Why We Make Games In China

Hi. This is Chris, founder and Top Dog at Cheer Up Games.

Listen. We have to talk.

Since it’s one of the biggest news stories in the world, you probably have heard about the new tariffs that Donald Trump has put in place in America, which as of today stand at 104% in China. Maybe you think this is the beginning of the end of the economy as we know it, or maybe you are excited about the possibilities of bringing more manufacturing to the US.

Whatever you think will happen, I wanted to have a frank and honest conversation about how this will affect Cheer Up Games specifically going forward, and given all the misinformation I’ve seen in the last few days about this policy, show how it will actually impact me and the games I make directly. I hope that you will read this, no matter where you stand politically.

In this post, I will be more open than I ever have when discussing my company and the industry of board games. You might even learn something interesting about how the sausage gets made!

But trust me when I say - I really, REALLY, didn’t want to have to do this at all. I make silly games about drawing dicks and making up swear words. I’ve tried VERY hard not to bring politics into this company. I totally get that people use games as AN ESCAPE from the craziness of their lives and I’ve never felt the need to remind anyone of current economic events.

But at this point, I have no choice but to have this conversation with you. I’ll try to make it kinda funny. Sorry.

Let’s start at the beginning...

What the heck is a tariff?

A tariff is a tax on imports. A company makes something in China, and sends it to America, and the government charges whoever is bringing it in an extra tax on top.

Awesome, so China will finally be paying us for a change!

Nope. I pay this tax.

Not China, not the factory I print at, not even just us as “taxpayers” in general. I literally pay this tax directly to the United States government. No one else. I can’t say it any clearer. I personally pay this to import anything into the country.

Right now it’s more than 100%. If I import something that cost me $10 to make, Uncle Sam slaps another $10 and change on top. It’s as simple as that. My costs literally doubled, overnight.

Great, so maybe you’ll make your silly board games in America! After all, now it’s gonna be too expensive to print over in China and ship all the way here! MUAHAHA!

Here’s a little secret about manufacturing:

While most people understand that making something overseas is generally “cheaper,” I really think people don’t understand just HOW cheap.

Put it this way – if the government tariffed my games at 300%, it would STILL be MUCH cheaper to manufacture them in China AND ship them across a whole ocean.

Let me say that again: it’s not just a little cheaper – manufacturing in China (and some other countries) is sometimes 1/4 or 1/5 of the cost of what it would cost in America.

On top of that, many overseas suppliers have started negotiating with publishers to help offset the tariffs to stay competitive, like with credits or options to split the cost directly. Kinda defeats the purpose if you can just go around ‘em, don’t it?

So these previously small or even current mid-level tariffs do nothing BUT increase the cost for me to make the games. Unless it was 300% or more, it probably wouldn’t affect where I would decide to print the games.

Ok so how in the heck is it that cheap? They must be using slave labor! Or children!

This is actually a rather ugly idea that may have been partly true at one time or could be true in some industries like cheap garments. I’m not an expert. But at least in my industry, it’s really not prevalent. In fact, board game manufacturing is largely automated and humans spend a lot more time behind Adobe Illustrator fixing my terrible templates than putting their hands in machines.

The majority of the “cheapness” comes from the way that China structures its logistics. There may be entire cities that manufacture one single type of product, and all the supplies to do so are right there. Yes, wages are lower, but wages in Mississippi are lower than California too. The cost of living is just less.

I’m not gonna sit here and defend everything another country does, but just remember a people is not a country. I work with trusted industry partners that have a good reputation. Doing business with the people of a country does not endorse that country’s leadership or policies. How would I feel if a Canadian Game Store said they liked my games but didn’t want to carry them because they’d be supporting Trump’s policies?

I’d probably feel sad, and feel that was unfair. Which is what I did feel. Because that actually happened.

WOW dude, so all this time you’re buying games in China and then selling them to me at 5 times the price! How’s that yacht you’re living on, YACHTY!

Yes. That’s actually very standard, and basically how all companies work. What you don’t see in that “upcharge” is the 100’s and 100’s of hours of work upfront I did for free on each game. What you don’t see are the costs of marketing, like going to shows and spending money on ads. What you don’t see is that buying a game from a retail store means they only paid me wholesale prices, and then they have to take the little profit they make and pay rent and employees. See a game at Target? Five or ten different people have their hand in that pie before it even got to the shelf.

I have no official employees, no rent, and I’ve tried to keep my costs as low as possible. I am the smallest possible business you can be. I’ve sold over $200,000 worth of games and have barely been able to pay myself a penny doing this. I do it because I love it and want to, and because you CAN eventually make money at scale. It just takes a long time and a lot of free work. That was the end goal, but now…

So ya, come on in, the water’s great.

Well, at least this will encourage people to build new factories in America and give us back some jobs! It couldn’t possibly be that I was duped by a person who figured out how to bankrupt a casino!

To be clear, I’m not against making board games in America. In fact there are a few companies that do. It’s just that, at the scale that the industry requires, it just can’t be done. I don’t even mean that in the metaphorical sense. I mean literally, it can’t be done.

