Jonathan Silva and his team at WS Game Company set a challenge for themselves last year: Produce a bespoke Monopoly game that was 100% made in America.

The company set out to produce its first U.S.-made game after President Trump imposed high tariffs on Chinese imports. The goal was to have it ready in February, ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

"It was a colossal headache. I hope I don't have to go through it again," said Silva, who at one point considered canceling the whole project. "It was not profitable for our company in any shape or form."

What Silva and his team discovered was that options for manufacturing a game in the U.S. are extremely limited and costs can be prohibitively high. A like-for-like game made in China would have been better quality, cost less and come to market faster. Still, the company persevered-although it ended up just shy of 100% American-made.

Silva's company produces high-end versions of classic games, from Chess & Checkers to The Game of Life. For 25 years, all of the games had been made in China. His father, the company's co-founder, would spend weeks at a time in Asia. The company has developed deep relationships with the company's Chinese factories and produced games for the likes of Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn, as well as mass-market retailers.

Silva, co-owner and chief executive of the family-run company, landed on the idea of what would eventually be called the Monopoly Americana Edition after Trump's tariffs disrupted Chinese production.

The first 2,500 copies of the Americana Edition-with properties named after U.S. landmarks-hit shelves in June, in time for the nation's 250th anniversary but four months later than expected. Difficulties making the tray used to hold game parts delayed the second half of the 5,000-unit order until August.

Trump administration tariffs have led many companies to rethink their manufacturing footprint. WS Game's experience highlights the challenges of quickly shifting production to the U.S. after decades of working with Chinese partners. The company initially thought it could make a game for about 20% more than the cost in China, after factoring in shipping, said Adam Hocherman, WS Game's director of new business development. Instead, the premium was around 100%.

Higher labor and materials costs were among the many challenges, Hocherman said. Other key differences: In China, unlike the U.S., many factories specialize in things like intricately sliced, painted and printed wooden parts and other detailed components, and factories are closer together.

"The product made in China has so many little things that are better than we can do here," said Chief Operating Officer Kerry Addis, Jonathan's sister and fellow co-owner. "It's hard to say that they are equivalent even though the Americana is so much more money."

WS Game sells about one million high-end games a year. Based in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., it has 25 employees.

Dana Silva, Jonathan and Kerry's father, and co-founder Michael Doyle launched WS Game in 2000 to design and develop games for Hasbro, the toy company that owns or licenses the rights to hundreds of games. Their first licensed Hasbro products were coffee tables, accent tables and pub tables with built-in versions of Scrabble or Monopoly.

For two decades, Dana Silva spent 80 to 100 days a year in Asia. As the company's president, he still travels there an average of 30 to 40 days a year.

In 2009, Hasbro asked Silva and Doyle to create a line of classic games for Restoration Hardware, the furniture retailer. The first three were high-end versions of Monopoly, Scrabble and Clue. They became the model for WS Game's Vintage Bookshelf line, with boxes that resemble books.

To give them a distinctive look, they created a rounded book-like spine that wouldn't collapse. They decided that houses and hotels would be made out of wood rather than plastic, packaged inside resealable bags. And they asked their Chinese factory to insert a hidden magnetic closure.

"The magnet was an important part of the design," said Jonathan Silva, who joined the company in time for the launch. "We wanted to make sure the customer wasn't left with a box that flopped open." The whole process took roughly a year, he said.

When Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 145% last year, Jonathan Silva temporarily halted Chinese production. That August, he rushed in $5 million of inventory during a pause that temporarily lowered tariffs to 30%. Many customers had already canceled or pared orders. Sales ended the year down 35%.

Silva also started looking for new manufacturing partners-in Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, Canada and Brazil. He tasked Hocherman with developing a U.S.-made luxury game.

The American version includes numerous adjustments tied to the realities of U.S. production. It has a paper cover and a flat spine, while the Chinese-made version is covered in fabric, with a curved spine. It also lacks a magnetic closure. The magnets are inserted by hand in China, a step that was too costly to replicate.

The houses and hotels are plastic rather than wood. Standard sealed plastic bags replaced the reusable ones.

And the dice? They still come from China. The game company couldn't find anyone in the U.S. to make 5,000 pairs.

In China, WS Game tells factories what it wants, and asks them to make the idea a reality. The U.S. process was reversed. "We figured out what the factories' capabilities were, then backed into the design," said Silva.

No one could do the job from start to finish, as is the case in China, where factories are often more sophisticated and often vertically integrated. The team looked at different game formats and cast about for manufacturers that could supply individual components before settling on a hybrid approach that relied on one main manufacturer and several smaller suppliers.

Often, their decisions came down to dollars and cents. Card boxes fell by the wayside because they cost about $5 each in the U.S. versus pennies per box in China.

Hocherman, who oversaw the project, first imagined a luxury game in a wooden box-similar to versions the company has been making in China for years. But it was too expensive, with an estimated cost of at least $65 just for the box. WS Game typically prices games at four to six times production costs to provide a profit for each party in the supply chain.

