Board Games are in Trouble, and it's NOT Why You Think | Extra Credits

Have you ever accidentally stepped on a board game piece? You know, especially one of those really pointy ones like a Monopoly hotel or a miniature holding a sword. Well, that same surprise and pain seems to be hitting physical game publishers around the globe these days. Thanks, 4D Chess. Seriously though, as much as the tariffs are to blame this time around, it does seem like every few years we hear about a different problem that rocks the world of board games and tabletop RPGs, which got us thinking. If someone were to make a new game, right now, how in our current world would that work? Why are these games and the companies that make them so susceptible to these kinds of intense market forces? Well, good news, everyone. Our buddy, board game and tabletop RPG designer Eddie Webb, has agreed to break it all down for us, you know, as soon as he's done screaming into that pillow. It's okay, Eddie. Take your time. Seriously, I can relate to your pain because we are currently Kickstarting

our new Extra History 2026 calendar. We're doing it again after last year's success with new art, new historical surprises, and as much of a tariff plan in place as possible. But, more on this beauty after the episode. Three years ago, Eddie told us about how the pandemic was killing board game companies. You can find that episode right here. But, these days, we're hearing the same thing about the Trump administration's pandemic-sized, ever-changing tariffs. Eddie's been working on physical games for nearly 25 years, so he's close to the problem right now. And shockingly, he says the overall big issue is modern capitalism. Though, we did want to break that down a little more because that seems to be the catch-all these days. Specifically, this goes back to consolidation. In 1998, two of the biggest game distributors in the United States merged to form Alliance Game Distributors, and they handled the lion's share of tabletop game distribution within the US. Alliance was, in turn, bought by comic distribution giant Diamond, which held a virtual monopoly over comic distribution

and wanted to extend that to tabletop games. Then COVID started, DC and Marvel pulled out of Diamond, and in January 2025 Diamond filed for bankruptcy, which included the entire Alliance game catalog. Now, the drama around the Diamond bankruptcy is just so juicy and fascinating, and I wish we had time to get into it right now. Actually, you know what? I can't leave this on the table. I'm just going to tell you all about it real quick just as a treat, and I mean like super quick. Going to channel my inner Micro Machines guy. Here we go. Diamond went into bankruptcy auction, and the winning bid went to a different company also called Alliance, Alliance Entertainment specifically. But the debtors declared they had chosen a backup bid from Universal Distribution and Ad Populum instead. But Alliance claimed they won the bid, so they went back to the bankruptcy court and were awarded the right to the winning bid. But then Alliance terminated that bid and sued Diamond for fraud claiming they misrepresented themselves, so the bid went back to Universal and Ad Populum. But now it turns out the reason Alliance wanted Diamond in the first place is because of their Wizards of the COAST DISTRIBUTION DEAL. BUT HASBRO TOLD

DIAMOND THEY WERE ENDING THEIR DISTRIBUTION DEAL WITH ALLIANCE WHEN THE CONTRACT RAN OUT IN APRIL. BUT LAST ONE, I PROMISE, DIAMOND NEVER MENTIONED IT IN the bankruptcy proceedings, and Hasbro never mentioned their intent until after Alliance sued for the winning bid. And now Universal and Ad Populum own Diamond, and in the midst of all that Penguin Random House pulled most of their comics distribution out of Diamond except maybe not in the UK. And oh my god, it is such a mess, folks. Woo. Fascinating corporate tangents aside, the point is that the distribution chain was in trouble before the tariffs were even a concern because so much of tabletop game distribution in the US had been consolidated into one company. That is our first point of fragility. And what's the second point, you ask? Hyperspecialization. Of course, this isn't exclusive to tabletop games, and it's due to how production chains have evolved over time. Over the past several decades, the world has pushed countries into being highly specialized as part of a global manufacturing economy. All the pieces of an iPhone, for example, aren't just made in China. Various parts are also made in

South Korea, Japan, India, and even the US. Similarly, board games often require manufacturing pieces in different parts of the world before they're put together and packaged at a distributor, like Alliance, and sent off to retailers. As a side note, books for TTRPGs aren't immune to this, either. Eddie told us a story of how one project he worked on required the interior pages to be made at one printer, the slipcase at a second, and all the parts were shipped to a third printer who made the covers and assembled the final book. Now, multiply that by how many parts board games can have. Actually, let's use a hypothetical to illustrate this. If we at Extra Credits wanted to make, say, a board game out of our long-time apocryphal franchise Hecknomancer, how would this hyper-specialization fragility affect us? Well, since it is, of course, a big and again hypothetical epic fantasy campaign, we're going to need tons of stuff, like some nice cardstock boards, player mats, well-made cards in a separate little card box. Ooh, and some of those plastic

