There is so much vitriol in both the article and the comments. The board game community isn’t normally this toxic, is it? Certainly none of the groups I’ve played with were.
It’s become a shouting civil war in the comments there, with people steadfastly adhering to their particular faith-based beliefs and insulting their opponents’ similarly faith-based beliefs. No one seems to know what the actual tariff classification was, is, or will be. The government itself might not know… what’s even left of the government. Good times.
Yeah, I’m regretting posting that - I just blew past his assholery because I was interested in his contention about tariff coding, but probably shouldn’t have.
It’s partly the era we live in. It’s fairly common in some circles of the internet for even the most minor of disagreements to blow up. I’ve had people get pissed at me even when we largely agreed because of a minor disagreement or having a different reason behind reaching the same conclusion. As a whole, no, I don’t think the boardgame community as a whole is toxic. Most of them are pretty positive on the whole. But like it or not, this is a political issue, and that can make people ugly.
Stonemaier Games (maker of lots of great games, including Wingspan and Viticulture) says they’re suing the President over the tariffs. What exact kind of lawsuit would that be…like, suing for some kind of injunctive relief on the tariff being applied? I am definitely not a lawyer.
Something I might characterize as bad news/good news. CMON is laying off some unidentified number of people, but they’re committing to delivering existing kickstarters.
Also, Iello is stopping production in the US. Not a surprise, given they’re a sister company to Greater Than Games within the Flat River game group.
Also also, Pandasaurus is going to hold product in China, expand markets in the EU to France and Germany, and is recommending that if you want a Pandasaurus game here in the US, maybe you want to buy it now.
One of the podcasters on “Board Game Insider” is the owner of Portal Games, and he recently did some comparison shopping of production. He sent some specs for an imaginary board game to both European and US producers, and he limited them to only cardboard - no plastic inserts or minis.
The European producer came in at about $3.50/unit, while the US producer came in at $8.50/unit. He knew from his own productions that in China the game would have cost about $1.50/unit. So…that’s a pretty big hurdle to home production.
Another thing they talked about on the podcast was the (at least for now) elimination of small-package exemptions from tariffs, the de minimis exclusion that doesn’t apply tariffs on packages worth $800 or less. Trump mysteriously described these as a “scam against small businesses” and has instead implemented a $100 flat fee that is being applied to small packages. Apparently, it was applied to some single test copies of board games that were sent from China recently, which I’m sure was a big surprise.
To add insult to injury, the small package exemption making them duty free is expiring so until new rules are established, Europe will no longer send packages to the US.