Today’s project update is dedicated to bringing awareness to the tariff crisis happening right now in the tabletop games industry.

(Mini Update: Wave 3-Gloomhaven(2E) factory freight pickups begin this week for Asia, UK, and EU!)

While this is not intended to be a politically partisan post, tariffs are implemented by elected politicians (constitutionally by Congress, but in this case by emergency claims and Executive Order of the President) so it will inevitably be political in nature, but from the agnostic perspective of a small business operator.

Regular updates will resume in 2 weeks, but we felt it necessary to explain the landscape as we march towards unknown and hard decisions across our entire company, slate of projects, and our personal lives.

Thank you for your time, understanding, and support over all these years. We intend to fight like hell and utilize every tool at our disposal to maintain our obligations to our backers, our employees, and our families.

Right now, that future is being made incredibly unpredictable.

Our next steps are uncertain and being forced to change daily.
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Hello Everyone,

This is Price Johnson, COO of Cephalofair Games. I asked the team to let me take lead on this week’s update so I can give all our incredibly passionate and patient backers an update on the situation currently unfolding in the tabletop games industry.

Speaking bluntly, our industry, our jobs, and our projects are under attack by volatile, and self-inflicted, U.S. trade policy. Our manufacturing costs in the last two months have seen an increase of 104% due to U.S. tariffs.

(See below for a more thorough explanation of how tariffs work.)

The impact that 104% tariffs will have on our industry, and our company, are nothing short of devastating and are already having immediate consequences that will be felt knowingly and unknowingly by everyone who enjoys this industry - from the hobbyist, the retail store owner, the publisher, and ultimately our communities.

But don’t just take my word for it. 
Here is what the industry, and our peers, have been feeling as well:

Q. What is happening?

The U.S. has imposed blanket tariffs (meaning broad & general, not strategically targeted goods) on ALL imports from a multitude of international countries - most notably in our situation: China, where the majority of the tabletop games industry manufacture our games.

This is leading to mass and widescale manufacturing, pricing, and inventory concerns as most products have had their profit margins all but eliminated.


Q. What is an import tariff?

An import tariff is a tax on businesses bringing goods into a country, - in our case, the United States. It is charged against the cost of goods of our product (AKA how much we pay our manufacturer for the final product). This means it has a DIRECT impact on our costs as a U.S. Business, how much we have to charge customers, retailers, distributors, etc.


Q. What tariffs have been put on board games?

Prior to this administration = 0% on board games

A Brief Timeline:
February 1st = 0% → 10% tariffs (link)
March 4th = 10% → 20% (link)
April 2nd = 20% → 54% (link)
April 7th = We are being TOLD 54% may increase to 104% (link)
April 8th = 54% → 104% (link)

Bringing this home: from the time Gloomhaven went into production our cost of goods has risen 104%.

For example, if a game costs $10 to produce, that company must pay the U.S. government an invoice for $10.40 on top, meaning the cost is now really $20.40 total.

“Yeah but the game is still $50, so you have lots of profit to work with”

Not really, no. To make games viable for nationwide distribution in retail stores (where most of our sales occur) publishers traditionally need to apply a x5 to x7 multiplier to our cost of goods to make wholesale pricing discounts viable and still provide us with a razor thin margin in which to cover additional costs and overhead such as freight, warehousing, staffing, product development, designer royalties, reprints, etc.

So that $50 game is really, typically, being sold at wholesale for $20, meaning a profit margin is gone.

If 54% or 104% tariffs hold and we don’t see reverse steps taken, this will all but eliminate our wholesale business as we know it today leading to some incredibly hard and scary choices to make.

P.S. Gloomhaven & Frosthaven cost considerably more than $10 to manufacture...





Q. Why is this a problem?

1. Domestic manufacturing does not exist for the products we make. Nor do many of the materials. I wish they were. I like having my product when it’s ready and not having to depend on a 30-45 day buffer between manufacturing and ocean freight.  

The reality is that China has been our industry’s gold standard for quality for decades, and continues leading the way in innovative new processes, materials, and capabilities. I’ve visited our facilities in person. I meet with our teams multiple times per year.  We can bid a project with well over two dozen reputable and specialized board game manufacturers internationally on a new project. We don’t have anything that resembles that level of availability, competition, or experience here in the United States that could support our products, let alone those of our entire industry. 

