After a long career with roles in some of the biggest companies in both the tabletop games and videogame industries, Daniel Block is less than a month away from launching his dream game, the miniature wargame Zeo Genesis. He’s carried the idea with him for over 25 years, and in the last five he’s invested over a million dollars of his own money to open an American factory that will produce plastic miniatures to the same high standard as the globally popular Warhammer range. Yet if Trump’s current tariff regime had been in place when Block began the process, he says he “simply would not have started the project”.
I interviewed Block via video call on Wednesday, after news broke that goods imported to America from China would be subject to 104% tariffs. That’s since risen to 125%, and by the time you read this… well, who can say. Many prominent figures in the board games industry predict ruination if these tariffs remain in place. Tariff defenders state that, by rendering Chinese imports less competitive, they will bolster domestic manufacturing in the USA, including in the tabletop games industry.
But Block – who has just built a factory to allow his fledgling firm, Best Hobby, to make the miniatures for Zeo Genesis in the USA – takes a radically dimmer view. “In a world where access to the global market is constrained by increased prices – which is what tariffs are – I simply would not have started the project”, he says.
Block has always been a producer and publisher. His career started in White Wolf in the 1990s, working on tabletop RPGs and trading card games. He had a short stint at Wizards of the Coast, and was “a small” part of the team that licensed, localised, and released the Pokémon TCG in the West. In the video game industry he worked at Eve Online publisher CCP games, then Riot games on League of Legends, and most recently Epic, working on a little game called Fortnite.
He never lost the passion for tabletop games – or his passion for physically making things. “I started out on the role playing game and card game side being joined at the hip with designers, artists, writers, and we would make a book”, he recalls. “The first two or three books I got to work on with other people were amazing, and later on the 50th book in The White Wolf Line, the 80th book, it was always a little more divorced from the process of making the physical thing”.
Which is one reason why Block’s project for “what I’ll do for a decade in my 50s before I get near legitimate retirement age” is not just to make the rules for a miniature game, but to build a factory, and to build it in America.
“Over the last 20, 25 years, I’ve watched manufacturing, printing, all the parts of stuff we do move from 30% China, to 50% China, to 80% China”, Block says. That, in itself, is neither good nor bad in his opinion: “People want to buy a game at $20, then you’re going to print it in the place you can get the cheapest printing; people want to buy a game with a lot of miniatures, you’re going to buy it wherever those are available”.
The desire for his own, all-American factory is not nationalism from Block, and he’s too practical for me to call it idealism – this is just his American dream. Most firms that create games subcontract huge amounts of the manufacturing process, but Block says “If I’m just going to order widgets from a factory, that’s not exciting – making a creative thing is way more exciting”. Which means building a factory of his own.
How you build a factory in America
The recent discourse around tariffs has caused a lot of people to suggest that the tabletop game industry can immediately pivot to building things in America. Block has a reality check for them: developing the manufacturing processes to make models for Zeo Genesis has taken the best part of five years, three of them as his full time job.
The investment capital required has been substantial. “By the time that we actually ship our first stuff later this year, our first set, we will be tipping the scale just near a million dollars”, Block says. That’s purely on manufacturing processes, “not the game design, not sculpting, not any of the fun creative stuff”.
And this has only built “a prototype cell”, a reproducible business unit that could be replicated with enough extra capital. At the moment it will allow Best Hobby to release a couple of new products every month at Warhammer 40k or Gundam quality, for the first two to three years of Block’s business plan.
Should Zeo Genesis be a success, Best Hobby may want to scale up by buying more machines and more space. Import tariffs will make that harder. The milling machines needed to make new moulds cost around $150,000 each, plus another $100,000 sunk into supporting machinery, certifying they’re up to code, and so on. They come from Haas, a division of the Philips Corporation – they’re American made.
But first, Philips has to build those machines – and Block tells us “half of the components come from China, some of the motors come from Japan”. These aren’t trivial components; China produces the casting “that sits underneath all of it, that keeps it rigid, that lets you do the fine detail without having vibrations, that provides the necessary weight for the giant part of the spindle to spin against” – the foundation of the machine.
“Our injection machines are from Germany – we literally just got a BOY machine last week to add to the line”, Block says. “I called to speak with the folks shortly after the tariff announcement to ask ‘If I want another one, what will the price be?’, and the general feedback from – not one company, from all the people I talked to – was, ‘We don’t have the answer for you yet’”.
