Monopoly Maker’s U.S. Experiment Exposes Tariff Reality
When the WS Game Company received a seven-figure tariff bill on its Chinese imports last year, CEO Jonathan Silva decided to test a proposition at the heart of President Trump’s trade policy: Could a profitable board game actually be made in the United States? The answer, after a year-long experiment, offers a sobering case study in the gap between political rhetoric and economic reality.
Silva set out to produce a special “Monopoly Americana” edition entirely in the U.S., pegged to the nation’s 250th birthday. What he discovered, as NPR reported, was a supply chain so fragmented and underdeveloped that the project nearly collapsed before it began.
The Dice Problem
The most emblematic obstacle: Silva could not find a single U.S. manufacturer capable of producing 10,000 dice. “We turned over every single leaf trying to find someone who would make 10,000 dice for us in the U.S.,” Silva told NPR. “It requires special machinery. It requires investment. And that type of stuff just can’t happen on a random Tuesday and be ready in a couple of months.” He ultimately had to settle for imported dice.
Silva did manage to piece together a domestic supply chain for other components. Cartamundi, operating out of a former Hasbro factory in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, prints the Monopoly board. Pioneer Packaging produces the tray that holds the Monopoly money. And Stateline Industries in Liberty, Indiana, fabricated custom metal game tokens in all-American shapes like a cowboy hat, a covered wagon, and an apple pie.
But assembling those disparate players took more than a year, causing Silva to miss the first half of the 250th birthday selling season. The cost to manufacture the games — which retail for $80 — was at least double what it would have been in China.
The Ecosystem Gap
“When I place a purchase order in China, they have all those capabilities under one roof,” Silva said. “For one item, it took up way too much of our resources and time to bring it to market.”
There is a reason nearly 80% of all toys and games sold in the U.S. are made in China. That country has spent decades building a dense factory ecosystem capable of supplying not only finished products but every specialized component that goes into them. The U.S., by contrast, has seen its manufacturing base for low-margin consumer goods steadily erode.
Greg Ahearn, president and CEO of the Toy Association, told NPR that the industry’s challenges with reshoring are not simply a matter of will. “That’s why the re-shoring and the looking at bringing it back into the U.S. or even looking at other countries and moving it is not as easy as it sounds,” Ahearn said. “Even if you could, who in their right mind would take their capital and invest it into creating a toy manufacturing plant? Of all the things you could pick, we’d probably be pretty low on that list.”
Industry Under Pressure
The stakes for the toy industry are enormous. A survey of over 400 Toy Association member companies conducted in April 2025 found that nearly half of small and medium-sized enterprises stated they may soon go out of business due to the 145% tariff policy. Hasbro, the toy giant that owns the Monopoly brand, estimated it could see as much as a $300 million hit to its bottom line.
The Toy Association has spent heavily on lobbying — $180,000 in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone — and is pushing for a carve-out from future tariffs. The newly formed U.S.-China Board of Trade is considering allowing up to $30 billion worth of Chinese products to enter the U.S. tariff-free, but toys face stiff competition for those exemptions from shoes, apparel, and other products.
A Modest Lesson
For now, Silva is marketing his Made-in-the-U.S.A. Monopoly Americana edition as a limited-run success story. But he continues to manufacture the rest of his company’s board games in China and is awaiting a shipment of about $6 million worth of games for the upcoming holiday season, with no idea what the tariff bill might be.
“We’re really good at a lot of great things here in America,” Silva said. “But we’re not really great at making certain items that are consumable goods. And that’s OK.”
The experiment echoes an earlier NPR investigation into a Texas showerhead company that found zero customers willing to pay an 85% premium for a domestically made version. Together, the two case studies suggest that reviving American manufacturing of low-cost consumer goods will require far more than tariff policy alone — it will demand years of investment in supply chain infrastructure, specialized machinery, and consumer willingness to pay higher prices.
As Silva prepares to roll the dice on his next shipment from China, the question remains whether the U.S. can rebuild the manufacturing ecosystem it has lost, or whether some categories of production are simply gone for good.