson holding the company's game Frosthaven next to shipping boxes full of the same.
Cephalofair Games
Cepholafair Games, which makes the very successful board game Gloomhaven, successfully funded its next Gloomhaven game on crowdfunding platform Backerkit. This March, the company planned to deliver on its promises by shipping some of its new products to backers' doors -- except for Trump's new tariffs, which at their peak would have made it so expensive to import them into the country that it would be cheaper to have never made them at all.
"I speak on behalf of those publishers, but we cut things really tight, and we depend on the infrastructure of our industry, the right retail stores and distribution models to really get our games distributed widely and at margins that make sense for us to operate," said Cephalofair Chief Operating Officer Price Johnson.
Trump's tariffs have gone up and down, charging importers at their height a proposed 145% fee before temporarily reeling that back to 30% for importing from China -- at least for a 90-day pause before the number could shoot back up. Even that timeline is thrown into question with the recent court decisions about blocking the tariffs.
The 90-day pause may be enough time to get existing products out of China, but is "the bare-minimum step to avoid pandemic-level trade disruption," Johnson wrote in a Facebook post criticizing the topsy-turvy tariff rates.
But even that lower tariff rate is potentially unprofitable to import existing product stock that board game makers have stashed in warehouses outside the US, waiting for trade relief -- and wondering whether to act now or gamble on whether the tariffs spike again, which could potentially bankrupt them to import. Publishers with products to sell now are gambling with incomplete information, Stacy said. Those who will take longer than the 90-day pause to ship or finish production runs of games are left with even more uncertainty.
"How can you, in good conscience, commit to a new product without knowing the costs to make, ship and import it?" Stacy said. "Setting prices to ensure profitability becomes challenging without all the factors included in the calculation. It's like playing a game where the rules change every round, and it's unclear what those rules are until you are halfway through the next round."
Under the 145% tariffs, 51% of the board game companies GAMA surveyed in late April said they would have to shut their doors or lay off employees if conditions didn't improve in two to three months. "These are small businesses -- they don't have that kind of cash to weather a storm like this," Stacy said.
Rollacrit, a board game maker and nerdy merchandise company staffed by veterans from the shuttered online retailer ThinkGeek, had been sitting on a reorder of Heroes of Barcadia, one of its more popular games, which it couldn't afford to bring into the US under the 145% tariffs.
"If we were to ship it in now, the amount of money we'd have to pay is astronomical," Erin Zipperle, owner of Rollacrit, told me in early May.
In the face of financial calamity, tabletop game producers have been scrambling for alternatives, making drastic changes and calling their US elected representatives in hopes they could lobby for leniency from the Trump administration. The crisis, reminiscent of the COVID pandemic's disruptions, has already forced several game publishers to shut down entirely. A handful of board game companies, including Stonemaier Games, XYZ Game Labs and DinkerHouse games joined product makers from other industries in suing the Trump administration over the tariffs.
Even if the tariffs were completely recalled tomorrow, their impacts of increased hardship would still ripple through the industry. Board game makers would clamor for slots in factory production queues, shipping costs would ramp up, and the resulting cost and supply instability would shake consumer trust. If the tariffs extend for weeks or months to come, more publishers will likely go under, and there may not be any new board games on store shelves by the holidays.
Board game pieces from a Cephalofair Games tabletop game at PAX East 2024.
Cephalofair Games
The board game industry is a flotilla of small businesses
When most people think of board games, they imagine Monopoly or another mainstream game sold by a company as colossal as Hasbro or Mattel. But many of the popular upstarts defining the new era of tabletop gaming come from companies a fraction of the size. As widely known as the tactical fantasy roleplaying game Gloomhaven is within the games community, Cephalofair employs eight people full time, including Johnson. Rollacrit lists 10 employees on its staff page. Stonemaier Games has eight.
For folks who have spent years building their businesses in an industry that requires a unique alchemy of product and marketing shrewdness blended with the wonder of playful design, becoming besieged with spiking tariffs has seemed like something of an existential crisis. Zipperle felt like he worked his entire career ensuring he had enough money to properly start and grow his business organically without outside investment, and now this happens.
