Cards Against Humanity (CAH) this week announced its newest stunt: a “Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke” edition that ditches the game’s rules and adds explanatory notes to each card in the box. This makes the project “informational material” rather than a “game,” and therefore CAH can avoid import tariffs. All profits from the one-off project will be donated to the American Library Association to fight censorship.
While a clever way to stick it to Trump, this week’s news did raise a question I’ve heard from several readers: If CAH is this upset about the whiplash-inducing tariff rates, which are added and then removed with almost no warning, why doesn’t it print the game in the US? I mean, it’s just a box of cards! How hard can it be?
In the board game space, designers have wrestled with this question for years. While many US-based designers would like to work with local manufacturers, in reality, it’s often not possible. Complex board games today may feature cardboard creations like constructible dice towers, custom-shaped and painted wooden markers, multicolored jewel pieces, plastic bits of nearly every possible variety, custom-printed component bags, molded miniatures, cards in multiple sizes, metallic coins, dry-erase boards, fancy box inserts, massive dual-sided playing boards, and long manuals. The only manufacturers capable of doing all this work are generally in China or central Europe (Germany still has good manufacturing, and there are also sites in Poland and the Czech Republic).
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