So I backed a card deck on Kickstarter a while back, which was to add support for the game “Mork Borg”. It was a cool little deck, reasonably priced ($25), and one that would add well to my collection of other MB-supporting card decks (I have a lot of those).

Well, it finally shipped some time ago, but after finally making it through Customs (coming from Canada), it got lost in the mail. Literally, I was about to follow it via USPS tracking as it traveled from Chicago to California, all along the West Coast, then inexplicably over to Baltimore, before finally disappearing after leaving Maryland.

I contacted the guy who ran the project, and he was very cool about the whole thing. Tried to send me another deck, but the Canada Post went on strike, which caused further delays. Now there’s something else causing problems: Trump’s Tariffs.

You see, until recently items under a certain price were exempt from Tariffs, to include decks like this. But that isn’t the case anymore, and now Canada Post wants between $7-10CDN, and possibly the USPS will want more than that to cover the tariffs, once it clears customs. They checked with shippers like UPS as well, and they want over $30 upfront to cover said tariffs.

Fuck. That.

The creator offered instead to just give me a refund, and let me know when the deck goes up on DriveThruRPG’s print-on-demand service, and that’s how I chose to proceed. It costs the creator a sale, but I hope to make it up to them by buying their POD, which is at least something.

What bothers me so much about this is that NONE of this is the creator’s fault, nor is it mine. We just tried to conduct a business transaction, and the US government literally screwed us… twice! First by losing the first deck, then by changing the rules and demanding more money for the deck, possibly to exceed the actual price of the deck itself!

ALL of this is Trump’s fault. All of it. There is literally no reason for these tariffs, none, zero, nada. All it is doing is hurting the economy by making me unlikely to spend money at all for purchases like this in the future, other than those I’ve already begun (there are a few KS projects I’ve backed, that have yet to be delivered upon). What bothers me the most is that many of the remaining projects I’ve backed are coming from overseas, and as such will be subject to these tariffs.

So basically what I’m saying is that until Trump is out of office, and these ridiculous tariffs are knocked down, I won’t be able to buy new products from some of my favorite TTRPG creators, like Modiphius and Free League… not unless they start printing and shipping from here in the US, anyway.

This is not how this should work. This is not how ANY of this should work. All this is doing is placing even more taxes upon consumers like myself, when we are already taxed quite enough, thank you! Where do these tariffs go, by the way? If I had to guess, a lot of them will be siphoned off by Trump and his cronies.

Don’t believe me? Ask your congress-critters (House and Senate both) to force the Executive branch to provide a full accounting of where these funds brought in by tariffs are going. When they can’t, ask yourself why that is, because the IRS and Treasury Department as a whole should absolutely know where every penny of that money is.