2. Suddenly punishing foreign manufacturing before standing a roadmap or solutions for building domestic options is backwards and will not lead to anything close to overnight manufacturing options. Especially when machinery, materials, raw goods, would all be subject to 104% import taxes as well. The cost has literally never been higher for a company/entity to consider such investments. 

3. Publishers must know their definitive costs in order to calculate retail pricing. When tariffs are in flux, our pricing is in flux. Meaning we cannot responsibly produce, market, and sell our games. If we do, we’re having to plan and mitigate around unknown cost increases, and that comes at a cost to ourselves and our customers.

4. Publishers who have already raised funds via crowdfunding did not account for tariffs. These were not in place, nor was there any guidance ahead of the last few months as to what tariffs might look like. I can guarantee none of my publishing peers anticipated anything close to the 104% implemented this week.

5. Board games that ARE capable of being made ARE going to get more expensive.

6. Your favorite publishers will be canceling, delaying, or stalling exciting projects.

7. Many publishers/retailers will close their doors due to financial insolvency. Many others will have to make hard staffing choices, furloughs, layoffs, etc.





Q. Doesn’t China pay the tariffs?

No. We do. The U.S. business who produces internationally and imports for domestic sales. We don’t import into China, so China raising their tariff rates against the U.S. are effectively meaningless for our business operations.

We have approximately $1.2M in product produced and awaiting shipment from China currently. The United States generally accounts for ~60-65% of our business. If we shipped what we'd normally be allocating to the U.S. - we'd be looking at a U.S. tax bill of ~$800k+ once it lands at port and before we even start making any new sales (slower sales, at new higher prices.


Q. What does this mean for Gloomhaven: Grand Festival Projects?

Honestly, we’re still analyzing this and it will take us some more time to solve fully.

We do know this is already meaning some really hard decisions for Cephalofair in terms of release schedules, fulfillment timelines, project costs, staffing considerations, conventions, contracts, budgets, and more.

As you are likely aware, there are three Cephalofair projects due for fulfillment. One of which (Gloomhaven) has already been mass manufactured and was due to start shipping this week, and two of which are in pre-production and development (RPG & Miniatures).

2025 has yet to provide us with a stable and known playing field for what lies ahead. It is hard to “plan a journey” when the “price of travel” keeps going up monthly, weekly, daily, without warning and without much perceived rationale. 

Ultimately, we take our obligation of delivering on crowdfunding projects very seriously and have a track record of delivering (development delays aside) 100% of our projects to date. Currently, our top priority is to uphold that promise and track record by protecting your backer investment to the best of our abilities - fighting as hard as we can against obstacles, interference, and sometimes the occasional global pandemic or trade war.
 

Q. What can YOU do to help?

Contact your elected officials:
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Support your favorite publishers, favorite local game stores, and creators however you can. 

Understand that indie publishers, first time publishers, and crowdfunding publishers (like us) that funded prior to tariffs are hurting the most, and have the most difficult path forward.


~THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT & UNDERSTANDING~

On behalf of the entire Cephalofair Team, and so so many of our publishing peers:

Thank you for the opportunity to shed light on this giant obstacle in front of tabletop at this time. Our backers - YOU - helped build this company, our games, and continue to make this industry thrive as a whole. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we pull together as an industry to weather this storm.

We'll be back in two weeks with regular project updates and next steps being taken - until then be well and enjoy some games!

Price Johnson
Chief Operating Officer
Cephalofair Games

Good day! We've got plenty to update you on across all projects, so let's get to it!

Getting all the production issues squared away with the manufacturer took longer than we would have liked, but at this point, we are satisfied with what we have seen and have given the go-ahead to get everything assembled and shipped out, which is great news! The factory is crunching the numbers on when we'll be able to get everything on the water as we speak, so we don't have dates yet, but we'll keep you informed when we do!

Over the last month we've seen significantly more back-and-forth with our miniature factory as we make some serious progress through pre-production, especially on the Gloomhaven and Frosthaven summon sets, which saw the most momentum. We really appreciate their increased focus and are doing our absolute best to capitalize on that focus, replying quickly and thoroughly.

Speaking of summonable creatures, these summon miniatures are so full of character and variety. It's exciting to think about how summons started as generic tokens, eventually got standees in Frosthaven and the new re-release of Gloomhaven, and now they’ll be miniatures!

And check out that Elder Drake, one of our very few multi-hex miniatures!

