Tabletop industry becomes poster children of tariff collapse

The New York Times has noticed that the tabletop industry is struggling. An August 23 article, titled “A Wild Card for the Board Game Business: Trump’s Tariffs”, spoke with several prominent designers whose businesses face mortal threat from the president’s “trade brinkmanship.” That’s the NYT’s word for it. They’re well practiced at wedging human suffering through a Play-Doh machine that extrudes economic punditry. In fairness, this piece serves more as a drive-by account, letting well known business owners like Stonemaier’s founder Jamey Stegmaier ask if manufacturing board games in China is such a crime. But it is still using tabletop games as evidence that nothing is safe from the scourge of stupid governance.

The article mostly avoids to leer at the smoke and wreckage of companies such as CMON and Greater Than Games, but author Hannah Ziegler fails to understand —or at least communicate — the extent of the precarity at the heart of the tabletop industry. Trump’s tariffs are disastrous and will kill businesses, but history did not begin on January 20, when he took office. Tabletop has been skidding on thin ice for a while with no valid recourse nor much in the way of blame for itself. The lugnuts were already wobbling, and we lost the tires just in time for a photo op.

Five years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic artificially ballooned board games and trading card games with interest and money — the former driven by lockdowns and our newfound collective sense of boredom, and the latter by an influx of unspent luxury money coupled with stimulus checks suddenly giving people unheard of levels of purchasing power. It was never going to last, and the bitter realities of 2024 are what is currently killing CMON even if tariffs hasten that unfortunate end.