How are tariffs affecting American businesses?

Today on Civics 101, we answer listener questions about tariffs. And then, we look at how they've affected one American Industry. It's not a game, but these companies do make them, and they've been hit hard by President Trump's ever-changing tariff policies. NOTE - This episode was republished because of a technical issue . Click here to check out our 2024 episode on how tariffs work. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Capodice?

  What's the sort of thing we can say to like indicate that we're playing Anno 1800?

• 0:04Hannah McCarthy?

  You always get the cheat boxes first. I always forget about the cheat boxes.

• 0:09Nick Capodice?

  It makes it so you don't have to use artisans, but you can use workers to get

• 0:13Hannah McCarthy?

  I know what it does.

• 0:14Nick Capodice?

  Goods. They're just general goods.

• 0:15Hannah McCarthy?

  I know this game like the back of my hand. That's the only thing I forget every time. You need the boxes to win the game. You need the boxes for everything.

• 0:26Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nikita Deejay.

• 0:28Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 0:29Nick Capodice?

  And we have explained tariffs on the show recently. Please listen to our 101 on what tariffs are and how they work if you haven't. I got a link down there in the show notes. Does anyone click on the links in the show notes?

• 0:41Hannah McCarthy?

  Does anyone still wear a hat?

• 0:45Nick Capodice?

  We say it all the time.

• 0:46Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, we say it in almost every episode.

• 0:48Nick Capodice?

  I didn't even know what the word show notes meant. Everyone, it's the little thing. It's like the information about this episode. We call that the show notes. Now you're an insider.

• 0:57Hannah McCarthy?

  If you didn't know what it meant, how?

• 0:59Nick Capodice?

  How does all our audience know?

• 1:04Nick Capodice?

  Anyways, yeah, we are talking about tariffs again because they're changing all the time and we have gotten several listener questions about them since our recent tariffs episode. So first Hannah, I'm going to answer some listener questions and then we'll do a deep dive into how the recent tariffs are affecting one industry in particular, an industry we both love. Sound good?

• 1:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Sound good. Is this going to be like a price of milk kind of episode?

• 1:29Nick Capodice?

  Oh yeah, it's going to be one of those.

• 1:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, okay, cool.

• 1:31Nick Capodice?

  The price of milk. All right, Hannah, what do we got in the old question hopper, the old question basket?

• 1:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, first one, how much money has been raised by the tariffs since Donald Trump took office? And I think this one means like, how much money have the tariffs provided to the United States?

• 1:51Nick Capodice?

  Excellent. Yes, absolutely. It's good to have a question that's got a nice firm pat answer. From January 1st, 2025 to July 1st, 2025, and that's when we're taping this episode. The United States has collected $97 billion from tariffs. This is according to the US Treasury Department's daily treasury statements. This money was paid to the US government by American businesses that bought things from outside the country.

• 2:19Hannah McCarthy?

  And is that a lot? It sounds like a lot, but we have had tariffs for as long as we've been a nation. So how does that 97 billion compare to other years?

• 2:31Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, to compare the same stretch of time last year, 2024, during the Biden administration, the US had collected $58.3 billion in tariffs.

• 2:40Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so is 97 billion, is that like breaking a record?

• 2:44Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, not yet, but we're on track to break it. The current record is 2022 during the Joe Biden administration, we took in $102 billion over the whole year. So we're only halfway through the year, so we're probably gonna break it. By the way, another thing in the show notes, there is a wonderful tariff history tracker courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

• 3:06Hannah McCarthy?

  That's actually fascinating.

• 3:07Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and you can like see what we charged every year. It goes back to 1930. That year, we took about half a billion dolary dues. All right, give me the next one.

• 3:17Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, here we go. Where does the tariff money go once the government gets it? Originally, in the 1700s, the money funded the government. Who decided where that money went? Is it the same now? Does it bypass Congress? Lots of good questions there.

• 3:35Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, all in one email.

• 3:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Very thoughtful.

• 3:37Nick Capodice?

  Very thoughtful. Another pretty simple answer to this one, albeit with a nebulous caveat at the end, Hannah. The answer to where does this tariff money go is exactly the same as it's been since the 18th century. And I'm so glad our listener brought up the 1700s. And you know why, don't you, Hannah?

