For folks in the US who make tabletop or board games, Trump's newest round of tariffs is going to be a crippling blow to an already razor-thin-margin industry, which is going to have an outsized impact across the entire market regardless of where you live unless you're purchasing locally produced tabletop games.
Like it or not, if your tabletop/board game comes with basically any kind of plastic figurines, wooden meeples, or other peripherals... that's almost always coming from China. There are functionally zero domestic US companies able to satisfy this branch of the gaming industry. Most paper products for tabletop games come from Canada.
The vast majority of the stuff used to create fun games comes from somewhere that isn't the US, and thanks directly to Trump's infantile understanding of everything, the entire industry is going to suffer. And, of course, because the US is a major producer of board games and tabletop RPGs... that's going to have an impact everywhere that sells things like Monopoly or RISK. Beyond those however, it's going to impact a ton of Kickstarters in the space as well, so it's not just big names like Hasbro and Mattel that are going to be feeling a huge hit thanks to these idiotic tariffs... it's also small teams and individuals creating cool stuff.
The big guys can, to a certain degree at least, weather this storm. But indie creators? What do they do?
Games already in the pipeline are instantly more expensive because of this, and that can mean for Kickstarters, having to ask more money from folks or refunding them - neither of which is good for creators that already are working within very limited profit margins. Which means we're going to be seeing a LOT more posts like this:
The game is done, but thanks to Trump being an infantile moron, it needs additional funding to be able to do anything beyond the bare minimum of fulfilling its campaign promises and getting books to backers. So they did a second Kickstarter to ensure they could get enough stock to, y'know, sell some as well. Not a lot of stock, mind. 500 extra books, which is not a lot.
Because I follow so many cool people making cool things, my focus here is on tabletop games... but these dumb tariffs are going to impact everything for US consumers. From entertainment to essentials, everything is going to get more expensive, and competition is going to suffer as smaller players find themselves unable to compete and weather the storm.
There is no scenario where this idiotic trade war is good for anyone.
Reaper Miniatures is based in Texas, and they also produce minis for some smaller boutique designers I think, but this is probably the end of their Bones Kickstarters. Games Workshop is already outrageously priced as it is. Hasbro/WotC prints their D&D books in China. MTG cards are made in the USA, but their packaging and spindown dice and other accessories are often from overseas. And LEGO... that bastard jacked up the price of LEGO, didn't he.
If it contains plastic, you bet your ass it's going up. There is, for things like ttrpgs/board games/lego, precious little plastic manufacturing. They might make the actual thing in the US, but the materials so often come from china even if it's re-formed in the US. It's going to be a shitshow if these stay enforced, and even worse if they continue to go up.
These are for sure challenging times for a lot of industries like that. I think one of the issues is that we are far too accustomed to subsidized goods which doesn’t bring the cost to actual numbers but keeps it far lower than it would. Not that subsidies are necessarily in play here but we so often don’t get an idea of what things really cost until it changes.
The insidious part about the tariffs is that the conglomerates are still going to make money hand over fist but the people are the ones that suffer. We do need to fix the trade issues though, so this was inevitable.
It's a middle-class and lower-class tax, 100%.
And I mean, the US is the biggest consumer country in the world. If they want to stop buying shit, cool, buy less shit. Otherwise, they need to be aware that setting up the infrastructure to bring jobs back to the US is a decades-long undertaking and, quite honestly, will fail.
The US cannot offer sweat-shop level production, and so long as other countries DO, those of us who make shit with actual... y'know... laws and protections and shit... we'll always lose manufacturing to them. Canada, the US, EU, etc... we have labour laws and so long as we do it's always going to make getting these company owners to manufacture here very difficult, unfortunately.