Chaosium statement about Tariffs - 4 April 2025

ANN ARBOR MI, 4 April 2025: By now everyone knows that the US president has announced new and substantially higher tariffs on a swathe of nations, including China.

Whatever your opinion of these policies, no one disagrees that this situation has created extreme disruption and uncertainty for tabletop games publishers as we try to print books and board games and get them to you.

Chaosium, as the importer, is required to pay tariffs out of our pocket. Even if we already paid for the production of books or board games in another country, we will need to pay a new, unanticipated – and potentially very large – cost when those books or board games enter the United States.

These tariffs are applied to the production cost, not the cost of the final goods. But even so, depending on margins, they are inevitably going to lead to substantially increased costs in the final price.

We think that transparency with you is the key to getting through this.

First, we will certainly need to raise the price of our books and board games. We simply cannot afford to absorb the cost of these additional tariffs. We wish it were otherwise, but that’s just the reality of the situation.

Second, this may result in delays. We need to look at potentially new manufacturing locations, new supply chains, etc. This may delay manufacturing of some anticipated products until we know how to deal with the changing environment.

Third, we also want to reiterate that we really do not have a clear picture yet. The situation is still chaotic and evolving: tariffs might get reduced or revoked (or even raised higher!), there might be special exemptions made for books and board games, and so on. We will closely monitor developments and remain agile in our plans. Together with our peers in the tabletop games community we're sharing ideas to help see our industry survive and thrive.

This will definitely be a hard situation to navigate, but we will communicate with you as much as we can to get us all through this challenging time. Thank you for your support.

— Chaosium Inc.