❖ Version History ❖
December, 2024
As we approach the last days & weeks of 2024, our prototype development for Royal Threadcount has started to come together. It has now become the time to start really considering the possibilities of the budget. Depending on when you are reading this post, it will be one of our more interesting financial discussions for a variety of reasons:
1. We are getting better at establishing our budget limitations as a company that has been doing this work for almost five years by this point… but…
2. We are stepping into very new territory regarding the components being used for this game (between the PVC plastic cards & the custom made plastic components we are stepping a bit out of our normal price expectations)… And…
3. The world is changing around us very, very, quickly. At this exact moment in time, we are only a few weeks out from the second term of the Trump presidency, and with this comes some major complications on both budgeting & world culture. The news has been changing quite literally every day on these topics, but one point that we will definitely be covering in today’s story is the threat and realities of foreign tariffs.
However, before we get into that, let’s talk about what we are getting ourselves into & why this post is titled the way that it is!
Budget Complications Part #1 :: What is our Maximum Player Count for Royal Threadcount?
Up until this point in time, the prototype of Royal Threadcount has always been 2-4 players… but we always strive to be a bit more inclusive than that, because we know that people want to have more availability in “who can sit at the table”. This leaves us with a few questions:
1. What would it cost (at scale) to manufacture the game at the 2-4 players?
2. What would it cost (at scale) to bump up the materials cost for 1,2,3, or 4 more players?
3. What would need to change in order to change the player count (the most affordable way)?
4. What other options do we have if we cannot expand the player count (at scale)?
Well, for starters, after a very long back & forth discussion with the manufacturing liaison, we started getting the numbers that I doodled out on the piece of paper you see at the top of this post. If you don’t want to scroll all the way back up there don’t worry, here’s the base numbers for the cost of the game at the 2-4 player count:
•1,000 Units :: $12,730 ($12.73/unit)
•1,500 Units :: $16,155 ($10.77/unit)
•2,000 Units :: $19,480 ($9.74 / unit)
•3,000 Units :: $26,250 ($8.75 / unit)
Now, these are actually pretty good prices at face value, but there are a couple of other factors you have to consider when looking at these numbers:
•The first big one is that this isn’t even the whole budget for the game, because this is not including the addition of the custom D4 dice that we would need (we will be going over the costs of the dice sometime very soon in a future post, because at this moment we are still waiting for all of the quoting data to be in on that… but its not going to be cheap… ballpark number at the moment is north of $3-$4,000).
•The other big factor is that this is just for the 2-4 player setup, so any additional content being added to this quote from here is going to add an enormous cost to that ideal.
•One thing to also consider (as a consumer) as well when looking at these numbers, is that you will be paying anywhere between x2-x4 this cost per unit of the game by the time it is available at MSRP. So, while “$12/unit” seems so cheap, that is actually only a little bit more than half of the wholesale cost (which for this, would likely work out to about $20/unit, with MSRP set to $40). So ideally, we want to get this number down as much as we can, so that we can reflect those savings for you!
•Finally, this is also not including the potential threat of Tariffs, which we will cover in more detail at the end of this post.
Budget Complications Part #2 :: If not more Players in the box…. what about an Expansion Kit?
So, the 2-4 player game as it stands will already be a financial challenge. But maybe this isn’t the end of the line for this plot point? One interesting question that came up during my conversations with the manufacturing liaison was whether or not I would consider an “expansion kit” for the game to help keep the costs of the main product down.
Now, how would an expansion kit even work? ~ What would you get exactly?
Well, that would depend on a lot of different features… Are we just trying to expand how many people can sit at the table? Or are we trying to include more “game” per player by expanding on the base content of the game? (i.e. one could theoretically buy x2 copies of the game to add more players / or / They could get the base game + a kit with ‘new and exciting’ parts that aren’t in the base kit to expand how many people can be at the table as well).