• 3:59Nick Capodice?

  I think I do have to be careful, Hannah. That's two carriage drops in one month. The tariff of 1789 was our very first piece of legislation as a country.

• 4:09Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, don't I know it, Nick. And with good reason. We had just won a war, we were pretty much broke, and we owed money all over town. And by town, I mean the world.

• 4:21Nick Capodice?

  France was basically chasing the US like Sally Mae "Chase Me" before my student loans. Live at the Comedy Cellar. Did I ever tell you the bit that my best friend and I used to fantasize about, like a revolution era stand-up comedy routine? I'd wear like a tricorn hat. Where are you from, sir? Oh, Fredericton. I hear there's a lot of taxation down in Fredericton, but not a lot of representation. Am I right, folks? Anyways, what's the deal with the food served on carriages these days?

• 4:50Hannah McCarthy?

  Where's Fredericton?

• 4:51Nick Capodice?

  I don't know. It's one of the 10 oldest towns in America.

• 4:58Nick Capodice?

  But seriously, folks, the tariff of 1789 was a sweeping 50 cents per ton of goods that came to America on foreign ships and 6 cents per ton on goods that came on American-owned ships. There were a few exceptions. There's one fun one tied to a certain trade good, near and dear to your neck of the woods, Hannah. Very low taxes on a certain good that you might say flooded the Boston economy.

• 5:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, Nick, is that a Great Molasses Flood joke? People died.

• 5:30Nick Capodice?

  So long ago. It was a sweet death. Oh. No, no.

• 5:35Hannah McCarthy?

  No, no. But yeah, we did need a lot of molasses in early America. It was not just for baked beans.

• 5:41Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it was for rum. And that is how the country funded itself. 80 to 90% of our federal revenue until the 1860s came from tariffs. But back to our listener question, where does that money go? It goes to the U.S. Treasury's general fund. It is the same place our federal income taxes go. And once it's there, it can be spent as Congress decides.

• 6:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Just to clarify, Congress spends the money from that fund.

• 6:11Nick Capodice?

  They do. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. This is the taxing and spending clause.

• 6:17Hannah McCarthy?

  And what was the caveat that you mentioned earlier?

• 6:19Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, the caveat is, is as we're taping this, the Senate is debating and voting on a massive budget bill, which may have passed in the time between taping and putting this out. I think it might have passed a couple hours ago.

• 6:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Wow.

• 6:32Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. So I can't say where the money is going specifically until I read the bill. It's 900 some odd pages, but I got a pretty good idea, Hannah.

• 6:43Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, one last question here. Who collects the tariffs?

• 6:47Nick Capodice?

  I love this one, Hannah. Let me lay out how the money gets into that treasury fund. So the business, or person, or company in the United States that is importing that good from the other country is called the importer of record. When we buy that thing, and it's put on a cargo ship in another country, and it's shipped here, when it arrives at that port in America, the person can't get it until they pay the tariff to the CBP. CBP, that stands for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency.

• 7:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Do they have like a book that tells them how much money to charge someone before that thing goes away? I'm sure they're not keeping the numbers in their head.

• 7:28Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, they use something called the harmonized tariff schedule. The CBP says to the importer, "You bought hand-cut lace from China." And they look at the chart, and they see what extra percentage is owed as a tariff.

• 7:41Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, but I imagine this can get a little tricky, right? The tariff percentages on different goods from different countries have vacillated wildly in the last few months.

• 7:52Nick Capodice?

  I think that's a bit of an understatement.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  We saw a spike earlier today in markets, for example, based on a rumor, an unfounded rumor, apparently, that Trump was going to potentially pause those tariffs. And then the administration said, "Never mind, we're not doing that." So you're seeing markets just incredibly jumpy.

• 8:11Nick Capodice?

  I also want to add, in April, after several changes to the tariffs, there was a glitch in the system, which meant that for a short period of time, nobody knew the correct amount to tax, and no taxes were collected at all. When this glitch happened, I saw an interview on CNBC. Jared Varonelli, he's the vice president of a U.S. sales and logistics firm, he said this quote, "Social media posts are not law on the pause and increase in tariffs. With the constant changes to the regulations, all customs brokers in our industry have a difficult task ahead of them."

