Tariffs are killing “uncommon” RPGs

Magpie Games’s latest Kickstarter campaign asked for $10,000 to create three games. It advertised a trio of card-based, horror RPGs: Airlock, The City Devouring, and a new edition of the 2019 Zombie World. The campaign had raised just shy of $50,000 on October 23 when the studio cancelled the project, saying, “our post-launch review of the project has convinced us that we can’t move forward with these games in their current form.” Telling stories with decks of cards is experimental, sure, but far from unheard of. Heck, For the Queen is an entry point into the hobby these days. The culprit of this murder wasn’t bad design or poor advertising; it was tariffs.

The full update on the crowdfunding page explains that Magpie Games, the RPG studio also responsible for Avatar Legends, Urban Shadows, and Rapscallion, had been observing US tariffs against countries such as China bounce up, down, and up again at the whim of the Trump administration. Cards were a gamble from the beginning due to their form factor and international production requirements, but the team “lived in hope” that reality would play nice. Magpie spoke with suppliers, freight forwarders, and other members of the industry, who all agreed that creating, shipping, and selling “uncommon” games just isn’t viable right now.

Magpie queried several Chinese printers it has used in the past — Longpack, Game Beings, Panda — along with printers in both the US and Eastern Europe, who might be able to handle this decidedly not-book-shaped RPG. “We needed the printing and production capacities of these factories to handle many of the more complicated aspects of these games — especially with regard to the deluxe boxes — and we knew that most of our backers were here in the States as well,” Diaz-Truman told Rascal via email. On October 10, Trump threatened to impose another 100% tariff against Chinese-produced goods, bringing the total price paid by US countries to receive those goods at 130%.