Will Board Game Quality Decline Due to Rising Production Costs?

The board game industry, as a whole, has always prided itself on three factors: creativity, community, and slim profit margins. A recent tariff announcement threatening to tank the third of those three has jolted the industry and made many people worry about the future of their business.

Designer Jamey Stegmaier, the creative force behind popular games such as Scythe, Wingspan, and smaller indie darlings such as Bravo Victory, went public this week with his concern at an announced 54 percent tax on goods produced in China and imported to the United States.

“I started writing this last night, and I got about halfway done before I found myself sitting on my desk in tears,” Stegmaier wrote in an article on his blog. “This isn’t an article about politics or my personal beliefs. This is an article about the fact that the hobby game industry, and companies like mine, may not survive because of the decision to put a 54 percent tariff on goods imported from China.”

It was a startlingly personal and human admission for a designer with some of the most popular games in the world. But it’s also an issue that has implications for the whole industry.

A Global Production Ecosystem, Suddenly Upended

Board game manufacturing in the United States has, for many years, been heavily centered in China. Germany, home to the modern tabletop renaissance and itself a major board game-producing nation, also hosts several production facilities, but for “everything print and beyond,” as Stegmaier puts it, China has long been the default. Plastic miniatures custom-cut to a designer’s specifications, printed cards, wooden tokens, hand-die-cut boards, specialty dice: the list goes on.

Produce those components yourself, domestically? In theory, yes. In practice, it’s prohibitively expensive. Stegmaier, by his admission, was once quoted $10 by an American company to produce a standard empty game box. In China, he says, $10 could cover the labor and materials to produce and package the game as a whole.

Hence, the enormity of the shock with this new tariff. Small, medium-sized publishers in the United States already work with very little profit margin. The new 54 percent hit in costs on goods coming from China, with no time to re-budget or re-negotiate production costs, is a serious blow to most companies.

Calls for Change From CEOs

CEO Meredith Placko of Steve Jackson Games, makers of the long-running Munchkin series and other products, recently spoke out on the issue in a Facebook post that echoed many of Stegmaier’s sentiments. The company, she wrote, also produces in China for the same reason everyone else does.

“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.”

It’s not just a question of changes to logistics and supply chains. This is, for the games industry, an existential threat. For Placko, it’s “not just a policy change,” but “a seismic shift.”

Rob Daviau, co-founder of Restoration Games and designer of the hugely successful Pandemic Legacy series, has been warning of the worst-case scenario for some time now, both on social media and in op-ed pieces like one published in the Dallas Morning News earlier this year. He has described innumerable business meetings since late 2019 as “an existential crisis about our industry.”

If the Worst Happens, Gamers Could Suffer Too

Gamers are likely to start to see the effects of these tariffs, should they go into effect, as early as this summer. Prices for newly-released games will likely go up to cover at least some of the higher production costs. Other companies may try to cut corners in materials, packaging, and production to keep price tags at their current levels, but at the hit of quality. Yet other companies may decide to scale back their releases altogether.

Local game stores, already at a disadvantage from online competition, may be the last to suffer. Faced with higher retail prices, many gamers have long bought games online, where they are often cheaper, or pulled games out of their unplayed “shelves of shame” to satisfy new cravings.

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

Sliver of a Silver Lining?

Publishers are already talking about ways around the tariff, including sourcing their goods from European distributors (tariffs are less onerous on those countries, but that’s a non-solution for an American company). In the event the tariff is enacted, it may be months before the first shipments are affected. If a game is still in the design or early production stage, it’s possible that a company can re-budget and absorb some of the new costs in those early phases.

That doesn’t help companies that have already manufactured their goods, and those goods are on their way from China. Chris Solis, head of the California-based Solis Game Studio, spoke to this frustration in a Facebook post: “I have 8,000 games leaving a factory in China this week and now need to scramble to cover the import bill.”

The Industry Reacts

The Game Manufacturers Association, an organization dedicated to championing the business interests of board game publishers, has been lobbying Congress and federal agencies on the issue to little avail to date.

It’s still early days, and the full details of how and when a new tariff might be imposed are still being hashed out by Congress, the White House, and the Federal Trade Commission. But as the US industry takes stock of what the new tariffs could mean for its future, the board game world is suddenly facing one of the most difficult tests of its short history.