I think we have to look on the bright side of the death of Kickstarted board games.
My inbox is burning up from all the board game creators whose games I have kickstarted panicking about the new tariffs that will kill their profitability and likely their company. Steve Jackson Games posted a long letter about how they don’t know how they will continue with their business. Car companies are laying people off. It’s an economic disaster. Unemployment will spike. The economy is crashing.
We’re about to enter the techno-dystopia we’ve been reading about for years (Neuromancer, Snow Crash, so many others).
It’s fine! Democracy was just a crazy dream but dreams end, right?
It’s a new world. A world where high tech smugglers will get your game out of China for you – for a reasonable price. Underground night clubs where deals to get your “Goats of Lamentation – Kickstarter Edition” across the border from Shenzhen to Hong Kong and then into a fishing boat headed for the Port of Pismo Beach, where trucks painted matte black with no markings will haul it to a distribution center in Kansas.
You could probably make a board game out of that, but you’d have to make it out of sticks and bits of grass because it ain’t coming from China.
Will LLMs ever learn to spell?
Seriously, though. These past few years have been amazing for the indie gaming studios; so much creativity combined with cheap, high quality manufacturing and shipping. Hard to believe it’s all gone, so suddenly. Maybe the tariffs will be rolled back quickly, but Dr. Doom seems wedded to them.
A few years back, I was having a discussion with one of the people from Rock Manor Games that was having trouble getting their games out of China, as to why they just couldn’t make them domestically. He echoed what Steve Jackson wrote in his blog post; the capability just doesn’t exist in the US for the sort of small runs that indie creators need. It just doesn’t exist at all. Even if someone just decided to set it up in the US, the costs per unit would be ruinous, not to mention the years to get it all set up, and the certainty that the next president will just walk all this back anyway.
I think everyone is just going to hunker down and hope it all just goes away before too many businesses are destroyed. Congress could stop it, but Congress is already bought and paid for – same for the Supreme Court. Everyone has bent the knee to Dr. Doom.
One world under Doom.
