Stonemaier Games, the board game publisher behind hit board games including Wingspan, Tokaido, and Scythe, has published a detailed breakdown of how new tariffs on Chinese imports to the USA will affect prices for board game buyers, and revenues for the designers, publishers, and distributors of games.
Jamey Stegmaier, co-founder and president at Stonemaier Games, published the blog post on April 7, stating “I consistently saw questions, confusion, and even accusations of greed regarding the math of tariffs”, and that board game “publishers, distributors, retailers, and customers do not benefit from the manufacturing cost increasing by 54%” – his article attempts to explain how and why costs are likely to go up.
Stonemaier Games publishes some of the best board games on the market, with Wingspan its best known breakout hit. When the tariff rate was first announced the firm stated that “manufacturing the types of games we make is not an option in the US” due to a lack of suitable manufacturing facilities. It added that anyone attempting to set up a new US factory will also have to deal with the tariffs, as the specialist machines needed to make boardgames are predominately built in China.
Stegmaier’s latest blog post goes into extensive detail (and more than we’ve summarised in this article), but starts with a simple model of what a board game is likely to cost at each step of its journey from a manufacturer to the consumer. Suppose a publisher buys a board game from their Chinese partner for $10. They would sell this to a distributor for $20. The distributor sells it to a retailer for $25, who can then offer it to the customer for $50.
The only stage at which a tariff is paid is when the game is imported, when the publisher (as the importer of the goods) pays the tariff the US treasury. For the sake of making the sums easier to deal with, Stegmaier rounds down, so that the example $10 board game now costs the publisher $15.
This represents a totally new cost for the publisher. Stonemaier Games apparently “spent around $10 million on production costs in 2024”, and “tariffs could add as much as $5 million in expenses for us this year”.
If the cost of importing the game increases by $5, couldn’t the price at each stage of the distribution chain just go up by $5? That would mean that the distributors buy the game for $25, retailers get it for $30, and customers get it for $55. But Stegmaier warns that this would put a large “burden of risk and cashflow” onto distributors and “especially retailers”.
Retailers only have a finite amount of money to spend buying new stock each month. If the cost of a game goes up, a retailer can’t buy as many copies of it: a fixed $1,000 stock budget can buy 40 copies of a $25 game, but only only get 33 copies of a $30 game. If the retailer makes the same $25 profit on each game, they’re going to make a worse return on their investment if they have fewer copies to sell.
It’s worth stating quite how much this drop would be for retailers. If the retailer sells 40 games at $50 each, making back $2,000, they’ve earned a $1,000 gross profit (from which they’ve got to pay their rent, staff salaries, utility bills, and so on). If they sell 33 games at $55, they’ll make $1,815. Their gross profit has just fallen by $185, or 18.5%.
The exact same cashflow problem faces publishers when they seek to print new games. A $100,000 budget can buy 10,000 copies of a $10 game. If that same game costs $15, the budget will only stretch to 6,666 games. To get the same amount of profit back from selling 33% fewer games, they need to charge 150% as much per game.
In other words, to preserve their current profit margin, the publisher would need to pass on a price increase in line with the tariff, increasing the cost to the distributor by 50%. If the distributor wants to keep their profit margin the same, they need to do exactly the same thing, and it’s the same for the retailer.
Stegmaier estimates that if this approach is taken by the entire industry, the cost to the distributor will be $30 per game, to the retailer will be $37.50, and to the consumer will be $75. Now the customer is bearing the full brunt of the cost increase, and none of the businesses are any more profitable.
Stegmaier does not address the possibility of pressing for lower prices from Chinese suppliers, reducing the amount of tariff payable. Some savings may be possible here. But absorbing the full impact of a 50% tariff would require a 33% discount from the manufacturer.
That seems unlikely. Current manufacturing prices are already the result of negotiations and competition in the market, and while there may be give, it’s unlikely to be anywhere near 33%. Imagine haggling for a full day over the price of a used car, and then just before signing on the line, you ask the dealer to drop their best offer by a third.
Stegmaier thinks that the best resolution will be if the “publisher simply eats part of the tariff cost and the distributor and retailer pursue a middle ground increase” – that is, each stage of the distribution chain passes on a price increase, but not quite as significant as the one that would recoup their lost buying power.
In this scenario, the publisher charges a distributor $23, the distributor charges the retailer $30, and the retailer charges the customer $60. “In this scenario, if a retailer spends $1000 on 33 games, their revenue is now $1980”, leaving their gross profits just 2% lower than they were before the tariffs.
But as Stegmaier remarks, “in all of these scenarios, the prices you pay to bring joy to your tabletop will increase”. “Even if you don’t have a tight budget, the impact is equivalent to 10-16% inflation”, he adds.
And this doesn’t account for rising costs elsewhere, that will shrink the amount of disposable income in American pocketbooks. All businesses that import products from abroad, or rely on an international supply chain for raw materials, tools, or consumables, are going to have to consider similar calculations.
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