View From the Pelgrane’s Nest – April 2025

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On May 1, 2025

A big shout-out to our estimable Patreon backers! Thanks to Peter, Jim, Phil, Bryant, P. Troilus, Michael M, ScottKey, Michael B, Andreas, Ranting John, Michael H, Mark, Daniel, Jiří, Marcus, Cena, Thomas and Marc!!

TARIFFS

Since my last update, one topic has dominated the tabletop games industry: the impact of the USA’s extensive tariffs on imports, with the Chinese tariff rates currently standing at 145%. For a lot of our peers in the games industry, this is an existential crisis on a par with the global pandemic of 2020 (for more on this, BoardGameGeek has a post they’re keeping updated with the latest publicly-available information on the impact on games companies and individual games).

Our retail distributor, Flat River Games, recently announced that they were cutting ties with Greater Than Games, the company they brought in to support their RPG distribution. I got an email from the FRG Vice-President for Hobby Distribution and Business Development, Jules Vautour, saying that

“Due to the impact of recent tariffs, Flat River Group has been compelled to reassess our long-term strategy. After extensive consideration, we have made the difficult decision to halt all owned goods imports from China within our board game category. Unfortunately, under current conditions, the financial model no longer supports sustainable operations in this area.

As part of this strategic shift, it is with sincere regret that we share the departure of the GTG Publishing team and a large part of the hobby team, including our vendor liaisons. This decision was not made lightly—it followed a thorough exploration of every possible alternative.”

This is bad news for FRG customers in hobby games, like Pelgrane Press. Our vendor liaison was great, and worked hard to stay up to speed with our games, so I’m expecting to see our retail sales plummet as the team members knowledgeable about our games depart. If your local retailer is struggling to find our games through hobby distribution, please ask them to reach out to us directly at support@pelgranepress.com.

As to other impacts on Pelgrane Press, the first thing to say is that the situation is volatile and developing, so our future planning must be agile and adaptable.

Our mail order store has two shipping points, one in the USA (from where we ship all our US & Canadian webstore orders), and one in the UK (where we ship all our other orders from). For our perfect-bound books, we do a print run in the USA for our US warehouse, and a UK print run for our UK warehouse. This is possible as minimum print run numbers for perfect-bound books start as low as a single copy, and are affordable even in low double-digit print runs.

Minimum numbers for hardback print runs tend to start at around 100 copies, and printing that low a volume, print costs tend to be around €30-€35 per book, which is unfeasible given our MSRPs. As a result, we do a single high volume print run with Standart Impressa in Lithuania, and ship from there to our UK warehouse by truck, and by ship to our USA warehouse.

That all being the case, Pelgrane Press shipments will not be affected by tariffs on Chinese imports into the USA, although – if books are not exempted, which a number of authorities (like the American Booksellers Association) believe they will be – Pelgrane shipments will be impacted by tariffs placed on EU goods coming into the USA (currently at 20%, but with a 90-day pause).

One thing I know we will be impacted by is the effect of those tariffs on the cost of raw materials, such as ink, paper, packaging, and fuel. It’s too soon to predict the full extent of that impact, but I’m guessing our production costs will have increased at least 10% by the end of 2025.

We will be monitoring the situation closely, talking with our suppliers, and working through what changes we can make to mitigate these rising costs – such as holding back on new products, moving older products to print on demand only, and offsetting the shortfall with more crowdfunding campaigns – but I suspect these increases will be more than we, as a small company, can afford to absorb, and the worst-case scenario is that we will need to pass these price hikes on to consumers.

We’ll keep you updated as as when we know more, and if we do need to increase our prices, we’ll let you know well in advance.

GEN CON: Work at the Pelgrane booth!

We love Gen Con; every year, it’s an opportunity for the whole team to get together, hang out, meet the people who are playing our games and hear their war stories. Unfortunately, this year, none of the non-USAian Pelgranes will be at Gen Con, and so we’re looking for people to help out our USA team on the Gen Con booth. If you’re familiar with GUMSHOE and 13th Age, comfortable explaining both to new players, and have some retail or customer service experience, drop me an email (cat@pelgranepress.com) with a CV.

Until next time,

~Cat