This week's Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stories behind consumer culture, is about the least fun aspect of a very fun business. I'm Jason Toon with a report on the threat looming over your next game night. I love games and always have. Every family gathering at my Grandma's house led into extended kitchen-table sessions of Trivial Pursuit, or Pictionary, or poker. I caught the role-playing bug as a teenager, then started encountering sophisticated board games like Diplomacy and Civilization and never looked back. Our local game cafe in Seattle was a lifesaver on rainy days with bored kids. To this day I can't walk past a game store without stopping in to add several more amazing-looking games to my mental "when I win the lottery" list. Anything that threatens that joy feels personal to me. And I'm far from the only one. "Tariffs are already stopping so many of us in our tracks," says Ami Baio of Pink Tiger Games. "We're in a very heartbreaking moment for our creative community."
In the '70s even bankrupt philosophers could afford nice houses. When a group of small businesses filed suit against the Trump administration last week to overturn the new 145% tariffs on goods imported from China, one industry dear to my heart was well-represented among them: tabletop gaming companies. If you've missed it, game publishers are using terms like "extinction" and "devastating" and "seismic" about the sudden imposition of these steep taxes on their products. So many indies are having trouble, Board Game Geek's tariff news roundup can barely keep up with them all. Cards on the table: I've always been a skeptic of "free trade". When big companies write the rules, they tend to win at our expense. I'm not convinced vast international wage disparities, 10,000-mile supply chains, just-in-time inventory, and endless cheap disposable products are a sustainable or fair basis for an economy. But the tabletop game industry's current crisis shows how flipping the board has reverberations that go way beyond steel mills and textile plants - and even beyond what we think of as "the economy". "Pawns in a political game" Here's how an indie tabletop game usually gets made today: a publisher develops an idea. They get a quote from a manufacturer. They raise money on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. If they raise enough money, they spend it to get the game manufactured. They then send games to the backers and have some left to sell through distributors or direct to consumers. Everybody wins. Indie publishers can test the waters and produce niche games that no big company would bother with. Backers get ahold of original games they're really into. Those of us who aren't into that particular game benefit from a healthy creative economy that supports the creation of games that do scratch our particular itch. Now, suddenly, it's a problem that most of those games are made in the only country in the world with the specialized fabrication capacity and scale to produce them: China. I didn't have to look far to start digging into why the industry relies so heavily on China. My brother, Jamie Toon, co-published a Kickstarted game called To Serve Man in 2017. "There are companies in the US that could make the stuff in our games," he says. "But there's no one company that would just make all our stuff. There's no company here that would print cards, and cut cardboard boxes, and make vacuum-formed inserts, and do wooden tokens. In China, these companies are set up so we sent them money and they sent us back a shrink-wrapped product ready to go onto a shelf."
Meeples ain't cheap. Even for simpler games, the cost of production in the US right now would make the products too expensive for US consumers to buy. Pink Tiger specializes in card games but Baio says a $25 game now would retail for $50 or more if made in America. The math of pricing with 145% tariff taxes, which she laid out in a Bluesky thread, is equally grim. "Who wants to buy a smallish card game for $50?" she says. As damaging as the tariffs themselves is the uncertainty around them, with the administration sending different messages almost daily. A typical Kickstarter campaign takes months of planning. If your manufacturing cost could suddenly spike to multiple times higher with no warning, planning is impossible. Which is especially a problem if you've already taken people's money. And especially especially a problem if the games are already made. In his post "We Are Suing the President", Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games explained that they're joining the lawsuit against the administration because they suddenly owe $1.5 million in tariff taxes on products they started manufacturing in January. "Like many tabletop publishers," Stegmaier writes, "we started print runs of products before the President took office, and now we face an unprecedented $14.50 tariff tax for every $10 we spent on manufacturing with our trusted long-term partner in China. For Stonemaier Games alone (a US-based company in which all 8 employees are US citizens), that amounts to upcoming tariff payments of nearly $1.5 million. "Canary in the coalmine" What difference does any of this make? I think the current heyday of tabletop gaming is the most under-recognized cultural flowering of this century. Good games bring together narrative and visual arts with a heaping helping of math to produce totally unique cognitive, emotional, social, aesthetic, and sensory experiences that are also super fun. If video games are increasingly recognized as an art form, so should their tabletop predecessors: what they lack in immersive high-tech razzle-dazzle, they make up for in tactile creativity and in-person social connection. It's remarkable how much life the best games can fit into a box.
One reviewer described Pink Tiger Games the best: "cards for humanity." Baio's Pink Tiger Games is a perfect example. Their "sweet, kind games to connect people" include Flatter Me, where players compete to give each other the best compliments, and Hurt Party: A Game of Bad Apologies, having fun with the ways people say "sorry not sorry". They're light and quick to play, and have been used in classrooms and therapy sessions. "Another story that I carry around in my heart is a woman who told me that she had a communication breakthrough with her autistic son during game play," Baio told the newsletter The Generations Games. Stonemaier, too, makes original and straight-up beautiful games like the bird-themed Wingspan and the city-building classic Between Two Cities. If you're holding onto any stereotypes about what board games and card games are, wander into a game store and marvel at what these artists can do with this form. Overnight that was thrown into jeopardy, supposedly to help a manufacturing industry that is years away from even existing, if it ever does. "For me personally," Baio says, "it means pausing the launch of my next Kickstarter for Pet Names: A Game of Endearments. I will not run a new campaign until the tariffs are gone, I can't in good conscience proceed and then have to manage my responsibility to backers. Kickstarter backers are an essential part of the process and I owe them so much, I am beyond grateful to every single person who supports my projects, and since I haven't hit launch yet (only my pre launch page is up) I'll be waiting." I asked her if these tariffs had been in place before Pink Tiger's first game, would she have ever started making games? "Absolutely not." Publishers and gamers outside the US will feel the effects, too. If the world's biggest game market contracts, the global industry will be able to support fewer publishers, fewer games, fewer ideas - especially from the smaller, independent end of the spectrum. "Like, Hasbro is fine," my brother Jamie puts it. "Dungeons and Dragons books will be more expensive, but people will still buy them. But even 'bigger smaller' companies, like Stonemaier, they're gonna take a huge hit. It's going to further the divide between the bigger companies that can handle added costs and smaller companies that can't."
Six of the 54,190 tabletop gaming projects on Kickstarter at press time. Who is helped by any of this pain? Building more domestic manufacturing capability is a fine goal. But the current global economy is the product of 50+ years of laws and incentives and systems and practices. It has to be unwoven thoughtfully, carefully, precisely, predictably, to avoid hurting far more people than it'll help. Driving a bunch of creative US-based small businesses into ruin is going to do exactly nothing to rebuild America's manufacturing base, while making American life duller and less fun. This is definitely one of those issues that could quickly be out of date, either way things go. While we wait and watch to see what happens next, we can always talk about what boardgames we’ve currently got, which ones we’re playing constantly, and which sit on the shelf waiting for that perfect Sunday afternoon to pull out with family or a few friends. What are your current favorite boardgames and card games? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat. Roll d20 on these other Shoddy Goods stories and you'll find every one is a critical hit:
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