Launching a board game YouTube channel in 2025: tariff impact, side gigs and getting back in the saddle

Part 2 of our ongoing series exploring the trials and tribulations of launching a board game-focused YouTube channel in 2025. JC Wollslager is now several months into his attempt to “flip the script” on How To Play videos with his channel How To Teach, which he believes fills an underexplored niche in the industry. But the chaotic US tariffs situation is affecting more than just publishers and manufacturers in tabletop – and in this edition JC details the impact on his fledgling channel, his mental health, and what the future holds for the project. Part 1 can be read here.

Almost exactly a year to the day as I write this, I got let go of my job, alongside 299 other employees. It was a nice office job, paid $90k a year, and had all sorts of benefits, so honestly life was pretty cushy back then. When the mass layoff hit, I had a good chunk of money saved up, and I was eligible for unemployment, so I took the leap and started working towards launching a career in the tabletop industry as a content creator. And to quote [documentary maker] Dan Olsen, “Boy howdy, does the journey require a journey”.

Seven months, over 800 subscribers, 1,700 hours of watch time, and five well-received sponsored videos that have led to even more production work in the pipeline, I’d like to think that I was mostly successful. Just last month I was looking at my income and I thought to myself “Dang, this is actually turning into a legitimate career!” I was riding the high of a half of year of hard work and, for the most part, had considered this whole endeavor a success. I had a real busy April ahead of me at the time, and I was so excited for the various projects I had lined up. I was SO busy, in fact, that I even turned away one How to each sponsorship on the premise that I wouldn’t have enough time to get all my work done!

However, everything changed when the nation’s tariffs attacked.

I Am a Very Cuttable Cost

Yeah, I’m sure everyone in the board game industry is sick of hearing about it, but smaller content creators are getting just as screwed as the publishers in this market. Costs are getting bonkers expensive for everyone here in the states. What I personally got to learn firsthand is that marketing is one of the easiest places for publishers, both big and small, to save on costs. I had about three videos scheduled for this month, and for one reason or another, all of them either got canceled (and here I thought I was going to be so busy, isn’t that ironic), or they got pushed back to some unknown date in the future all because of the tariffs.

The level of uncertainty included with every email and message I got was brutal to read. Essentially, within three days, all of my work for April vanished. If it wasn’t for my tax return, I would’ve been in a world of hurt. And the worst part about all that was I didn’t quite know what to do about it, either.

Thank God I Can Pivot with the Best of Them

How to Teach is something that’s incredibly difficult to make money from of when not being directly funded by a publisher. While it’s my main point of introduction to most people, it certainly doesn’t pay the ever-increasing bills. Ad revenue on YouTube only starts manifesting once there are a few commas in your subscription and view counts. It’s one of the reasons there hadn’t been an episode in a month two months, as they’re a large investment of time without a ton of financial payoff.

My first major job of April came from the Unpub Festival, where I was hired to do event photography. How to Teach has been a great way to refamiliarize myself with my cameras, especially when it comes to taking pictures of people and board games and people playing board games. I also managed to snag an additional quick animation/editing contract job with Floodgate to highlight the awesome videos that my fellow board game influencers put together for their launch of Landmarks at Barnes and Noble. I’ve got
the animations and video assets that I’ve put together for How to Teach to thank for keeping me up-to-date on my After Effects skills. You can see these skills in action with the animation I did for The Pirates of the High Teas Kickstarter.

It’s the Mental Health Part!

Because it’s fun for me, I’ve still been working on How to Teach, albeit quite a bit slower than I normally work. Honestly, I’ve been in a bit of a depressive episode ever since all my work fizzled away because of things outside of my control. I’ve already got a laundry list of mental health issues, diagnosed by professionals, mind you, but the whole tariff kerfuffle has really added an extra layer to it. My car breaking down the other month certainly didn’t help – when it rains, and all that. Things were so bad I thought I was going to be returning to a cubicle, tail between my legs, to work until another mass layoff took me out.

However, after taking the time and effort to take care of myself (and my car), not pushing myself into burnout, and accepting that my mental health needs to come first, I’ve been able to slowly but surely drag myself out of bed and off the couch and back into the swing of things. How to Teach has been the beacon of light to help draw in those clients, while also being a great motivation for me to keep pushing forward.
Since then everything has settled more or less back to where it was prior. Sure, some contracts fizzled out for good and some are still up in the air. However, with a new episode of the show finally out for Let’s Go! To Japan, some animation work ramping up, and the industry starting to pick up the pieces left behind by the tariffs, things are genuinely starting to look up again for the moment, which is a feeling I didn’t think I was going to get to experience again.

I don’t know what the future holds for me or my fun little YouTube channel, but I’m doing what I love, I get to do it on my own schedule, and all the while I know I’ve got a world of incredible people to back me up and give me encouragement to keep on going. So I think I’ll do just that.

If you enjoy JC’s work on How To Teach and want to help support the channel, you can visit his Patreon here.