Mike’s Monthly Book Report: Why Board Games Won’t Be Manufactured in the US Anytime Soon
“Surely this will be the last straw,” every comments-section on the internet whispered in one voice. “This will be the event that finally lets us make games right here in the USA.”
"No,” Mike said. “Stop that. Why would you even think that? Just… no.”
Manufacturing and world economy are big topics, but the one little corner of it I know a bit about is the part pertinent to the board game industry.
Today there are definitely factories right here in the USA that will take quotes and make games for you. In my personal experience, those quotes are typically 4x-10x higher than what we see from manufacturing partners in China. To be specific, the last quote I got from a US factory was $6.81 per unit for a game that would have cost $0.98 to make overseas.
In a vacuum, if you don’t know the first thing about anything else, then it might feel like there’s a numbers-based carrot-and/or-stick solution that will push US publishers to manufacture in the US. Unfortunately, in reality there are a lot of other barriers.
Let’s talk about a few of them:
The “Finishing Factory Problem”
Board games require agile manufacturing, meaning that every game is different and they often have unique components made from different materials. There’s no one factory that makes all this stuff anywhere in the world. In fact, the manufacturers we know and love in games are print and finishing factories–meaning that they’ll print components like boxes and cards, but just about anything else is coming from a different factory down the road.
For example, if we want dice or wooden cubes in our game, we’ll ask Longpack to include them and quote us a price. But Longpack might not make those themselves–they’ll generally ship big orders of them in from a partner, then pick and pack them on site.
This is important because it’s the same process that our existing US game manufacturers use with one really big difference: there is no “factory down the road” in the US. When US game manufacturers run into components they can’t make in-house, they literally import those components–usually from China.
In fact, as I’ll talk about in the next bullet point, the limited manufacturing capabilities of US game manufacturers mean that they would need to import most if not all of the components to make just about any hobby board game out there at the same quality.
Quality
Right now, there’s nowhere that you can find the quality of product you find in China at a better price. In fact, it’s not even close. On top of that, CN manufacturers are professional and generally excellent at what they do, and their offerings are improving every year.
In contrast, US game manufacturers have very limited scope and quality, and they’re not bringing anything new to the table. Our existing manufacturers are suited to serve their existing domestic partners, and those partners are almost exclusively aimed at the mass market. If you think about the quality of components you find in a pack of playing cards at a gas station, the offerings you see from US manufacturers don’t really get much better.
I can order cards from CN in any dimension, in a variety of configurations between material and finish and density and core and everything else. US manufacturers have a fraction of a percent of the options, and if you want anything else–you guessed it–they have to import it.
Volume and Order Quantities
If the US embargo’d the world tomorrow and board game demand stayed the same, the existing US game manufacturers wouldn’t be able to come close to covering that demand (even if they could still source components they couldn’t make in house). There just aren’t nearly enough facilities to process those orders.
Also, weirdly enough, all the US manufacturers I’ve spoken to have very high minimum order quantities. I can order 500 units of a game from CN, but a lot of US manufacturers won’t get out of bed for less than 5,000 or 10,000 units. Unless those practices changed fast, small indie publishers forced to manufacture in the US would just die on the spot.
Equipment and Process
The processes (and often the equipment) used in manufacturing are developing every year, and most of them are proprietary. This means that, to serve the needs of the modern hobby game industry, US manufacturers would need to cover that gap by buying or developing those assets on their own.
Labor
While there are some unskilled jobs in manufacturing, there are also a lot of skilled jobs. This includes operators for all those proprietary processes and equipment. The US is not a place where those skill sets have been incubated over the last 75 years, so again this is another thing that a US manufacturer would need to acquire or develop.
Additionally, the cost of living in China is a quarter of what it is here in the US. Even though the wages are lower, even the unskilled laborers in the game manufacturing process make the equivalent of a pretty solid wage. They make more (adjusted) than I do.
As a disclaimer, yes there are definitely instances of exploitation in CN labor. We should absolutely be vigilant regarding these human rights abuses and they should absolutely be eradicated, but I’ve never seen any evidence of it happening anywhere in or adjacent to the game industry.
Materials Sourcing
Trees don’t just grow on trees. Materials are a competitive market, and US game manufacturers currently do not have a horse in that race. While we could source some of those materials domestically, we would almost certainly need to import a lot of it anyways, which would put us at a distinct disadvantage.
Lack of Investors
If you look at the last 6 items, you’ll see that general infrastructure is one of the big missing links. Infrastructure is something you can in theory just build out of thin air with enough money and time.
I personally guess that the amount of money is “billions of dollars” and the amount of time is “5-20 years,” but that’s just speculation on my part. I imagine it as being a whole process, like gathering the Infinity Stones over the course of 10 years worth of Marvel movies. In any case, it won’t be cheap or fast.
The only reason it would make sense for an investor to commit enough money and time into establishing that infrastructure is if it were a savvy financial decision to do so. The problem is that it would not be a savvy financial decision to invest in game manufacturing–and it won’t be anytime soon.
In Summary
Right now, the future is unclear. We don’t know where the tariffs will go from here, but nobody has any reason to expect they’ll persist beyond the current administration. If you dropped a zillion dollars to build factories and those factories were made obsolete as soon as tariffs were lifted, you’d probably have a big zillion dollar lemon on your hands.
The US government made a conscious choice and effort to source manufacturing offshore that dates back to the 1950’s in an effort to globalize the US dollar. As a result, other countries and partnerships became staked in our success, and the USD became a major fixture in the world economy.
Americans have been reaping the rewards and eating that cake for the last 75 years, but now American wants to have that cake too. Unfortunately, at least for the game industry, that’s just not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpeg)
