Czech Games CEO says US tariffs drove $30 price gap between US, European editions of Kingdom Come: Deliverance board game

Czech Games Edition chief executive Petr Murmak has confirmed US tariffs are the main reason American customers will pay about $30 more than their European counterparts for the publisher’s newly announced Kingdom Come: Deliverance board game, underlining how import duties are now directly shaping board game pricing.

The publisher revealed it has eyes on a Spiel Essen release for the heavy euro adventure game, a Tomáš Holek and Vlaada Chvátil co-design based on the hit medieval RPG video game – which has sold more than 16 million copies across the original release and its 2025 sequel.

That announcement included the news that the game will cost €149.99 (~$170) in Europe, but $199.99 in the US – a situation Murmak explained in BoardGameGeek post was largely down to US tariffs on European imports.

CGE manufactures its games in a factory it co-owns in its home country of Czechia, rather than relying on China-based manufacturers like the bulk of the hobby board game industry.

Murmak explained on BGG in a reply to a post questioning the price difference, “USD to EUR is like 1:1.15 right now and tariff is 15% for production in EU – we produce our games in our own factory in Czechia. So 149.99*1.15*1.15 = 198,362 USD.

“Shipping to US also costs us something, so we have slightly less profit on one copy in US than in EU. Moreover there is uncertainty about tariffs in the future (they might go up – there were some threats already from US government), or dollar might go down like last year…”

Although board game publishers have repeatedly warned that tariffs would push retail prices higher, few have publicly broken down exactly how those increases translate into MSRP in different regions.

BoardGameWire has previously spoken to publishers who said they had already begun passing on to customer both US tariffs on China and the lower rates applied to European manufacturing, while absorbing part of the additional costs themselves in an effort to avoid psychologically difficult price points.

Several board game publishers warned last year that some consumers had yet to fully appreciate how significantly prices could rise once tariff-affected print runs began reaching retail.

Ongoing uncertainty about further US tariff hikes have also heavily impact international freight in recent weeks, with rates on routes between Asia and the US east coast, and Asia and Europe, surging to their highest levels since the Red Sea crisis two years ago, according to a report from the Financial Times earlier this week.

It said the price of a 40ft container between China and the US east coast rose to $7,880 last week, up 62% from a month earlier, while rates between China and the Mediterranean jumped 47% to $6,431 – citing data from shipping platform Freightos.

That surge has come in anticipation of new US tariffs next month, the report added, bringing forward the annual increase in shipping demand that usually starts as retailers filled inventories before the Black Friday and Christmas shopping periods.

CGE said it would be releasing the game in limited quantity waves, citing the need to ensure a high production quality for the “massive, component-rich project”.

Game co-creator Vlaada Chvátil’s pedigree include the huge-selling word game Codenames, the Mage Knight Board Game and Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, while his co-designer Tomáš Holek scored a huge success two years ago with his multi-award-winning space exploration eurogame SETI.

Chvátil said, “I’m genuinely enjoying working on this game. Amazing source material, a co-designer whose approach to games is very close to my own, the care and support the CGE team brings to every project, and, above all, gameplay that feels both epic and playful at the same time.

“That creates a design playground where every card, quest, skill, and encounter is pure joy to work on.

“Every time Tomáš and I sit down for another playtest, look over the starting setup, reveal the opening cards, and watch the possibilities unfold before us, we inevitably glance at each other and think: damn, this game is still so much fun.”