• 8:46Hannah McCarthy?

  What if you buy something, it gets put on the boat, and then the tariff changes while the ship is making its way here?

• 8:53Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, that is a great question. Once the good leaves the factory, or wherever it's made in the other country, the tariff rate is set, right then. And this is specifically to prevent the cost going up or down while it's in transit. This is called an "on-the-water" clause.

• 9:09Hannah McCarthy?

  One last thing, when you are at the port and paying the tariff, do you, do you just write the customs person a check? No, seriously.

• 9:20Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm good for it, I swear.

• 9:22Hannah McCarthy?

  No, not an IOU.

• 9:24Nick Capodice?

  A marker, my marker's good in this town. Most of the time, Hannah, you get this all set before the good ships. And when the goods are at the port, people usually do a bank transfer. And they want you to do it quick. They don't want these ports clogged up with stuff like a storage unit and we-hawking.

• 9:43Nick Capodice?

  Now we've got the logistics out of the way. Time to talk about what these recent tariffs are actually doing when it comes to American businesses. One kind of business in particular. But first, we gotta take a quick break.

• 9:55Hannah McCarthy?

  But before that break, if you like us, leave us a review. You can do it pretty much on whatever app you are listening to this current episode on. It is a tremendous way to let other people know that our show exists, and ideally that you like it, and it helps us out a lot. Thank you.

• 10:14Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called "data brokers" whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers.

• 10:38Nick Capodice?

  Sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background. You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 11:19Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. You're listening to Civics 101 and today we are talking tariffs again.

• 11:24Nick Capodice?

  Again.

• 11:29Nick Capodice?

  Our last tariff episode was before they had been enacted. So this time I wanted a real nuts and bolts example of how tariffs affect an industry. One industry in particular. Dollars and cents, how much money the US government is collecting and what the new tariffs are doing to American companies. So I decided to ask someone who makes just about my favorite product in the world.

• 11:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Black licorice.

• 11:59Hannah McCarthy?

  You shouldn't eat too much, Nick. It's not good for you.

• 12:02Nick Capodice?

  It's not good for the ticker.

• 12:04Hannah McCarthy?

  This is not, this is not a sugar comment, everybody.

• 12:06Nick Capodice?

  No, no, no, no.

• 12:06Hannah McCarthy?

  It can be rough on the heart.

• 12:10Nick Capodice?

  The good we're talking about is something near and dear to both Hannah and my hearts.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Kevin gave me a little bit of your background, so that's exciting. But what, what's, what sort of gamer are you actually?

• 12:22Nick Capodice?

  This is Jason Matthews.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Hi, my name is Jason Matthews. I'm a game designer. I designed Twilight Struggle. I work with Fort Circle Games as well as a number of other publishers.

• 12:32Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, Twilight Struggle.

• 12:33Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Hannah McCarthy?

  That ranked number one on a little website called Board Game Geek for years.

• 12:39Nick Capodice?

  Years. And Jason also made a game called 1960: The Making of a President, where one player is Nixon and the other is JFK. Do you remember that one?

• 12:47Hannah McCarthy?

  I remember that very well. I remember you were playing Nixon and I don't. I don't think I have ever gotten so anxious playing a board game.

• 12:56Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it's a wonderful game. It is a stressful game. So I was tired of hypothetical cost of things in our episodes, so I wanted to get a dollar by dollar breakdown. So I called Jason up because he has been speaking publicly about the recent tariffs and their effect on the board game industry.

• 13:16Hannah McCarthy?

  And when did you talk to him?

• 13:18Nick Capodice?

  This was May 6th, 2025.

• 13:21Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, okay. So this is when the tariffs specifically on anything coming from China were, to my memory, fairly significant.

• 13:30Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Absolutely, David. These numbers just keep changing, as you know. And what we've just confirmed from the White House is that the new total rate against China is now 145% tariff so far this time. And just to make it clear, if I am buying sneakers made in China to sell in my local Boston store, and there is a 145% tariff on all goods from China, as there was in May, if those sneakers cost me $5,000, now I would have to pay $7,250 to acquire them.