Tariffs with the EU have been delayed since I spoke to Block, but they’re not yet completely off the table. “If all of those parts that come from Germany have a 34% tariff, if the components that come from China have a 104% tariff, the cost is going to go up”, Block says. “Period. The end. There’s no magic”.
That was Wednesday; as I was filing copy for this article on Friday, I received an update. Multiple EU machinery providers have told Block to expect a price increase of roughly 20% “if tariffs restart on the current trajectory”.
The reasons China is such an important supplier, not just for finished goods or components but for plant machinery, are varied. Wage disparity is certainly a factor, but it’s also a matter of expertise. “China built whole cities built around producing these goods”, Block says. “No-one in America said ‘We’re going to build a printing city’: China said ‘we’re going to build printing city number eight’”. It’s not just minor business incentives – it’s long term, macro scale civic planning.
For many industries – at least the ones he’s concerned with for scaling up Zeo Genesis – Block says that American industry is working with extremely old buildings, plant, and processes. “Tesla built the supposed ‘Gigafactory’, they had photos of the robots that do the work of moving things down the line, all of that – that’s just what factories elsewhere that are more modern look like”.
Another reason Block has built his own factory and processes is that, even if he wanted to work with American partners, “the type of injection that we want to do is not a specialty of anyone in America”. It’s not that it can’t be made in America, but the specific kind of injection mould needed for wargaming miniatures is higher quality than one that makes simple industrial and building components, but less refined than something made for aerospace; those are made to extremely precise tolerances at very high cost.
Low grade injection moulds aren’t good enough. And while the companies that make aerospace moulds could subcontract for Best Hobby, “given a choice between charging an aerospace company $100,000 or charging us $12,000 for the same amount of work, quite rightly they take the $100,000 from the aerospace company”. It’s simply a gap in the USA’s manufacturing economy.
Best Hobby has the capability to conceptualise a miniature, digitally sculpt it, translate that into a file that can be used to make a mould, mill the mould, and then produce plastic model kits with it. As far as Block knows, Best Hobby is one of a tiny number of producers in the miniature wargaming market (rather than the scale model market) who can do that at scale and in-house.
He can name Games Workshop in the UK, Archon in Europe, and Wargames Atlantic in the US, and just like Best Hobby they can do what they can do only as the result of long, expensive years of investment and product development. All that, and the crowdfunding campaign for Zeo Genesis hasn’t even opened on Gamefound yet.
International dependencies
Not that everything in Best Hobby stays in house, or within the continental USA. The two model sculptors employed by the firm are based one in the Philippines, the other in Spain. “The reason that they’re not in the US is we are trying to find a very specific niche of sculptor who has worked with plastic but not the manufacturing method other people are using for it… we had to literally hunt globally to find people who’ve done this in other industries”.
The dice for Zeo Genesis are sourced from Chessex’ Danish factory. For the plastic feedstock that will go into Zeo Genesis miniatures, there were options to buy cheap bulk loads from India or China, but he opted for a supplier in Chicago. The price is higher, but he’s getting a high quality material, and he can scale up his orders on short notice if demand spikes.
In a post-tariffs world, that seems like it was a good move – but that supplier makes its plastic from precursor chemicals, and it’s perfectly possible that they rely on international suppliers for at least some components. It’s turtles all the way down.
Block did look for an American printer to make the pop-up cardboard buildings that will come in the starter set, but found the market wasn’t shaped for his size of business. Making cardboard terrain kits requires most of the same machines used to make countertop point-of-sale displays – think Magic the Gathering booster boxes. You can commission that kind of printing in the USA, but there are catches.
The firms that could make what Block needed all serve much larger customers. Contracting them would mean becoming their smallest job and the lowest priority, and paying a premium for it: “we would fit into their calendar somewhere, we would pay a price three times as much as we would have paid out of Mexico, three times as much as we would have out of Europe, for an unpredictable schedule”. There’s no incentive for these firms to service smaller businesses: “they’re really better off taking another job from Kellogg’s to run a million of a thing than hunting someone like me out”.
Block arrived at a Mexican production partner to make the starter set terrain, but getting there was a long journey driven as much by the search for expertise as by a hunt for low costs. The terrain was actually designed by existing Spanish modelling firm Acid House Terrain, as Block liked their work and wanted Zeo Genesis’ buildings to be interoperable with their products. Initially, he planned to use Acid House’s European printers, which had proven expertise making the kits, but the escalating cost of freight to the USA rendered this “radically more expensive”.