Personally, I really started to like the idea of “Adding in New Players + New Game Conent” by means of the ‘Expansion Kit’. In my head at first, it seemed like all I would need to provide for this would be: x4 new ‘garment cards’ per player + x2-4 new patterns into the game. All the pieces and parts would otherwise already be in the base kit, so there shouldn’t be any stress on that front? Excited by this idea, I decided to get some more quoting done in this direction, and here are our results:
•1,000 Units :: $6,710 ($6.71/unit)
•1,500 Units :: $9,105 ($6.07/unit)
Now… This is a bit higher than I was hoping to see, but it doesn’t mean the end of the world necessarily. It is simply how we begin the process of shopping & negotiating the future price. It does however make things a bit tricky for what we aspire to offer our customers. Consider getting the base game for $40, and then needing to pay somewhere between $10-$20 just to add a couple more players & some new designs into the mix… It is asking a lot of them (and it would require a pretty hefty starting pile of capitol on our end too, because even just making 1,500 units of both kits is looking like $25-$26,000 up front!) ~ and this of course brings us to our next point of concern:
Budget Complications Part #3 :: How do the threat of Tariffs affect all of this?
So far, we have only been talking about the pricing according to the (I hate to say this) ‘old way of the world’. In the coming weeks, the world is going to start to feel like a very different place. Right now, we are in a place of rumors & speculation based on what Trump will bring to foreign affairs of business…. but the rumors are scary, and there is literally no knowing what the future will bring on this conversation. So where does this leave us? What does it mean for everything we have discussed in this thread thus far? Well, to start, let’s consider the speculations & rumors:
During his campaign, Trump had declared several times over that there would be an international tariff on all goods coming from China. He has boasted anywhere between a 25%-60% Tariff on all goods. For some scope & scale, let’s just consider what a 50% tariff would look like on our budget for the 2-4 player game:
(No Tariff)
•1,000 Units :: $12,730 ($12.73/unit)
•1,500 Units :: $16,155 ($10.77/unit)
•2,000 Units :: $19,480 ($9.74 / unit)
•3,000 Units :: $26,250 ($8.75 / unit)
(50% Tariff)
•1,000 Units :: $19,095 ($19.09/unit)
•1,500 Units :: $24,232 ($16.15/unit)
•2,000 Units :: $29,220 ($14.61 / unit)
•3,000 Units :: $39,375 ($13.12 / unit)
~•• Edit :: Since writing this post, the maximum import tariff from China to the USA reached 125% in April of 2025. Luckily, that time-frame has passed, and we have regressed back toward a much more friendly number of about 10% as of the time of this edit (The import tariff has now changed more than 10 times this year alone). Just to showcase the risk this implied upon our business, here are the astounding numbers we might have faced if we had to endure the 125% tariff:
(125% Tariff)
•1,000 Units :: $28,643 ($28.64/unit)
•1,500 Units :: $36,349 ($24.23/unit)
•2,000 Units :: $43,830 ($21.91 / unit)
•3,000 Units :: $59,062 ($19.69 / unit)
When you consider the impact the tariff has on the production costs, it is very easy to understand what sort of damage this could do to the economics of the whole process. $25,000 is already a pretty big stretch for the kind of funding we can assemble as a company at the moment, but the idea that this is not even going to be enough to cover the cost of the whole game is wholeheartedly depressing. Not to mention, the MSRP of the game would need to be something absolutely outrageous like…. $50-$60 per game just for us to retain a somewhat decent profit margin & continue being able to offer “wholesale” prices to any Brick & Mortar store.
Budget Complications Part #4 :: What do we do? / How do we proceed?
At the present moment, these are simply our most raw & theoretical budget numbers. It is always necessary to start somewhere like this in order to gauge what is possible in the production of a new product. We do not have all of the answers yet, and we do not know what the future will bring with Trump’s complicated promises & ideals for navigating the country. The best we can do is take in all of this information, and continue to work forward with the hope that we can make these numbers & these plans work for us, no matter what the obstacles might be.
Though the project is not as exciting or promising as we were hoping for on the budget side of things from the onset, we are always heading in the right direction here. For the time being, we just have to keep making the game better while seeing what we can afford to keep / lose…. and we need to not lose hope that this game is worth making! The game is wonderful & absolutely deserves its place on the main stage, but we may have to fight a bit harder than normal to earn it!
Stay tuned for our next episode of the design journal, where we will continue to expand on this idea of the budget by considering some other interesting brainstorms for Royal Threadcount! And as always, thank you for reading!
