An unpredictable tariff regime has choked U.S. board game designers and chilled a once-vibrant hobby. Ahead of the holiday shopping season, one small business has bet its survival on shipping new products from China, where most of the world’s board games are produced.
“We were able to find manufacturers who could work at a bigger scale so that maybe we could lower the costs by printing larger volumes, which for us is a huge risk,” said Gwen Ruelle, co-owner of Runaway Parade Games.
“With the way that consumers are looking at things like board games, they’re worried about paying their grocery bill, they’re not going to pay more for a board game,” said Ruelle. “It’s looking right now like slimmer margins and having to print out these higher volumes [will] make it work.”
Ruelle and co-owner Sam Bryant tried to find stateside manufacturers to avoid the tariffs, but in the end, China remained the only economical option.
“We set out to try to make our smaller card game, Smug Owls, inside the U.S., and that was a month-long journey of dead ends,” said Bryant. “A lot of companies couldn’t make the cards in the specification we wanted. Other companies would get quotes, and we’d be excited, and then they’d be like, ‘Well, this is without the cards. It’s only the box and the rulebook,’ which is not exactly something to move forward on.”
“When we did get a quote for the whole game, it was about 10 times as much as we would have paid in China,” added Bryant.
So Bryant and Ruelle spent thousands of dollars retooling their production pipeline to offset the cost of tariffs. They also tried to time shipments during three-month truces in the tit-for-tat trade war between the U.S. and China.
“We’re rushing as fast as we can to get it in during the pause because we could survive the 30% tariff,” said Bryant.
But when President Trump threatened triple-digit tariffs ahead of last month’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Bryant and Ruelle accelerated their timetable. The move ended up costing them. While they tried to get ahead of a rate they couldn’t afford, the actual tariff rate dropped after Trump’s meeting with Xi.
“We were then thinking we were on the line for $45,000 that we weren’t aware of — but now, because we’ve rushed, we’ve been rewarded,” Bryant quipped. “It looks like we’re going to end up paying 30%, even though for board games it’s been reduced to 20% because our containers are coming in before the shift on Nov. 10.”
Ruelle noted that this experience is just one sign of how the Trump administration’s chaotic trade policy has hurt the game industry.
“Everybody we know is going through this level of uncertainty,” said Ruelle. “A lot of folks are getting laid off — we’re just seeing across the board people trying to survive rather than this long period of growth that we’ve been experiencing for many years.”
The downturn has even rattled Ruelle and Bryant’s confidence in their company, which they built out of a shared passion for board games.
“We’re working harder to make less and it feels like we’re being bet against by our own government,” said Bryant. “Everyone in our industry is scarred by this constantly shifting narrative where one day the tariffs mean the end of your business — the next day, maybe you can scrape by.”
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Perkins Mastromarino also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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