How do I know? Because I tried! In fact, if you have one of the very first versions of Swearmints from 2019 or 2020, congratulations, you possess a card game that was made right here in America!* (I’ll come back to that asterisk in a sec)

As the game was getting more popular, I required bigger print runs, and I went direct to that American company, all excited that I’d be ordering thousands of units from them for a huge discount (a win-win!) only to be told that they literally couldn’t go any cheaper. Again, this wasn’t about negotiating a penny here, a quarter there. Their best possible break-even price was THREE AND HALF TIMES what it cost to print it overseas AND ship it to my door. Most businesses get their goods at better rates as they scale their sales (each unit gets cheaper). Here I was looking down the barrel of my costs actually INCREASING over time. It just wasn’t an option and I had no choice if I wanted to make games and actually make a business out of it.

But what is “Made in America” anyway? While those versions of Swearmints are “made” here, it’s really more like that they were “assembled” here. Because as it turns out: you can’t make mint tins in the US! Like at all. No one does it. The American manufacturer I work with looked. Another thing that might be a surprise - there’s no company in America that makes dice at scale. Like literally none. Isn’t that crazy? If you want to make a game with dice, it just doubled in cost for you. Sooo… then this kinda blurs the line of what “Made In The USA” even means. I’m still importing parts and materials.

Throwing cost out the window, if there were American companies that printed competitively in the US, where would they get the printers? The paper? The ink? The plastic? This is EXACTLY why these tariffs screw AMERICAN manufacturing companies TOO - sourcing machines and raw materials is ALSO going to get more expensive (who makes the machines that make the machines?). Oh lookie, there’s that little asterisk*

For many industries, but specifically for board games, the manufacturing capacity in the US just doesn’t exist and probably never will no matter how high tariffs get. We don’t have the equipment, skills, or infrastructure to support it. Even the games that are “made” here frequently have quality problems. So why force it? It’s like asking why Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t just grow its own coffee in Massachusetts. Could they physically do it with the right technology, time, freedom, training, and money? Maybe, but why bother? Other countries already do it a lot better. Plus, it would probably taste like shit.

*BABY SOUNDS* I DON’T CARE! I want my AMERICA GAMES! JOBS! FART! WAHHH!

I think it’s great that some companies, even small businesses, specialize in American-made goods. The nice thing is, most people are willing to pay a premium for them, and I have!

But look at your game shelf. Look in your closet. Look at your whatever you are reading this on. Look around you wherever you are - maybe your living room, the dentist, the airport, sperm bank… 99% of the stuff in the room you are in is made or has parts imported from overseas, likely from China. It’s just what it is. Should we encourage more investment in American business? Sure, I’m down. If there was a competitive American option for me to print games, I would definitely consider it. But it won’t happen tomorrow!

Look, I just want to make fun games. I don’t want to get involved in macroeconomics. I want to make you pee from laughing. Some of this is just the reality of how global trade works in 2025. Is it perfect? No. Did you or I personally set it up this way? No. Should it be burned to the ground in one fell swoop, taking with it thousands of American businesses like mine, on the gamble that probably, maybe, hopefully, an industry that doesn’t exist will suddenly fall out of the sky in a few days? Absolutely not.

Ok…I guess I never realized how dumb this policy was. So what’s gonna happen to Cheer Up Games, my favorite game company of all time?

I think I speak for many in the industry when I say...

I don’t know.

Here’s what I do know:

• I have no plans to raise prices right now. My current inventory wasn’t subject to the new tariffs (except the Pot Pack, which is small enough that I’ll just eat it. Not the cards, I mean the cost. Did I mention we have a new Pot Pack? Preorder it now! See what I did there?).
• Swearmints may survive temporarily, but bigger games like Cheer Up! and Game of You are going to be a lot harder to reprint.
• New projects are now fully on hold. Including a big expansion to Cheer Up! I've been working on for years and a very funny party game about painting that I made years ago and have been dying to release. It's just gonna be too expensive.
• I might pivot to smaller games, or even sell designs to larger publishers who can absorb costs better. But that’s not what I WANTED to do.

See, that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? All this “aggressive negotiating” comes at the expense of me not having the freedom to do what I wanted to do as an American small business owner, to make the exact games I wanted to make for YOU. Think about it: the choices of games you get to play are now at the whim of an 80-year-old’s temper tantrums. That seems against everything America is even about.

So, If I have to stop making games, that would really, really suck.

But more importantly? You won’t get to play them. And that would suck even more.

UPDATE 4/10/25: Some of the global tariffs were paused, but China's were INCREASED. Meaning I and most of the industry are still getting screwed in the short term. Trump is playing chicken and he's anteing up American small business.

Thanks for reading and hopefully this just goes away and we can get to back to writing jokes. As a thank you for getting this far, use code “EFFTARIFFS” for 20% off everything until April 30th, 2025.

Think this sucks too? Click here to easily contact your representative.

...The Pot Pack is now available for preorder, sorry. I just wanted to slip that in one more time.

Don’t Just Take It From Me

Here are some people in the industry who are way smarter than me:

The Game Crafter (An American Game Manufacturer on why it's bad for them too)

Stonemaier Games explains the math of tariffs using their games

The Games Industry Reacts To The Tariffs