Dice for U.S. edition still come from China
WS Game Company set out last year to produce a bespoke Monopoly game that was 100% made in America, after President Trump imposed high tariffs on Chinese imports. The goal was to have it ready in February, ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The first 2,500 copies of the Monopoly Americana Edition — with properties named after U.S. landmarks — hit shelves in June, in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary but four months later than expected.
Jonathan Silva, the company’s co-owner and chief executive, said the project was a “colossal headache” and that he at one point considered canceling the whole project. “I hope I don’t have to go through it again,” he said. “It was not profitable for our company in any shape or form.”
WS Game’s experience highlights the challenges of quickly shifting production to the U.S. after decades of working with Chinese partners, even as Trump administration tariffs have led many companies to rethink their manufacturing footprint. The company, based in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., sells about one million high-end games a year and employs 25 people. For 25 years, all of its games were made in China.
Dana Silva, father of Jonathan Silva and Kerry Addis, and co-founder Michael Doyle launched WS Game in 2000 to design and develop games for Hasbro, the toy company that owns or licenses the rights to hundreds of games. Their first licensed Hasbro products were coffee tables, accent tables and pub tables with built-in versions of Scrabble or Monopoly. In 2009, Hasbro asked Silva and Doyle to create a line of classic games for Restoration Hardware; the first three were high-end versions of Monopoly, Scrabble and Clue, and they became the model for the company’s Vintage Bookshelf line, with boxes that resemble books.
For two decades, Dana Silva spent 80 to 100 days a year in Asia, and as the company’s president he still travels there an average of 30 to 40 days a year. The company’s Chinese factories produced the details of its high-end lines: a rounded book-like spine that wouldn’t collapse, wooden houses and hotels rather than plastic, pieces in resealable bags, and a hidden magnetic closure. “The magnet was an important part of the design,” Jonathan Silva said. “We wanted to make sure the customer wasn’t left with a box that flopped open.”
When the Trump administration raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 145% last year, Silva temporarily halted Chinese production. That August, he rushed in $5 million of inventory during a pause that temporarily lowered tariffs to 30%. Many customers had already canceled or pared orders, and sales ended the year down 35%. Silva started looking for new manufacturing partners in Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, Canada and Brazil, and he tasked Adam Hocherman, WS Game’s director of new business development, with developing a U.S.-made luxury game.
The company initially thought it could make a U.S. game for about 20% more than the cost in China, after factoring in shipping, Hocherman said. Instead, the premium was around 100%. Higher labor and materials costs were among the many challenges. In China, unlike the U.S., many factories specialize in detailed components such as intricately sliced, painted and printed wooden parts, and factories sit closer together.
Kerry Addis, the company’s chief operating officer and Jonathan’s sister, said the quality gap remained visible in the finished products. “The product made in China has so many little things that are better than we can do here,” she said. “It’s hard to say that they are equivalent even though the Americana is so much more money.”
In China, WS Game tells factories what it wants and asks them to make the idea a reality. In the U.S., the process ran in reverse. “We figured out what the factories’ capabilities were, then backed into the design,” Silva said. Hocherman first imagined a luxury game in a wooden box — similar to versions the company has made in China for years — but the box alone was estimated to cost at least $65, and WS Game typically prices games at four to six times production costs. U.S. box makers couldn’t produce the curved-spine book the company wanted, or an attractive box that met its quality standards, so WS Game pivoted to a larger version of the Vintage Bookshelf line, suitable for display on a coffee table. The company settled on a hybrid approach — one main manufacturer plus several smaller suppliers — with Cartamundi Group, the only traditional game maker with a U.S. factory to express interest in the project, as the main partner.
