DENVER (KDVR) — While tariffs have begun to impact businesses on a national scale, smaller, locally owned businesses are feeling the heat of rising costs as well.
That includes a Denver man who created his own role-playing game. Luke Stratton was a concert lighting designer for bands like The Smashing Pumpkins until the COVID-19 pandemic put the concert industry on hold. While stuck at home, he found a new passion, tabletop role-playing games, and dropped his job to put all his time into making his own.
“You can pretend to be somewhere and be somebody that you aren’t in real life,” said Stratton.
A chance to escape to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, even if he’s just in the basement of Denver game store “The Wizard’s Chest” for his monthly game meet-up.
“It’s like, adventure, excitement,” said Stratton.
Stratton picked up the role-playing game hobby while in the pandemic lockdown, but felt like something was missing.
“I just made the thing I wanted to exist,” he said. “There wasn’t a good pirate role-playing game; I made it.”
It’s called ‘Pirate Borg,’ a tabletop RPG in a similar vein to ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’
“I like to describe it as ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ meets ‘Army of Darkness,'” said Stratton.
A success in its early days, raising money through the website Kickstarter and even finding a publisher. Stratton placed an order last year for important pieces of the game to be made so he could begin a larger rollout. But with new import tariffs going into effect since he placed that order, the cost is now substantially larger than expected.
“All of our, like, gaming components, like, specifically dice and coins, they pretty much have to be manufactured in China,” said Stratton. “On the worst day when I was looking at it, I was looking at, like, a $125,000 bill.”
That’s more than double his initial estimate, which was around $50,000. Like the ships in his game, Stratton felt his dream beginning to sink.
“There’s not an option to, like, just cancel the order and print it here,” says Stratton. “Like, those things are already, we’ve already approved production prototypes. There’s no recourse for us, it’s just directly hurting me and my two employees.”
He says he may have to ask early investors for more money or be forced to pass costs to the consumer by raising the game’s price, two options he doesn’t want to do. The future of his game now feels as uncertain as the dice players roll.
“We love playing it, we love making it and we’re going to keep doing so, it’s just definitely ‘Dark Shores’ at the moment,” says Stratton.
Despite that uncertainty, he’s still working hard to build interest in the game. If you’d like to support Pirate Borg, Stratton hosts a meetup every month at Wizard’s Chest for anyone to come out and give it a try.