From Danielle:

Hello mercenaries! The past couple of weeks the team has been pouring through the RPG book’s layout and leaving comments about anything from art, design, visual impact, readability, and content. The goal is to catch anything at this stage that might need further clarification, a graphic to go along with it to enhance understanding, or reorganization to present the material in the best way possible. It’s an exciting time for me, as it means we’ve hit a pretty important milestone of first proof. This stage is sometimes deceiving. You think the book is almost done, but really, there’s a lot of little design tweaks that can take some time to implement. They may seem small, or even insignificant if I were to enumerate them here, but they make a huge impact on the final product and are worth doing.

That said, this stage of the project doesn’t always have flashy images or cool things to show you, so instead I’m going to share a snippet of setting text to tide you over. This does come in the form of a layout image so you can see how some of the design elements are coming together.

                                        

In other news, Frosthaven Digital was announced last week, in case you missed it. Snapshot Games has been working on this for more than two years, and I'm excited to see it come to fruition.  They've made a faithful port of the board game that looks great and plays snappy!



It'll be going into early access soon and you can wishlist it here.

We're very happy to have Gloomhaven moving again, and we have some more important updates coming down the pipe. Things are moving, so I'll catch you next time with the latest news!

Good day! We're going to have a small update today. Basically, we are in the middle of a lot of things with squaring away the Gloomhaven re-production, proofing the RPG book, and approving miniatures for the miniatures project, and don't really have any more solid news on any of them.

We're very busy behind the scenes, but, yeah, we need to take a pass on this week's update. We'll have more substantial news to report in the future, so until then, stay cool, and I'll catch you next time!

Good day! Thank you for all your RPG questions following the last update! Danielle has compiled a list of questions and answers for you to read through below.

Other than that, we've got minor updates on Gloomhaven production and miniatures for. A lot of the team is out at GAMA, so it's a bit of a slow week, but let's get to it!

We continue to work with our manufacturing partners to improve the quality of the game’s components. We’ve been consistently in contact with the factory to determine solutions for the problems we’ve seen. The folks at the factory have been working as quickly as they can to offer and test potential solutions. At the moment we are not able to share an updated timeline, but we expect we’ll be able to soon.

We have begun our review of a new batch of physical miniature proofs. We can’t wait to finish an in-depth review of them and share our findings with you! Look for this in the next update.

From Danielle:

Thanks for asking questions after the last update. I’ve tried my best to answer each question and provide any additional information that I felt was pertinent to help with context. I aggregated some of the similar questions, so I don’t always have the exact questions from each person. If I somehow missed your question, let us know!

What kind of resources will be available for GMs, and how beginner friendly is the game to GM?
(This question was not phrased this way exactly, but I figured this is the gist of the question, and it’s better to answer this than each specific inline question.)

We’ve tried hard to create an easy to understand and approachable set of chapters for the GM. I’ll admit the game has quite a bit of complexity tied into it, and familiarity with the board game does give you a bit of a leg up, but it might prove to set some expectations that we can’t meet.

We’ve tried to break everything out by situation (combat vs. social vs. environmental or puzzles) and give strong guidelines on how to utilize these elements individually and together. We have a strong GM chapter that guides you through planning encounters, and a bestiary full of monsters each with stats at all campaign levels (just like in the board game). Because antagonists work similarly to the player’s mercenaries, but controlled by the GM, we don’t have ability decks for them. We have provided a list of actions you can choose for them along with the initiatives you can use them at, and the GM chooses how fast they act while the players are choosing which Skills they are using each round. Everything you need to know about each antagonist is provided in the book, and because you’re unlikely to be using them at more than a single campaign level, it should be easy to jot down their stats and pertinent abilities when preparing for your encounter. As for health or status trackers, you can easily use your board game components, pen and paper, or any other tracking system that works best for you.

Where the GM chapter gives a lot of broad advice, the introductory adventure gives lots of detailed information about how to set up scenes, what is going on in each situation, how NPCs will react, and where to go next depending on what the mercenaries do. We also provide some GM notes and advice on how to keep the action moving along if the players get stumped.

Everything you need to know about Gloomhaven, its relevant history, and details that you might have missed from playing the board game are covered in the RPG. If you weren’t aware before, the Gloomhaven RPG is filled with Gloomhaven 2e spoilers! We did choose a “canon” ending for the Gloomhaven scenario, the events of which happened about 6 months in game time before the setting of the RPG. We expanded the lore from the board games, taking into account lore established through our other board games (such as Jaws of the Lion, Frosthaven, and even Buttons & Bugs). We also give brief coverage to locations beyond Gloomhaven, such as the valrath lands to the south, and the continent to the east, where the orchids and quatryls hail from.