Cartamundi, based in Belgium, operates a factory the size of 20 football fields in East Longmeadow, Mass., that once belonged to Hasbro. The operation dates to the 1960s, according to Hasbro, which acquired the site from Milton Bradley and sold it to Cartamundi in 2015. The factory makes standard Monopoly, The Game of Life, Candy Land and other Hasbro bestsellers for roughly two dozen customers, mostly in batches of 5,000 to 20,000, and it employs about 375 full- and part-time workers, including dozens who have been there for more than 40 years; head count is up about 100 from last year. Three years ago, Cartamundi lowered its minimum order size to 5,000 from 20,000 to attract smaller game companies.
Hung Le, Cartamundi’s vice president of business development for North America, said the Americana project was a custom job with special requirements. “It comes down to a feasibility and budget issue,” he said. “It’s not the fact that we aren’t able to do it. It’s that we aren’t able to make it at the price point that met the other criteria.” Putting the game together in the book-style packaging required modifying the factory’s equipment. “It took us a month to figure it out, repurposing and modifying equipment we had,” Le said.
The finished game reflects the limits the company hit. The Chinese-made version has a fabric cover and a curved spine; the American version has a paper cover and a flat spine. The magnetic closure is gone — magnets are inserted by hand in China, a step that was too costly to replicate. Houses and hotels are injection-molded plastic rather than wood, in green and red pieces Cartamundi produces in the millions for standard Monopoly. Sealed plastic bags replaced the reusable ones. And the dice still come from China: WS Game could not find anyone in the U.S. to make 5,000 pairs. Card boxes were cut because they cost about $5 each in the U.S., versus pennies per box in China.
A plastic game tray nearly ended the project. The tray, made by Pioneer Packaging of Chicopee, Mass., uses plastic treated with a process known as flocking that creates a velvety feel, and it has seven slots for money plus compartments for cards and other pieces. Tooling for the trays costs nearly 10 times as much in the U.S. as in China, WS Game said. Sample cavities didn’t form, came out too thin or lacked the required depth; in production, trays wouldn’t release from their molds, cracked when they did, or broke during shipping and in use tests. Silva discussed killing the project and paying Cartamundi for its costs. “I threw my hands up. I was done. I was sick of this,” he said. The team looked at importing trays from Asia but stayed committed to making the game in the U.S.
Pioneer, an 80-year-old family-owned business that typically makes disposable trays for food, medical and industrial supply companies, had never made a game tray or a holder meant to last. Addison Camossi, its co-owner and sales representative, said she made at least five trips to WS Game and Cartamundi carrying samples. “It’s the first time we made something that doesn’t automatically go in the trash,” she said. Pioneer bought additional tooling, experimented with changes in temperature and curing times, brought in a retired former employee as a consultant, and hand-inspected every tray before it went out the door. Production of the second batch of trays was delayed after the company used much of its raw material figuring out how to get the job done right, then waited more than a month for additional supplies because of the tray’s flocking and special color. “This would be more a wash to a loss, but a learning experience,” said Lynn Kieszek, Pioneer’s CEO.
WS Game sold out the first batch of 2,500 games and received preorders for about 10% of the 2,300 units completed in August. Production issues left the company 200 units short of the 5,000 games it had wanted, and the delays pushed the second batch past the July 4th holiday. Silva said sales of the second batch “were definitely hurt by the delays. We missed July 4th, which was a key date.” The company typically sells its Chinese-made Vintage Bookshelf editions for $45; for the Americana Edition it initially targeted a $50 price, and the game came to market with an $80 price tag. The project took nearly 14 months to bring to market, compared with roughly nine months to create a game in China. “While we are not selling the units for less than they cost to make, we are not able to cover our typical overhead or the resources that went into development,” Silva said.
Addis, who watched Monopoly money being printed at the Parker Brothers factory in Salem, Mass., as a child and who visited the East Longmeadow factory as an intern for Winning Solutions, the company that later became WS Game, said there was “something nostalgic about manufacturing a product at a former Milton Bradley factory.” The difficulties, she said, reflected how far U.S. manufacturing has moved from this kind of work. “A lot of the changes we faced had to do with the fact that U.S. manufacturing is not doing these types of products anymore, if they ever did,” she said. “To try and come back and try to put it together in a year was very challenging.”