• 14:04Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely. And it's up to you, Hannah. It's up to you how you want to make up all that extra cash. Maybe you could, I don't know, raise the cost of shoes at your store.

• 14:15Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, but the tariffs on goods from China are not 145% right now, right? What are they?

• 14:24Nick Capodice?

  Okay, here we go. What are and what were the tariffs on goods? Cue that jangly piano. February 1st, President Trump signs an executive order putting 10% tariffs on all goods from China, 25% on all goods from Canada and Mexico. Two days later, he issued a 30-day pause on the Canada-Mexico one. March 4th, that pause ended. He doubled China to 20%. I'm skipping a bunch of these because there is a lot. March 24th, he announces a 25% tariff on any imports from countries that buy oil or gas from Venezuela, which we in America do, by the way. April 2nd, announces the quote reciprocal tariffs.

• 15:04Nick Capodice?

  This is a 10% baseline on every country in the world and then more depending on a formula with the exception of 11 nations, including the aforesaid Canada and Mexico because they have their own situation, but also Russia, North Korea, the Vatican, Cuba, and others. China then raises its tariffs and then Trump raises them back. And by April 10th, the US has a 145% tariff on anything coming from China. The next day, Donald Trump announces there's an exception for electronics and electronics only, not sneakers, not board games. I then interview Jason. Six days later, the president announces there is a 90-day pause on those tariffs. And that is maybe half of what happened.

• 15:49Nick Capodice?

  I didn't even get into automobiles or Madagascar vanilla or European wine or American whiskey. And I'm going to take a deep breath. Here we go.

• 15:55Hannah McCarthy?

  I thought that was pretty well done.

• 15:59Nick Capodice?

  Thank you.

• 16:00Hannah McCarthy?

  But you didn't say what the tariffs are right now.

• 16:03Nick Capodice?

  I didn't.

• 16:04Hannah McCarthy?

  No.

• 16:05Nick Capodice?

  Sorry. The most up-to-date figure that I could find today was from a website called chinabriefing.com. They have a quote on their website that says, "Trade relations between the US and China are quote, 'highly complex, shaped by a tangled web of tariffs that have been imposed, adjusted, revoked, and reinstated going back to 2018,' end quote." This website lists the current tariff on goods from China at 55%. This is from the 10% baseline tariff and then a 20% fentanyl tariff and an additional 25% tariff on most goods made in China.

• 16:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Can you clarify what is meant by a fentanyl tariff?

• 16:46Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I'm going to just quote what a White House official said. This additional 20% is because of punitive measures that President Trump has imposed on China, Mexico, and Canada, associated with President Trump's accusation that those three countries facilitate the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

• 17:04Hannah McCarthy?

  All right.

• 17:05Nick Capodice?

  Okay.

• 17:06Hannah McCarthy?

  And again, we're talking about a 55% tariff, but that number could change again.

• 17:11Nick Capodice?

  It could change while we're recording these words.

• 17:13Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so back to board games. How are the tariffs affecting them, that industry specifically?

• 17:21Nick Capodice?

  All right, here's Jason again.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  The way a board game publishing works is that there are basically two models. Uh, one is direct sales. So if I, for instance, the company I work with, Fort Circle, most of their games are direct sales. They sell through their website. People go directly to them, so there's no middleman. But the vast majority are going through the retail sales process. So that means right off the top, you can lop 40% off of whatever a board game's MSRP, the, the standard price is.

• 18:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Real quick, what is MSRP?

• 18:02Nick Capodice?

  That is the manufacturer's suggested retail price. Stores can charge more or less than the MSRP, but it is a very good guide to go off of.

• 18:12Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so the retailer, let's say a local board game store, they take about 40% of what the person purchasing the game pays them for it. 40% of the money.

• 18:23Nick Capodice?

  Yes.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  And then inside the rest of that, the publisher has to pay an artist, a designer, possibly a developer, and absolutely the person making the game. The company that makes the game, usually a production cost, uh, is somewhere between 13 and 17% of the MSRP. So it's a significant portion of the cost of a board game, but it's nowhere close to the majority. It's not where most of the money is made, but it is, you know, it, it's noticeable when you've taken that 13% and doubled it, or 250% increase of that cost.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Suddenly now, it doesn't really make very much sense to publish a board game.