From there, recommendations from peers sent him to talk to a Colombian printer, which declined the job due to being unable to work with the materials required. They then referred Block on to a Mexican printer which makes countertop display boxes for many US stores, “and they’ve been a dream to work with”. The price was “roughly equivalent to the European price”, but with a far lower shipping cost.
Toy soldiers, free trade, and the American dream
The process of building the company to the point where it’s ready to start making things in America is one of international co-operation. In this instance, free trade has enabled a small American manufacturer to at least attempt to realize his dream, and create a space for a kind of manufacturing in America that otherwise doesn’t exist. Far from a threat to his American factory, tariff free trade with the rest of the world is precisely what made his business feasible.
Block is also counting on international customers to make Zeo Genesis a success. The American domestic market for games is big, but it’s not that big. “Without Europe, we don’t succeed, and we have to have a presence in South and Central America, that’s the only way that the investment in what we’re doing makes sense”. If America resumes its tariffs against those markets, they will respond in kind, putting tariffs on Zeo Genesis (and anything else coming out of America) and making it less competitive abroad.
From top to bottom, this American firm relies directly or indirectly on international partners for its machines, materials, components, and customers – tariffs make every step harder. Zeo Genesis has already been hit with a $5,000 bill on importing the starter set terrain from Mexico in the brief window when tariffs were in effect. “I have five more components. Are each of them going to be 35, 45% more? I just don’t know. It’s vaguely terrifying.”
There are firms in far, far worse positions. Right now there are boats in the water coming from China with goods set to be taxed 125% when they enter the USA. That’s the entire profit margin on those goods, possibly more than their entire profit margin. The firms that ordered those goods had no way of knowing that centuries of American trade policy would be incinerated overnight, taking their investment along with it.
That will hurt everyone, and – while those with big capital safety nets can endure it – entrepreneurs, mom and pop stores, and friendly local game stores will go bust. Block points to a bicycle store in his home town, a locally owned independent business with a 27 year history. The huge majority of bicycle components come from China. Is that business dead, he wonders? With 125% tariffs more than doubling the cost of its stock, how is it not?
Trump has turned investing in America from calculated risk to colossal gamble
Our one-hour interview has revealed a multitude of ways in which tariffs would have made it harder for Block’s business to succeed. And yet he insists the impact on the bottom line isn’t the main reason he would not have started this project, if the situation had been like this five years ago.
“I’m not risk averse”, he says. “I was on the team that brought Pokémon into Wizards of the Coast back in the beginning, and that team had to fight tooth and nail to get that game made because of internal politics, internal beliefs”. He was a leader on the team that made the decision to pivot from the original design for Fortnite to focus all efforts on the battle royale mode – one of the most earth shatteringly lucrative business decisions in the history of gaming, but a huge risk that threw away six years of existing development plans.
But taking those kinds of risks is only possible when you know, at the very least, that the fundamental math of your business isn’t going to be upended three times a week by presidential fiat. “I put a non-trivial amount of money on the line for me and my family to accomplish the thing I wanted to do”, Block says, and “there has to be the ability to make a rational, forward looking decision”. That is currently impossible.
“If I have to set a price for a good right now, I have to guess what the tariffs on it are. I didn’t have to do that two weeks ago. I didn’t have to do that two months ago. We’ve gone to a 100% tariff in a day, literally in a day. I have no control over that process, I have no say in that process, I have nothing to do but live with what happens”.
When I first heard about Zeo Genesis in April 2023 I contacted Block, just to get the temperature of him. Companies launching new wargames with hard plastic miniatures are incredibly rare, and manufacturing those minis in-house is all but unprecedented. I had to know: was this man a fool, or was this some kind of scam? But no, he was a guy with a dream, and twenty five years of experience as a business leader in the games industry. He was taking a big risk, but he was doing enough things right that he could, with a little luck and a lot of effort, make it work.
It’s one thing to put your time, sweat, and cash into a business that might sink or soar. It’s another to gamble it all on red. And that’s the business reality of Trump’s insane tariff policy. Why would anyone try to open a factory in America under these conditions?
Pre-orders for Zeo Genesis will be available from crowdfunding site Gamefound at the end of the month. I’ve received 3D printed prototypes of the models – I’m impressed with the designs, and you can read why in this preview feature.
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Source: Wargamer
