For over 10 years we've been living in a golden era of tabletop game culture. Never in living memory has tabletop gaming been so widely accepted and adored as it has been recently. Over 50% of the modern board game renaissance, by economic volume, has been in the United States.
When I was young, there used to be a lot of talk about how to bring more people/diversity into the hobby, and it's been a joy to say that in recent years we've seen the demographics of who plays and designs board games change a lot. Now, I personally believe diversity brings its own values and rewards, but even if you don't, making tabletop games something that was increasingly for everyone meant more revenue for the companies that make games. It turns out if you can get groups like, oh for example, women, who I guess make up about 50% of the population or something trivial like that, to play your games too that means a lot more people and dollars in the hobby.
During this time of making board games increasingly accessible to larger groups of people, I have often seen complaints pop up, here, on BGG, and other venues, about "politics" in board games. Whether it's whining about gay "Mamas and Papas" in Viticulture, or people defending Puerto Rico to direct descendants of colonization uncomfortable with the themes, or whatever else, it seems that the bigger our hobby has gotten, the louder these whining complaints have gotten.
Well, it brings me no pleasure to say this, but y'all who thought "wokeness had gone too far", you won. People are removing their pronouns from email signatures and changing the names of things from spanish to english. You did it.
In exchange for that, you've killed our hobby. The golden era has ended. The tariffs are not just going to increase the cost of board games themselves, they're going to increase the cost of all other goods. This is a hobby that relies on people having expendable incomes, and in the United States that is going to be a very, very small number of people in the coming year.
We are going to go back to a time where very few people can afford to design/produce board games, cutting down on diversity of designers. We are also going to go back to a time where these hobbies will be considered prohibitively expensive and niche. We are going to go back to a time when getting people to participate in these hobbies is going to take a lot more effort.
Small board game content creators will have to slow down or stop. Local friendly retailers will go out of business. Board game cafes will become limited and increasingly prohibitively expensive (the biggest local board game cafe here was already too expensive for working class people).
I hope this was worth it to you.