• 19:12Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm still a little shaky on the numbers here.

• 19:15Nick Capodice?

  I was to, so I figured the best way to wrap our brains around this was to imagine that we made a game.

• 19:23Hannah McCarthy?

  We could do it.

• 19:24Nick Capodice?

  We could. I think we could. And just to make it simple, let's say we designed a game called Civics 1.0 Win.

• 19:33Nick Capodice?

  Wanna win?

• 19:34Hannah McCarthy?

  I don't know about winning when it comes to civics, you know? Unless it's like a win-win situation. Um, maybe it's a cooperative game.

• 19:42Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, wanna we all win. Civics wanna we all win.

• 19:46Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, but carry on.

• 19:47Nick Capodice?

  Okay, okay. So Hannah, you and I come up with the idea, but we need a for-real game designer to do the rules and design the board and all that stuff. And we are gonna sell it in stores.

• 19:58Hannah McCarthy?

  How many do we make? Like, how many games?

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Normally, uh, kind of a middling print run would be about 20,000.

• 20:05Hannah McCarthy?

  20,000 copies, all right.

• 20:06Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. So first off, Hannah, nobody's gonna buy this game unless it looks pretty cool. So we have to hire an artist.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  So, uh, we're doing a 20,000 print run for our game. And it's going to cost us somewhere, let's say around $3,000 upfront for the art. And then you might pay an upfront kind of signing bonus for the game designer to kind of help pay for the prototyping and whatnot. And that'll usually be somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. So upfront costs, you're somewhere in that $7,000 range.

• 20:44Hannah McCarthy?

  As in, you and I have to pay seven grand just to get started?

• 20:48Nick Capodice?

  Just to get started, and we have a long way to go.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  And then you have to contract with your printing house. This is going to run somewhere short of 20% of the MSRP. The more components, the larger the game, obviously, the more expensive that all of that gets.

• 21:07Hannah McCarthy?

  And the printing of the game, that happens in China?

• 21:11Nick Capodice?

  Yes, and more on that later, I promise. I do imagine some of our listeners are like, why don't people print the games in other countries or the US? I swear, I'm gonna get to that.

• 21:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Can we give a hypothetical MSRP for this game so we know how much we are going to make?

• 21:26Nick Capodice?

  Sure. Uh, I suggested $49.95. I was gonna make it 50, but you know.

• 21:31Hannah McCarthy?

  It's pricey game.

• 21:33Nick Capodice?

  What? What? But $49.95 is what somebody pays to buy Civics 1.0 Win in a store.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  So at $49.95, we can say that this is gonna cost probably about $7.50 a game to make. After you have made it, then you have to ship it back to the United States, and that will be an additional cost. Normally, if you're in a game of this size where you've got 20,000 units, you're gonna be able to get a container. These days, you can get partial containers also. So at this very second, because of the trade interruption between the United States and China, containers are a bit cheaper than they were previously. So let's say you can do that for $10,000 or thereabouts.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  With 20,000 units, you also have to pay for storage. You're obviously not just putting these in your garage. So you have to ship to a warehouse. Costs for shipping to a warehouse are additional to the costs to get it from China to the United States.

• 22:40Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so you mentioned that Customs doesn't want things lying around at ports waiting to be collected. This is why it's gotta go from the port to a warehouse.

• 22:49Nick Capodice?

  Exactly.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Normally, you're going to try and pick a central location at the warehouse so that your shipping to individual retailers or to individual customers is less expensive. So a lot of these are located in Tennessee and whatnot. If you go the retail and distribution route, then you'll have a bunch of copies of the game sent directly to the distributor, and he will handle your retail outlet shipping and whatnot. After all of that, if you're going through retail, you get to lop off 40% of the cost for the retail and distribution percentage. And now, finally, you try and make some profit out of whatever you've done.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  I'm guessing you're gonna get about $15 out of that, if you're lucky.

• 23:39Hannah McCarthy?

  $15, that's what we get for a $50 game.

• 23:42Nick Capodice?