miniatures that look super cool and that I will totally paint one day, I swear. Do not look at the pile of shame behind me. We also wanted to go into a lot of stores. So, we need to focus on manufacturers that will work in large quantities. Well, cards usually are made by specialized card manufacturers, so let's say we found one in Germany. China is our go-to place for boards and boxes, so we'll get those made there. Finally, neither of them handle plastic. So, for dice, deluxe counters, and those sweet, sweet plastic minis that I am in no way addicted to, we have to go with a different Chinese printer. Ideally, this heavy specialization would actually reduce the fragility of production. Like, if you can't get your plastic meeples made at one Chinese printer, maybe you could get wooden ones made in Poland while the rest of your game components get produced, but over time this evolved into companies manufacturing only what was needed when it was needed instead of stockpiling in case of failure. When it all works well, these so-called quote just-in-time supply chains are great. Less warehouse

costs for the manufacturer and supplier, and less need to pay in bulk for the purchaser, which means less of your company's money tied up in stock. However, it doesn't take much to break such a chain and cause all kinds of manufacturing problems. The UK actually learned this since Brexit, particularly with medications and water treatment chemicals. Both became too expensive if they were shipped across the UK border, so in the case of medication it has led to certain things like wart removal no longer being covered by the National Health Service, and in the case of water treatment chemicals, that led to water companies dumping sewage rather than paying for treatment because the fines for dumping are less than the costs of treating the water. Ew. Eddie, I really hope you're not making tea with that sewage water across the pond. Though I do appreciate how much of it you are spilling right now. And all these new tariffs could lead to similar consequences. A tariff might get added to a product crossing a country's border, which must be paid by the company who purchased the manufacturer

of the product, not by the company that made it. However, it also might be added to a part of a product if it's being shipped somewhere to be assembled. So, if Heck No, Man's Her the Board Game was hypothetically assembled and distributed by say Alliance, all of the parts would have to be shipped to the United States. And since the US has tariffs against China and Germany, each part would have a separate tariff added to it. These little charges can add up quickly, and that cost will be passed on to the consumer, no matter how much the executive branch tries to bully retailers. And that is because of the third point of fragility. The margins for these games are extremely small because not all of the money made from a game goes to the game's publisher. There's a bit of standard wisdom in tabletop games that you multiply the costs of making something to find your actual retail cost. That number can vary. Some people say five times, others eight, and even more people go higher. But the reason is that the money has to

be spread around. Once a game is printed, all of those units are then sold to the distributor. Of course, the distributor wants to buy those at a price that's low enough where they'll make a profit, but the publisher wants to make as much cash as they can. Then retailers buy the units from the distributor, and the same dance is done once more. The retailer wants to make that cost as low as possible, while the distributor wants it as high as possible. And then third verse, same as the first, the retailer then sells it to the consumer at the final retail price, which is hopefully high enough to give the retailer some profit, but low enough to be attractive for a customer to, you know, actually buy. Let's use another hypothetical example from our increasingly hypothetical game. I promise you all we are not making this thing. I do not want to get your hopes up. Please believe me when I say that. Assume for the moment we can sell Hecknomancer the board game for, let's say, 50 bucks. At a $50 price point, our distributor will purchase the game from us for, say, $20 a unit. So, our goal is to have our manufacturing costs, making

all of the parts of the game and shipping them out to our distributor, be $10 a unit or under, which would give us enough money to recoup all of our development costs, which include paying the people who made the thing, writers, artists, editors, graphic designers, producers, you know the drill. And in this hypothetical, we luck out. Even though US printers are quoting at around $18 a unit to print and ship it, we find a Chinese printer that can get it done for $8 a unit. Cha-ching! So, this all looks doable, right? We'll get everything made for the $20 our distributor will pay us, and then they'll probably sell Hecknomancer to retailers for something around $30, so they make around $10 a unit, and then the retailer will put it in their stores and try to sell it, making about $20 a unit. Everybody gets paid, but now tariffs enter the picture. A 10% tariff on that would bump our costs to $8.80, which means we won't make as much money, but we can also probably absorb it because we're still under that $10 per unit safety threshold

that we set before. Though a 50% tariff means we're at $12 a unit, and now we're losing money unless we can get distribution and retail to adjust their prices as well and make less money along the way, which probably isn't going to happen. But then if the tariffs keep fluctuating randomly, which is sadly not a hypothetical, something like a 110% tariff means that the physical part of our board games now cost $16.80 a unit, which means we are losing nearly $7 per game. You multiply that by hundreds of thousands of units, and that is a lot of cash burned and a lot of small businesses crippled. But some people might be asking, "Why not just increase the price?" Well, that's because of the last point of fragility, which is we as consumers are really resistant to game prices increasing. If you want an example of this, just check out one of the gazillion YouTube videos talking about the price point for Switch 2 games. Yes, video games and tabletop

