Trump's Tariff Chaos Crushes Board Game Makers: 'The U.S. Is Our Least Trustworthy Trading Partner'
The Supreme Court will hear a case next week challenging the legality of President Donald Trump's "emergency" tariffs.
Price Johnson isn't a fan of games of chance.
Unfortunately, his gaming business is now caught in a high-stakes contest where the outcome feels entirely out of his hands.
Cephalofair Games, where Johnson works as COO, prides itself on making games that limit randomness and reward players for making strategic decisions and planning ahead. The company's most successful game, the award-winning Gloomhaven, is a dungeon-crawling adventure that, unlike most, doesn't rely on dice to determine outcomes.
"We've eliminated a lot of the luck elements that exist in games like Dungeons and Dragons and in other role-playing games," he says. "In our games, strategy is everything."
Now, it won't be tumbling dice, but the nine justices at the U.S. Supreme Court who will determine the fate of Cephalofair Games—and many other American businesses—when they hear a case next week challenging the legality of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. That's not exactly like risking it all on one roll, but you can forgive Johnson for feeling like it is. The outcome of the case will set the conditions for the future of U.S. trade policy: stability or chaos.
"If the Supreme Court decides one person, the president, is allowed to flip the switch on tariffs overnight, every day, any day they want, that is going to create such a volatile and unstable and untrustworthy market," Johnson predicts. "We can't build a business around that. We can't plan for that."
Board game makers have been hit particularly hard by Trump's tariffs, which have raised the cost of importing just about everything. Cephalofair is based in California, but like many other businesses in the industry, Johnson's company relies on contractors in China and Vietnam to make the tokens, pawns, cards, and other physical elements of its games.
Manufacturing all those parts in the U.S. is not possible if game companies want their products to be competitively priced. With high tariffs in place, the costs compound quickly. Nathan McNair, the co-owner of Pandasaurus Games, broke down the math in a post on his company's website. The added cost of the tariffs makes every step more complicated, from design to sales, and can even change what games a company chooses to make in the first place. "This has not just squeezed our margin; this has substantially increased our risk," he concluded.
Trump's tariffs have already stung Cephalofair in several ways. The company has paid more than $144,000 in tariff-related costs this year, Johnson says, and has had to furlough some employees. The staff that remain, including him, have taken pay cuts. Given the uncertainty in their supply chains, Cephalofair has paused the development of some new games, which means less work for dozens of contractors—artists, designers, writers, testers, and so on. For games that were already in production when the tariffs hit, Cephalofair asked buyers to pay a fee to help cover the new import taxes. Other production runs have been delayed as Johnson and his colleagues roll the dice on the hope that the tariffs will be struck down or otherwise lowered.
"The U.S. is our least trustworthy trading partner right now—and I say that as an American," Johnson told Reason. "I can't trust what the policy is going to be tomorrow, let alone next week."
Case in point: When I spoke to Johnson on Wednesday afternoon, he was worried about a tariff increase that was supposed to hit this weekend, just days before Trump's tariff authority goes before the Supreme Court. Earlier this month, Trump threatened to raise the baseline tariff on imports from China to 130 percent, from 30 percent, starting on November 1.
If that tariff rate becomes reality, "that is effectively an absolute embargo," Johnson said. "We are not going to pay more to bring our product in than it costs to make it."
On Thursday night, as he returned from a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, Trump told reporters that the U.S. would now be lowering tariffs on imports from China. The details remain vague—Trump said he agreed to reduce some existing tariffs by 10 percentage points—and it would appear the 130 percent tariff threat is now off the table. China, in return, agreed not to suspend exports of rare earth minerals.
From Trump's perspective, surely, the threat of 130 percent tariffs was simply a negotiating position staked out in advance of his meeting with Xi and never meant as a serious policy. But that approach, which the president has deployed repeatedly this year, is causing huge headaches and material losses for businesses like Johnson's, which can't afford to risk the possibility of being hit with a massive tariff bill just because a shipment arrives at the wrong time.
Instead, those businesses will do what Johnson has done: Delay orders, slow production, and hope more stability emerges.
As a legal matter, the Supreme Court is being asked to determine the extent of the emergency executive powers that Trump has seized to impose tariffs. But the practical implications of this case spill out across all parts of the economy. In reality, the justices are being asked to decide whether the president should be allowed to disrupt supply chains for thousands of American businesses at a whim—even for reasons as silly as television advertisements that he dislikes.
That's really a policy question, one that's better left to Congress. Even though Congress has been unwilling to stand up to Trump's tariffs so far, there are small indications that could be changing. This week, the Senate passed resolutions terminating Trump's tariffs on imports from Canada and Brazil, and another that would end his so-called "reciprocal tariffs" on many other imports.
Johnson is hoping the Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariff authority, but he also knows this mess won't really be resolved until the legislative branch reasserts its proper authority over trade.
"There's clearly no plan with this administration," he says. "And that's why I believe that power over tariffs and power over taxation, that's supposed to be with our local elected representatives. We should have someone that we could go to and appeal to, whether they listen to us or not, we can say, 'hey, I'm down the street. This is my business. Please represent us.'"