We are conscientious that powerful items available for purchase early in a campaign can make a game feel unbalanced. In an RPG, there’s no reason shops in Gloomhaven wouldn’t have rarer items available immediately, but that doesn’t mean lower level mercenaries can purchase them. We use a combination of item cost, item rarity, and the mercenary company’s level to help mitigate what can or cannot be purchased, rather than using a prosperity level.

We don’t really want to limit ancestry or class choices to players. Ancestries make perfect sense to mix and match, or have an entire party composed of a single ancestry. For classes, that becomes a little less straightforward. There are 16 different classes available and they all fulfill a different niche and use case. Having two people playing the same class could easily lead to spotlight stealing or one player feeling second class compared to their counterpart. While you can absolutely do it, we suggest that if you do make two characters with the same class, that you make a second character of a different class and never have both characters of the same class go on the same missions together.

This was a series of specific questions, but I think it’s best to answer it all at once. We plan to sell as many individual components as make sense for players to pick up for their games. That said, the deluxe version of the game will have its own cool little (as if anything we make is little) storage box for all the cards and decks, and you’ll be getting one of everything and enough modifier cards for 1 GM and 4 players. But everything else will come packaged likely in tuck boxes (but it’s still too early to know for sure). We plan to sell modifier card decks, class ability cards and perks bundled together, and some combination of ancestry cards. We’re still working on how to bundle all these things together for both ease of access and to not have 100-million SKUs floating around for retailers to track down.

Beyond that, we do have plans for game supplements that will be forthcoming once we get the RPG out into the world. I can’t be too specific about what those will look like, but we want to support the RPG as a line, not just a one-and-done novelty.

We’re still working on what this will look like in specific, but we do plan to have some guidelines for community created content, community provided webtools, etc. Our priorities are the books and starter set, but rest assured that we will have more information in coming updates about community tools.

                                                 

And that's about it for what we have to share now, so I'll catch you next time!

Good day! We appreciate all the support on the previous update. It was a rough decision to have to make, but I'm glad we can agree that when you have to choose between getting things done correctly or getting them done quickly, doing it right is more important. It had become clear that shipping these out before Lunar New Year would mean sacrificing quality, and that wasn’t acceptable to us.

We don't have extensive updates on the situation yet, given the tail end of the new year, but we'll get into what we do have below.

We are starting up communication with the factory again after the Lunar New Year, and the general plan is to disassemble the copies that were produced, salvage the parts that are acceptable, and reproduce everything that isn't. We were informed that they should be able to start shipping these reworked copies out at the end of the month, but, again, we'd prefer to do things right rather than fast, so we'll be taking whatever time is necessary to review the new assembly and make sure everything is acceptable. We'll keep you informed of the progress in future updates.

On this project as well we'd like to welcome back our production partners from Lunar New Year as we jump back into miniature modifications and production review. Depicted above are a smattering of miniatures including monsters, bosses, and summonable allies. Part of our design process is making sure miniatures are dynamic and to scale, but also remain manageable and able to be maneuvered around a busy game board. To this point, all miniatures share the same base size (25mm), and we do our best to make sure that any projections on the miniature (arms, legs, tails, weapons) don't stick TOO far outside a standard Gloomhaven map tile hex. We also make sure that we're taking into consideration monster group sizes.

We'll be previewing these miniatures throughout this year at various conventions, so if you stop by the Cephalofair booth, be sure to get a look for yourself!

We’re still working on layout for the RPG. It’s going slower than I like, but we’re making steady progress. I should be sending the first half of the book to the team for proofing in the next day or two, and then the rest of the book should follow shortly after that. I really wanted to be able to update today that the whole thing was in proofing, but alas, layout is not a simple or fast process.

Since we’re doing a lot of “this is still in layout” updates, I’d like to maybe do a different kind of update next time. If you want to submit questions about the RPG, I’ll try to answer them in our next update as a little Q&A. Please keep questions to things I can reasonably answer, such as lore or mechanical items or processes on how we make our games.

Until next time, here’s some art by Ed Bourelle for you to feast on!

                                       

In other news, our sales and marketing team will be at the GAMA Trade Show next weekend, and we look forward to connecting with our retail partners out there!

I'll catch you next time with more news on Gloomhaven production!