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 seven 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 - and in this edition JC details the impact on his fledgling channel, his mental health, and what the future holds for the project.

Boardssey: The All-in-One Platform Reshaping How Board Games Get Made [sponsored]

As the board game industry has exploded in the last couple of decades, so too has the desire and demand from designers for ways to streamline and manage the often fragmented reality of prototyping, testing and preparing to publish their new creations. In this sponsored article, the team behind board game design toolkit Boardssey explain how they've leveraged their own experiences designing games - and the pain points they ran up against - to create a one-stop shop for supporting overwhelmed game designers.

Chaos escalates in Alliance Game Distributors sale as winning bidder scraps deal, sues owner Diamond Comics, claiming it hid that AGD had lost biggest customer Wizards of the Coast

Chaos continues to engulf the sale of one North America’s biggest tabletop gaming distributors, Alliance Game Distributors, after the winning bidder scrapped its deal and sued bankrupt AGD owner Diamond Comics for the second time in three weeks - this time claiming Diamond concealed from it that AGD had lost its biggest customer, Wizards of the Coast.