Dark Days

It has been a very dark few days for the Board Game Industry.  This is a highly competitive market with notoriously slim margins and many of the companies in the industry are not necessarily run by businesspeople but rather by gifted designers or passionate gaming people.  Since the advent of crowdfunding the flood gates have opened and literally hundreds of companies have sprung up through direct-to-customer campaigns that provide quick, up-front and seemingly free cash in the hands of designers or often just enthusiasts with perhaps very little experience in international manufacturing and trade.  The crowdfunding successes are tainted by the failures and even before the US Trade War started in 2025 there were a worrying number of examples of crowdfunding projects for board games that went unfulfilled or have gone off the rails.  

But now with this trade war what has gone on this week?  We've announced future MSRP increases of 50% in the near future once we run out of our existing (pre-tariff) stock.  Just this week Final Frontier Games announced it would close with 3 outstanding kickstarter projects unfulfilled.  Worryingly they also at least partially blamed CMON (Cool Mini Or Not) for this closure saying that CMON committed to a print run of Merchant’s Cove and never paid for it, though even FFG noted that CMON was acting under the terms of the contract that they both agreed on.  CMON itself has 10 unfulfilled crowdfunding campaigns and its stock on the Hong Kong exchange has been halted due to failure to file its reports on time and is going to be reporting a big loss for 2024.  

Just today it has been reported that Greater Than Games is shutting down and AEG just announced it was delaying fulfillment of its projects to the USA.  

Darker Tendencies

The tariffs, currently at 145% for board games from China, are having a huge impact, but as highlighted by Final Frontier's announcement, the industry was in trouble before that.  The container prices during covid hit hard and there are a lot of other issues we could blame this on, but it seems the underlying problem we are seeing over and over is that of a lack of fiscal responsibility.  If you receive $100,000 upfront from 2,000 backers at $50 each for a board game that costs you roughly $10 to make, how do you not immediately take the $100,000 the day it hits your bank account and pay the factory around $20,000 for the production and set aside another $20,000 for the transportation and final delivery of the game?  Maybe you have another $10,000 in initial costs to market and develop the game, but even so you should be left with some profit.  You can't just go out and spend that $100,000 on other expenses and then be left short of cash when it comes time to pay your fulfillment bill.  But that is exactly what has been happening, companies are using that quick injection of cash to pay for day-to-day expenses or perhaps just live high on the hog when that money isn't really earned yet.  

The result has been that companies are using the proceeds from the 2nd or 3rd or 10th project to pay for production and fulfillment of the prior projects and making a mockery of the entire crowdfunding process.  Worse than that, using those funds for your own personal spending or to pay for other things ahead of what you collected that money for could be fraud.  Once you dig yourself a hole it is so easy to just kick the can down the road to the next big hit of cash and continue on your merry way.  This has been happening for a while and Kickstarter had a rule that you had to have your prior campaigns fulfilled completely before you could launch another one but that rules was walked back to "no more than 3 outstanding" if you are an experienced creator as of last year.  Perhaps that was due to companies just jumping to other crowdfunding platforms like GameFound or Backerkit for subsequent projects once Kickstarter jammed them up.  

But regardless of the reason, this house of cards (no pun intended) is coming crashing down when creators suddenly are facing 145% tariffs on the projects that should have been fulfilled several years ago.  Now their production is finally done and ready to come in containers to the US but they can't bring them in to fulfill as the cost has skyrocketed.  Is it the backers' fault that the publisher delayed fulfillment until 2025?  Should they be asked to pay more on an extremely delayed project?  That hardly seems fair.  But the publisher literally doesn't have the money to pay for the final fulfillment and now running a new campaign seems impossible with the tariffs and the backlog of unfulfilled campaigns.

A ponzi scheme is often uncovered when suddenly the incoming cash isn't sufficient to pay off the oldest investors and that feels a lot like what is happening now.  The spending needs to continue but there is no new cash coming in.  The result is a lot of unfulfilled projects and a lot of broken promises, and most importantly for us all, a lack of backer confidence in the entire system.  

A Better Way

We hate to see this eroding of confidence in the crowdfunding process.  This lack of confidence is merited, and we don't blame the community of backers for this, but rather the poor business decisions being taken with your funds.  Each time you pledge for a campaign you do so with the expectation that you are helping bring a game to life that might not otherwise find its way into your home, much less the marketplace.  To the extent your trust is broken by us as publishers, you are left feeling betrayed and less willing to pledge your own hard-earned money in the future.  

We would just ask you to consider that there are also many companies out there that have fulfilled their campaigns and we hope your understandable growing distrust among such uncertainties doesn't lead you to stop backing campaigns completely.  Be judicial with your pledges but send a message with your choices that you will continue to support those campaigns and creators that you want to see future content from.  

We have made it a standard practice to always pay the factory immediately upon receiving the funds from the campaign and to treat those pledges as "not our money" until we have earned it by fulfilling those rewards.  We had our largest ever campaign with over $750k in pledges from over 5,700 backers last year for our latest Crokinole campaign.  The campaign did deliver late for a majority of backers but luckily the USA fulfillment was substantially completed in January and we didn't have to pay a penny in tariffs for the project coming into the US. 

