"Board games are about to get more expensive" says Arcane Wonders president Robert Geistlinger in talks of publishers on "razor-thin" margins

The US board game industry could end up seeing sky-high tariffs on imports from China, where the majority of board games are manufactured. Currently sitting at 10% – as implemented on February 4, 2025 by the current US administration – even these minimal tariffs are likely to have a profound impact on the US board game market. With Trump having vowed to impose tariffs of up to 80% on all Chinese imports to the US, we could be about to see things get a whole lot more complicated for the board game industry as a whole.

As Arcane Wonders president Robert Geistlinger notes in an interview with BoardGameWire, "board games are about to get more expensive." But that's not even the half of it. Alongside that, publishers of the best board games are trying and failing to absorb rising costs, which could spell disaster for companies already cutting it fine.

Geistlinger says he's been concerned about rising import tariffs for some time. "Even before I was a publisher, the concern of what potential tariffs might do to board game prices was at the forefront of my mind, both as a gamer who has amassed a hefty collection of games and at the time working in the logistics space of the industry."

In raising import tariffs for one of the most prolific countries for board game manufacturing in the world, the landed cost of games produced there will also increase. That's basically the cost of everything that happens before the MSRP markup is calculated and the distributor takes their percentage of the MSRP. Geistlinger goes far deeper into the math in the original article than I'll deign to here, but the root of the matter is this: "for any small business to survive, it needs money to cover all expenses plus additional profit for growth and future products."

Importantly, Geistlinger notes that while publishers have "tried to absorb" the freight and manufacturing costs that have been steadily rising over the past half-decade "margins are razor-thin for most." Now being faced with a 10% increase, things are suddenly going to get a lot more precarious, as publishers "don’t have any room left in the already thin profit margins to absorb more."

Of course, companies now have the option to turn to the wonderful world of crowdfunding, but as Geistlinger makes clear, "not every game works for crowdfunding, and selling directly will potentially move fewer copies and require additional warehousing and employee overhead costs."

The bottom line is that with the rising tariffs, it's going to be a lot harder – especially for smaller indie board game companies – to survive. Whether this will encourage the set up of more board game manufacturers in the US is unclear, but for now the prediction is that big difficulties may be incoming for board game companies still importing from China as tariffs are expected to continue to rise.

In more tabletop industry news: Asmodee is saddling a large debt as Embracer Group splits this year.