games are apples to oranges, and there are many other factors why in that specific example people are pissed, but it still is a good illustration of the overall point. We as consumers do not like it when our entertainment costs go up. I know I don't. To use a less hypothetical example, let's talk about Eddie's Realm of Pugmire TTRPG rulebook. As of the time of this video's publication, he's selling it for $60 USD. That is for a full-color 224-page book with lots of art. For some contrast, the Art of World of Warcraft book, which was published nearly 10 years ago, sells for around $100. And college textbooks of a similar size can go for $150 or even higher. And yet, even a couple of years ago, the average price of a hardcover tabletop RPG was closer to $50 because it is hard to convince people to pay more for a thing they bought in the past. It also, of course, doesn't help that the prices of everything else is also going up. There's plenty of videos on why that is,

but that means that most folks don't have as much to spend on entertainment as they once did. Meaning right now, there's a ton of validity for not liking price increases in your entertainment. And currently, there's really not a good answer to this problem. That's what makes all of this so scary. Things have shifted to either the price going up astronomically or the publishers taking staggering losses or both. It's no exaggeration to say that some companies are looking to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a couple citing potential losses of over a million, like Cephalofair, the people who make the Gloomhaven games. And some companies have already shut down because this was just one economic push too many. In truth, to solve this, a lot of how games are made, distributed, and sold has to change on a fundamental level. That change, of course, will not come quickly, and it's far more complicated than simply saying, "Print in the US instead." Heck, even if there was a multi-year plan to relocate more production within the US, and let's be

real, the current administration doesn't even have a concept of a plan on that front, this would be a staggeringly complex process that still might result in elevated prices when all is said and done because corporations are going to corporation, in addition to it being crippling to publishers and consumers in the short term. So, for now, the advice we gave back in 2022 holds true today. If you love games and you are financially able to, pre-ordering or backing a crowdfunder campaign is a huge help to show publishers they still have an audience and to give them an infusion of much needed capital upfront to help offset the rising costs. Also, you can and should write your congressional representative about the damage this tariff rollercoaster is doing. Actually, some states have already sued the US government over them. Specifically, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont. Just wanted to give them all a shout-out. Also, using a website like fivecalls.org has made it easier than

ever to help you get set up and add your voices behind lawsuits like these that could help the industry. Because truly as gamers who love board games and tabletop RPGs, we really do have to stick together on this. We all love games. And now really isn't the time to tear publishers down or claim they're being greedy. A lot of this is out of all of our collective hands and we're all frustrated. So, there is no time like the present to make your voice heard. Then afterward, you could reward yourself by, I don't know, kicking back and pretending to play Heckna Manser, the most anticipated board game that I cannot stress enough will never come out. Though, you know what is coming out? Our brand new 2026 History Happens Every Day Calendar featuring phenomenal art from Extra Credits artist David Woiso, like Luminaries right here on the cover. Then you have our kick-ass end of the Samurai homage and finally my personal favorite, Zowie Nu Ar. I'm sure you can guess as to why. You can snag all of these plus nine more historical

reimagining right now over on Kickstarter because last year's 2025 calendar was so successful, we're doing it again. That is right, all of the things you loved about our 2025 calendar are back. And you know, if we look at this list of Kickstarter backers here on the back, a lot of uses of the word back here, I think there's a lot of stuff you loved. But now we are updating it with brand new jaw-dropping art, new daily historical happenings that regular calendars usually omit, and new scannable QR codes that link to extra history videos we've done about events that happened on those specific days. Plus, we've got cool new stuff in our deluxe tier for you to check out. I am particularly partial to the coasters that I pushed for very hard, by the way. And for all of you international extra historians, we heard you and got better rates on international shipping. Hell yeah. So, what are you waiting for, friendos? A formal invitation? Okay. Well, you know what? Please consider this your save the date. And check out the new calendar tiers and exclusive perks for yourself at the link below, or the QR code I hope is right next to where I'm pointing here. Because

the only way we can guarantee that you'll get your calendar before 2026 is if you back this campaign. So, to snag your 2026 historical calendar, click or scan here. And then you know what? I'm not even going to pitch the next video because this campaign is too cool. I want to make this calendar. Please go back it. You will not be disappointed. Once upon a time, Angelo Valenciana, Dominic Valenciana, Hunter Z, Joseph Blain, Kuya Koi, Lotus Wolf, and Ziliads Architectures were phenomenal legendary patrons. And that's no myth.