One of the huge positives from this has been that we have never had to delay a project's fulfillment due to cash flow issues and we've never had to pull funds from a future campaign to pay for any prior campaigns.

Between Mayday and Imperial Publishing (Sleeve Kings) we have run 59 successful prior crowdfunding campaigns.  75,000 backers have pledged over $4.7 million dollars to our campaigns since our first campaigns in August of 2011.  With that many backers we have had some missteps and flat-out bad decisions on our part, but we have learned a lot and are more committed than ever to providing the best experience yet on our next campaign.  We keep a publicly available record of EVERY project we have run.  You can check them both any time HERE for Mayday and HERE for Sleeve Kings/Imperial.   To our knowledge, every single backer has either gotten a refund or their rewards, except in cases where backers ignored our emails and updates and never filled in their surveys over an extended period of time.   Here is what our backerkit backend shows for our 2024 Crokinole Campaign in terms of fulfilment as of April 18, 2025:

We still have 41 backers who pledged for $99 or more back in May 2024 that haven't replied to our emails or updates or filled out their surveys, so we don't even have their addresses yet.  After a certain amount of time these pledges become donations to the project as we can't just hold onto their rewards forever.  

It is also true that with our nearly 15,000 backers over 8 seasons of Crokinole that we have had some damaged or imperfect boards delivered to backers and that not all of those backers were happy with the resolution we were able to provide them.  Because those HUGE boards cost up to $60 in shipping in the USA and over 200,00 euros in shipping in the EU and elsewhere, shipping replacements isn't always possible.  We've given partial refunds and instructions on DIY instructions on how to fix board issues, but we have replaced over 2 dozen boards in the USA, reselling the imperfect boards on our website and sending replacements to backers.  But we have streamlined the process for handling those requests with this massive 2024 project with more customer service help and a new online form for capturing all the data and pictures of damage/defects upfront.

But we have been as transparent as possible on our campaigns and have stepped that up with our latest projects.  In fact we have posted 42 updates in the 46 weeks since that campaign ended,   We are committed to ensuring future projects will run better each time and hope to deliver better rewards and in a more timely manner than in our first 59 campaigns. 

We are committed to using the funds from future campaigns ON the production and fulfillment of those campaigns, just as we have always done.  For us, having no outstanding campaigns caught in this tariff mess has given us the freedom to move forward with new campaigns where almost no one else is.

A Brighter Future

We are in a strong financial position but we are going to have to raise the MSRP of our products to stay that way, once the existing, pre-tariff stock runs out.  But being in this strong position and having NO crowdfunding fulfillment coming from the factories at all means the path is clear for us to press forward while so many other publishers are pausing new projects or further delaying already badly delayed fulfillment.  

We would LOVE to have you consider backing our latest project launching in a couple of weeks.  On May 1, 2025 we are launching Lifeboats with an expected delivery time of August 2025.  We want this game to be available at GenCon and the files are 99% done for printing.  We've actually already paid a 50% deposit to Broadway who is both licensing the game to us and producing it at their sister factory.  We haven't just paid a 50% deposit on the royalties, but a 50% deposit on the production of the game too.  We believe we know how many copies we will need for the crowdfunding AND distribution and are ready to pull the trigger once the campaign is over.  We may need to up the number of copies, and we can do that if needed.  Are there still backers out there that will pledge in this environment?  We hope so.  

Click Here to Be Notified at Launch

And to address the tariffs, we have run the numbers even with the 145% tariff and we are sure we will be able to bring this game to market EVEN with the tariffs in place.  The MSRP of the game will be $50 (up from the $40 we had planned before the tariffs) but the Kickstarter pledge for the limited edition will be $40.  We are guaranteeing none of our US backers will pay more than what we are asking for on the campaign.  We will not hold the game until some nebulous future date when tariffs come down and we won't charge you a penny more even if tariffs go up.  We are able to do this because we believe the campaign will raise a lot of support and perhaps a lot of eyebrows.  

How can we do this?  Besides having already pre-paid for 50% of the production and licensing cost, we also have a strong financial position and own our own warehouse, so we will do our USA fulfillment in-house rather than paying an outside company a huge markup to do it for us.  We are taking a gamble that the tariffs will be gone by the time these ship to the USA sometime in June/July, but if not we will pay them.  If the tariffs are gone we will make much nicer profit for having gambled on this, but if not we will still turn enough profit to make this launch worthwhile.  

Our warehouse in Spanish Fork, UT

We also hope the community proves the growing skeptism wrong and shows up to back this amazing game.  We hope that will send a signal to other responsible creators to carefully look at their margins and pricing and perhaps consider launching a campaign too.  We want this industry to not just survive but thrive and we beleive we are in a position to lead the way forward.

Thank you for reading to the end here if you got this far, we want this industry to continue to grow and be stronger.  When the dust settles on all this change we hope the remaining publishers and backers will be wiser and stronger.