The company pivoted to a game suitable for display on a coffee table, modeled after the Vintage Bookshelf line, but larger. U.S. box makers couldn't produce the curve-spined book WS Game wanted, or an attractive box that met the company's quality standards. A book maker expressed interest, but the cost was too high.

WS Game finally found a partner in game manufacturer Cartamundi Group, the only traditional game maker with a U.S. factory to express interest in the project. The two companies brought in outside suppliers for parts Cartamundi couldn't make.

Cartamundi is based in Belgium, but operates a factory the size of 20 football fields in East Longmeadow, Mass., that once belonged to Hasbro. The operation dates back to the 1960s, according to Hasbro, which acquired the site from Milton Bradley and sold it to Cartamundi in 2015.

East Longmeadow manufactures games for roughly two dozen customers, mostly in batches of 5,000 to 20,000. The factory employs about 375 full- and part-time workers, including dozens who've been there for more than 40 years; head count is up about 100 from last year. The factory makes The Game of Life, Candy Land and other Hasbro bestsellers-including the standard version Monopoly. There's a 30-year-old printing press and machines added in the last two years to serve the burgeoning trading-card games business.

East Longmeadow churned out more than one million games a week during the pandemic, but orders softened as the country reopened. Three years ago, Cartamundi lowered its minimum order size to 5,000 from 20,000 to attract smaller game companies.

The Americana game wasn't just a smaller run, said Hung Le, vice president of business development, North America, at Cartamundi. It was also a custom project with special requirements. "It comes down to a feasibility and budget issue," he said. "It's not the fact that we aren't able to do it. It's that we aren't able to make it at the price point that met the other criteria."

Instead of wooden houses and hotels, WS Game opted for green and red injection-molded properties, which Cartamundi produces in the millions for standard versions of Monopoly.

Putting everything together in the book-style packaging was another challenge. "It took us a month to figure it out, repurposing and modifying equipment we had," said Le.

A plastic game tray produced by an outside vendor nearly undid the project. The tray, manufactured by a company called Pioneer Packaging, uses plastic treated in a special way known as flocking that creates a velvety feel; it has seven slots for money and compartments for the cards and other pieces.

Tooling to make the trays costs nearly 10 times as much in the U.S. as in China, WS Game said. Production delays made matters worse.

When Pioneer created samples, cavities intended to hold game accessories didn't form, came out too thin or didn't have the required depth. Once it moved into production, trays wouldn't release from their molds, cracked when they did or broke during shipping or in use tests.

Silva discussed killing the project and paying Cartamundi for its costs. "I threw my hands up. I was done," he said. "I was sick of this." The team looked at importing game trays from Asia, but was committed to making the game in the U.S.

Addison Camossi, Pioneer's co-owner and sales representative, said she made at least five trips to the WS Game and Cartamundi, carrying samples to show that her 80-year-old family-owned business was determined to get the tray right.

Pioneer typically works with food, medical and industrial supply companies, creating disposable trays made of materials such as polystyrene or polyvinyl chloride. The Chicopee, Mass., company specializes in custom orders but had never made a game tray-or a holder meant to last.

"It's the first time we made something that doesn't automatically go in the trash," said Camossi.

Pioneer bought additional tooling and experimented with changes in temperature and curing times to better understand and fix the problem. It brought in a retired former employee as a consultant, used a special foam to release the trays and stacked them on boards rather than on top of each other to prevent cracking. Overtime piled up. Camossi said that Pioneer hand-inspected every tray before it went out the door.

Production of the second batch of trays was delayed because Pioneer used much of the raw material figuring out how to get the job done right. It had to wait more than a month for additional supplies because of the flocking and special color.

"This would be more a wash to a loss, but a learning experience," said Lynn Kieszek, Pioneer's CEO.

WS Game typically sells its Chinese-made Vintage Bookshelf editions for $45. The company initially targeted a $50 price tag for the Americana Edition. It didn't come close. The new game took nearly 14 months to bring to market compared with roughly nine months to create a game in China, and with an $80 price tag.

"While we are not selling the units for less than they cost to make, we are not able to cover our typical overhead or the resources that went into development," said Silva.

WS Game sold out the first batch of 2,500 games and received preorders for about 10% of the 2,300 units completed in August. (It ended up 200 units short of the 5,000 it had wanted due to the production issues.) Sales for the second batch "were definitely hurt by the delays. We missed July 4th, which was a key date," Jonathan Silva said.

"There was something nostalgic about manufacturing a product at a former Milton Bradley factory," said Addis, who watched Monopoly money being printed at the Parker Brothers factory in Salem, Mass., as a child and visited the East Longmeadow factory as an intern for Winning Solutions, which later became WS Game.

That was decades ago, however. "A lot of the changes we faced had to do with the fact that U.S. manufacturing is not doing these types of products anymore, if they ever did," Addis said. "To try and come back and try to put it together in a year was very challenging."