"We're literally the American dream of what you want to do to create a company out of nothing, and to get to this point just to be derailed by the government from a random war on toys?" Zipperle said.
That echoes Trump's recent comment that "maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls" as a result of the tariffs.
Board game makers weren't caught unawares -- after all, Trump campaigned on tariffs, and had deployed them in his first term. But the severity blindsided the industry, including Jamey Stegmaier, founder of Stonemaier Games, maker of hit games like Wingspan and Tokaido.
"We were expecting tariffs and slimmer margins, but not like this," Stegmaier said.
Though Stegmaier concedes that the decrease to 30% tariffs is progress, it still doesn't take into consideration the need for grace periods for all the products made before the tariffs -- around 250,000 units for Stonemaier, including the yet-to-be-launched game Vantage. Like Cephalofair's Price, Stegmaier has been vocal in his criticism of the Trump administration's tariffs, and even after their reduction to 30%, will continue taking part in the lawsuit against the president for tariff disruption of business.
"We will absolutely proceed with the lawsuit, which focuses on the Constitutional power of Congress to apply taxes (not the president)," Stegmaier told me. "A tax like this has such a massive impact on small US businesses that it deserves the due process that we're seeking with the lawsuit."
The purported intent of the tariffs is to spur US manufacturing instead of sourcing parts or products from China. But board game makers that I spoke to don't believe they'll have that effect. Even in the miraculous scenario of companies breaking ground today on new factories, it could take three to five years before the first ones start producing the kinds of miniatures and other products needed for board games. And it could be a decade before the US ramps up to the kind of product expertise and factory scale that China has. By then, many tabletop companies could be long gone.
"It's a craft," Zipperle said, cautioning about all the learning and care that goes into avoiding what can go wrong among dangerous plastic fabrication processes, let alone the years of expertise needed to operate such precisely calibrated machines. "You don't just start making stained glass windows."
Then there's the vulnerability of investing millions of dollars in a factory given the uncertain future. Even if a US company invests in domestic factories to make board game parts, if the tariffs are lifted at any time in the years to come, board game makers will likely simply go back to paying for cheaper production in China. It just won't be cost-effective to build in the US without consistent investment for the better part of a decade.
Cephalofair Games COO Price Johnson (third from left) and the rest of the company's staff stand beside boxes of their game Frosthaven as they prepare to ship to backers.
Cephalofair Games
A decisive moment for small businesses with products ready to ship
It's not just financial success at stake, but customer trust too. Cephalofair and other board game makers have won customer trust with track records of successful crowdfunding campaigns that stick to schedules and deliver products as they predicted. Now, tariffs threaten that trust.
Rollacrit hit all the successful milestones of a crowdfunded project, but at the worst time. After launching a Kickstarter in September for its Heroes of Barcadia game that raised over $1.2 million and secured lots of preorders at set prices, the company put in its order for production, which finally finished in April, on the day Trump announced reciprocal tariffs. "It's my new favorite April Fools' Day joke," Zipperle lamented.
Crowdfunding is a pivotal part of these small board game companies' business models, as it allows efficient fundraising that directly connects to customers. In 2024, backers pledged $220 million for tabletop games on Kickstarter, and while tariffs haven't yet measurably impacted the platform, the company's head of games, Asher McClennahan, said lifting the tariffs would be a relief for campaign creators.
"Unlike large corporations, most Kickstarter creators are small teams — sometimes just individuals — working hard to bring their ideas to life. Even modest cost increases can have an outsized effect on their ability to fulfill rewards or stay financially on track," McClennahan told me. Kickstarter recently added a Pledge Manager to handle post-campaign schedule adjustments and a tariff manager to handle US import costs.
Game makers like Cephalofair, Stonemaier and Rollacrit with successful crowdfunding campaigns scheduled to deliver backer rewards are scrambling to fulfill their orders on time, and the chaos is also affecting those about to launch new ones, said Maxwell Salzberg, co-founder of BackerKit.
