“It’s just a game.”
A term often used to deflect criticism to excuse behavior or unintentional mistakes.
Games are harmless. Right?
Just a box on a shelf with cards, dice, perhaps a map, and a set of rules by which to play. Perhaps there are plastic tokens or miniatures that shift about when the box is moved. The box is an implied promise. It says there is an event coming. An event involving friends experiencing a shared distraction. Rules will be debated. Alliances will be forged and betrayed. There may even be a single winner. And when it is done, it will go back into the box with all players being better for having partaken of its promise.
The odd thing about games, is the manner in which they reflect the world outside. Possibly a little too closely for comfort.
The board game industry has grown to resemble the hobby itself. It is a large sprawling network of visionaries, designers, artists, developers, producers, manufacturers and distributors. All spread across the world. All speaking different languages in different countries, and struggling to achieve. What starts as a concept scribble on napkin in Brazil, passes through a designer in Holland. Into the hands of an illustrator in Japan. Rules for the concept are tested on the internet. Funding is crowd sourced. Producers in the back office a nondescript building orchestrate the whole process. Until, it is finally manufactured in Asia and shipped across the planet to holding facilities in various countries. There the finished concept, now a game, is distributed either by a retail outlet or by direct shipping to the player.
The distances crossed are mind boggling.
The chain is long.
Its Fragile.
Weak.
As with any delicate process, it only takes one ignorant heavy hand to make it shudder and shake.
One such hand stepped onto the stage of global politics actively disregarding the perceived rules and agreements many industries and countries had grown accustomed to. Like a child it preferred flipping the board to negotiating over the pieces. Trade wars, tariffs, threats, and real lives thrown away like dice in a smoky casino. To supporters it looked like strength. To critics it looked like something else, something closer to predation.
Deep in the background of all that bluster and belligerence sat the quiet unassuming board game industry, hoping the storm would pass it by, knowing deep down, that it would not.
Modern board games and table top role-play games depend on manufacturing in Asia. The reasons are simple, many other countries have dissolved or retooled their gaming industries in favor of other things. The equipment required to produce complex components — custom dice, miniatures, thick cardboard tokens — exists in specialized factories there. Manufacturing without those facilities would force the price of a single box to increase drasticly.
When the tariffs began, publishers could feel the dreadful breath of uncertainty on their throats. Then the US Supreme Court struck them down. Only for them to be reinstated across the board under a different rule.
A 15% percent tariff might not sound like much to someone reading headlines over morning coffee. That’s what? 15 cents on the dollar? To a small publisher, it can feel like the crisp cold wind blowing through a cracked window. Now the numbers don’t work. A game that was supposed to sell for sixty dollars, now costs sixty nine just to produce and ship.
Operating margins evaporate like smoke in a gale.
Projects stall.
Projects fail.
Crowd sourced campaigns — those hopeful promises of a bright future for their games — begin to look less like dreams and more like insurmountable debts.
Large companies can sometimes weather storms like this. A publisher like Asmodee or Hasbro may have the capitol and scale to shift manufacturing or absorb temporary losses. Not so much the smaller creators. The trapdoor of a sudden shift in global trade policy can send them tumbling into the darkest abyss.
In an odd symmetry board games themselves often revolve around exactly this type of maneuvering.
For example, the game Diplomacy. Players make deals, forge alliances, and betray one another when the moment is most advantageous. No dice, minimal luck, just a dose of harsh cold negotiation and the brutal execution of power.
Another game to consider is Twilight Struggle, wherein superpowers wage a cold war for influence across the world. Every move is calculated. Every advantage exploited. Power prevails.
Chillingly relevant to now, Tammany Hall. Brutal territory control and negotiations feeling like the cutthroat world of large politics on a small scale. With all of the corruption, bribing, and the ruthless exploitation to gain and retain power.
Play those games long enough and you begin to understand something intrinsic to the world at large: power does as power pleases, and with little to no accountability for the powerful individual making the choices.
Power pushes.
It traps.
Sometimes, it consumes.
And the weakest group, is the one that is most crushed, smothered, and devoured.
Power is the shadow hanging over industries involved in global trade. Corrupt political leaders aren’t thinking about cards, tokens, or rulebooks when they impose tariffs and casually disrupt global markets. For them its all about leverage. About pressure. About forcing the unwilling to capitulate.
The game industry is just one of many pieces sitting on that much larger board, subject to the whims of unstable power.
And pieces on that board are sacrificed all the time.
With crowd funding the situation is even more precarious. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of gamers spend money, months or years, before a game exists. They’re buying the infancy of the game, paying in good faith for the promise that a box will arrive on their doorstep filled with joy.
But when trade policies change, and market disruptions occur, the money collapses. Shipping costs surge. Tariffs appear and like a redcap’s teeth, bleed the funding away. War shuts down the the trade artery of the world.
Publishers then face an unenviable choice: absorb the loss chancing bankruptcy and failure, or ask backers for more money thereby destroying the trust and good will previously gained. The road to successful crowd sourced games is littered with the remains of failed and collapsed projects. Projects that met their financial goals but could not survive the creation process.
Neither option feels like winning.
True irony is impossible to ignore. Around tables and in convention halls, players gather to simulate diplomacy, empire building, and geopolitical struggle. They argue over rules, make alliances, plan careful strategies, and sometimes connive their way to success.
Meanwhile the real world outside keeps playing its own version of the same contest, only the stakes are higher, the lives real.
No reset button.
No house rules.
No take backs.
Just cold unfeeling power, moving across the board.
While in warehouses and shipping containers, trapped in distant ports, thousands of unopened game boxes, dreams really, wait quietly in the dark, caught up in a match they were never meant to play and will never be considered as collateral damage.
– Dru
Dru's Den of Ill Repute 