  Yep, and that was in the pre-tariff world. When I interviewed Jason, there was a trade battle going on between the US and China, where a game publisher would pay twice as much to get it to the United States.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  And so now your $15 profit on your $49 game is down to $7.50. Now, if you are a capitalist and you're interested in making money, is that a rate of return that you're really interested in? Can you make money, a lot more money, a lot easier, without all of these risks and uncertainties? Absolutely. So now, what are you doing? Like, what's the point?

• 24:32Nick Capodice?

  And look, we know a lot of board game designers. I think it's safe for me, Hannah, to say that nobody really gets super rich from making board games. I mean, of course, yes, there are a handful of outliers, some really successful games, but it's just not something people do only for the money. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

• 24:53Hannah McCarthy?

  So what is stopping game publishers from moving production somewhere besides China?

• 24:59Speaker 03

  It's a very hard business case to make for anybody. So why are they gonna do it? Which is not to say no one is going to do it. I'm just saying that you have to have a business model that overcomes these prima facie kind of questions. And if you're already a printer and a successful printer, then maybe relocating a factory to a place with a lower tariff rate for the United States makes perfect sense. Or you can expand your existing facility in Poland or Germany or wherever you are. But the idea that you are going to plop down a new board game-making facility in Wisconsin, very, very unlikely.

• 25:43Nick Capodice?

  Jason told me a story about some companies that had tried to print in the United States, and it was not profitable, and the quality was nowhere near as good. The US and China have a rich production history, going back decades when it comes to board games, more years for other things. Factories do this tremendously well. According to board game publishers, it's not about paying workers less in another country. It is about maintaining a long-developed production ecosystem.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  I don't know. If you haven't ever played a war game, most of them come with counters with all these detailed little bits of information on them. Well, printing that precisely on a counter turns out to be a technical expertise that a lot of people don't have, including some European printers who, you know, do board games otherwise. The Chinese have mastered it, and it's not, it's not a question of the Chinese being cheaper. It's not a labor question. It's a technical expertise, coupled with, of course, this kind of investment in manufacturing equipment, printing equipment that most American printers just haven't made.

• 26:51Hannah McCarthy?

  So what is all of this actually doing to the board game industry?

• 26:57Nick Capodice?

  Since I had this conversation with Jason, several prominent board game publishers have folded. One of the largest online board game retailers, Boardlandia, they also closed up shop. In addition, a handful of other board game publishers have filed a lawsuit. They are suing. The exact name of the case is Princess Awesome and Stone Mayor Games et al. versus Customs, which has been filed in the Court of International Trade.

• 27:24Nick Capodice?

  So, to answer your question, I asked Jason, what could all of this do to the industry we love so much?

• 27:31Speaker 03

  The industry, well, first of all, of course, it's being damaged. Some people are in marginal positions in the first place, and they simply don't have the capital to make the adjustments quickly enough to save themselves. American distribution was already in trouble. Some retail is already in trouble. There's practically a new announcement every day, and has been since the tariffs have come out. And then we get back into this, okay, I'm a capitalist. I'm trying to make money. Am I going to invest multi millions of dollars into printing presses made in Germany for an industry with low margins in the first place?

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Who I can't tell if the tariffs that are being enacted today are still going to be around three years from now, when I might be able to recover the costs of buying these machines. It just puts all of this negative pressure on doing the exact thing that the president suggests that he wants to do, which is bring back manufacturing to the United States.

• 28:41Nick Capodice?

  Your turn, Hannah. Take those bicycles, put them on that boat.

• 28:46Hannah McCarthy?

  What am I supposed to do without the boxes?

• 28:53Nick Capodice?

  That is tariffs and specifically tariffs in board games. This episode is made by me, Nikita Padij with you, Hannah McCarthy. What a joy. Thank you. Christina Phillips is our senior producer, Marina Hanke, our producer, and Rebecca Lavoy, our executive producer. While we were recording this, we were playing Anno 1800, the board game designed by Martin Wallace and published by Cosmos Games. They didn't pay us anything to say that. They didn't give us a free game. We just love it and it's about making stuff and trading it on chips. So I thought it was apropos, right?

• 29:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Right.

• 29:20Nick Capodice?

  Music in this episode by Epidemic Sound and the artist who I hope never puts a tariff on his crunchy beats, Chris Zabriski. Civic 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.