"You've seen less projects in the tabletop games category being fulfilled, because it sort of feels like everyone's waiting for the shoe to drop," Salzberg said.
BackerKit is helping how it can, releasing its own Tariff Manager and a way to charge backers for shipping later -- say, after tariffs are reduced or (hopefully) repealed.
"That's what BackerKit provides for creators," Salzburg said. "Creators are going to create. Crowdfunding is predicated off of people making cool stuff, and that's not going to ever stop. Not even tariffs can stop them."
An attendee of PAX East 2024 takes a turn playing a Cephalofair Games tabletop game.
An over the shoulder view of someone playing a board game with a hand of cards on a playing mat below.
Alternatives? Move production outside China, abandon retailer allies…and look beyond the US
Originally, Trump's reciprocal tariffs meant dramatically higher prices on imports from many other countries, but a 90-day pause on those tariffs left products from China suffering far more severe cost increases in comparison. In the interim, board game makers have looked at other nearby countries with comparable production capability, like Vietnam and Indonesia, as temporary alternatives -- or if the China-US trade war drags on, for the longer term. Tech giant Apple made similar moves over the last five years to shift iPhone production to Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, as well as India.
Amid the uncertainty, one strategy board game makers are considering is ramping up sales outside the US. Currently, 65% of Stonemaier's sales go to American buyers with 35% elsewhere in the world, but they may try to shift that split to a more even 50-50, Stegmaier said.
Another way Stonemaier could offset tariffs and improve its slim margins is to push for more direct sales to consumers, though it's reluctant "because I really, really appreciate our distributor and retail infrastructure," Stegmaier said. "But it might be necessary because of lower margins in China."
There will still be board game fans in the US, and there could be ways to avoid tariff price hikes by making them in-country. In fact, that's what board game makers explored during the supply chain crisis caused by the COVID pandemic. The handful of factories in the US that make game components are specialty producers -- Cartamundi, a Belgian game producer, owns a factory in Texas that makes cards for Magic: The Gathering, and another in Michigan produces basic plastic parts that don't match the meticulous detail that modern board games require.
When Stegmaier looked into diversifying game production to make parts in China and boxes in the US, he discovered that it would cost as much to make just the boxes domestically as it did to make an entire complete game in China.
Further, Chinese factories are better at producing at low scales and high numbers. For smaller board game creators with modest crowdfunding campaigns that want to make only 1,000 units or so to satisfy backers, China can facilitate that, while US factories might require runs of 5,000 to 10,000, Stegmaier said.
Attendees of PAX East 2024 play a Cephalofair Games tabletop game.
Cephalofair Games
If the tariffs go away tomorrow, the damage is still done
Board game makers continue looking for ways to survive. But even if the tariffs were completely ended tomorrow, the damage would still be done. "Probably close to a dozen or two" board game businesses have already shut down, Stacy told me.
Game makers like Greater Than Games and Final Frontier Games have publicly announced their shuttering, blaming the economic conditions and uncertainty that they'd be able to hold out until relief came. If it doesn't arrive in the next few weeks, more may follow, Stacy said. This point in the year is when board game businesses order their stock for the holiday season, and they may not be able to afford that.
The reduction to 30% offered a brief respite for Stonemaier, which was able to place orders for more stock. The bad news is that the company could order only enough during the 90-day pause to last until mid-August, which is well before its holiday print run would arrive in the US. This would strand them unless they receive more tariff respite.
Ultimately, increased prices to import on thin margins are going to impact the board game industry regardless, which could -- and may still -- lead to increased costs passed on to the consumer. But companies can't make decisions until they have enough information to make big decisions about pricing, product sourcing and how they'll run their business.
"Uncertainty is one of the core problems with the way these tariffs were implemented," Stegmaier said. "There was no due process, just an agent of chaos raising tariffs from 20% to 145% in the span of one week. As a result, it is impossible to properly plan ahead."