One Importer's Attempt to Make Board Games in America Reveals the Real Cost of Reshoring

A board game importer who sells a Monopoly-branded product decided to test a question many American businesses are now facing: could he make his product domestically and absorb the pressure that new tariffs have placed on imported goods? According to NPR,Business, Jonathan Silva pursued that question in earnest — and what he discovered offers a grounded look at the distance between the idea of American manufacturing and its present capacity.

The outlet reports that Silva's investigation was not theoretical. He actively sought U.S.-based production options for his board game line after tariffs on Chinese-manufactured imports raised his costs to a level that threatened his business model. His findings, published July 12, 2026, reflect a pattern that economists and supply-chain analysts have documented over decades: the domestic manufacturing infrastructure for many consumer goods has atrophied to a degree that makes rapid reshoring difficult and, in some cases, prohibitively expensive.

**Why This, Why Now**

The broader tariff environment has made this kind of reckoning common among small and mid-sized importers. For business owners who built their operations around global supply chains — many of which took shape over thirty or more years, the current policy landscape presents a structural dilemma: absorb higher import costs, pass them to consumers, or attempt to rebuild a supply chain domestically. Silva's experience illustrates that the third option is not simply a matter of will or patriotism; it involves tooling, labor, materials sourcing, and economies of scale that do not reconstitute quickly.

**Who Is Affected and What Is at Stake**

Small importers occupy a particularly exposed position in this environment. Unlike large corporations with diversified supply chains and legal teams to navigate trade policy, businesses like Silva's operate with narrow margins and limited flexibility. Consumers who purchase these goods may encounter higher prices or reduced availability as importers absorb or pass along increased costs. Workers in domestic manufacturing sectors may, over time, benefit from reshoring efforts, but the timeline for that benefit is measured in years, not quarters. The tension here is real on all sides: the policy goal of rebuilding domestic industrial capacity is not inherently unreasonable, and the pain experienced by importers and consumers in the interim is not fabricated.

Proponents of tariff-driven reshoring argue that short-term disruption is the necessary cost of correcting a long-term strategic vulnerability, that dependence on foreign manufacturing, particularly from geopolitical competitors, carries risks that market prices alone do not reflect. Critics argue that tariffs as a reshoring mechanism are blunt instruments that burden small businesses and consumers without a coordinated domestic investment strategy to actually receive the manufacturing that is supposed to return.

**What Remains Unknown**

The NPR Business report focuses on Silva's specific experience, and the source summary does not detail which production steps he found feasible domestically, which were unavailable, or at what cost differential. It is not known from this report how representative his findings are across the board game or broader toy and game industry, nor whether he ultimately altered his sourcing strategy. The longer-term effect of current tariff levels on small importers as a class, whether they adapt, contract, or close, remains an open empirical question.

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