Reply To: Darkest Dungeon: The Board Game – Shipping surcharge

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Your game is printed, it’s yours, and it’s currently stored in China. If you are unable to pay this contribution immediately, we will store your game for as long as possible.

Something smells funny about this. I don’t know about other countries, but here in the UK your agreement is with the seller of the item, not the manufacturer. If I bought a faulty hoover from Currys, I take it back to Currys – they are responsible for reimbursing, for selling an item that is not fit for purpose.

So if I’ve paid a board game company for a board game and they fail to deliver the board game, they are responsible for reimbursing the item that was not delivered. Same goes for, let’s say, Amazon (in the UK). They take the money and pass the order on to their fulfillers. If the order is not fulfilled, it’s Amazon, not the trader that is on the hook to return the money. Amazon have tried this wheeze a couple of times in recent years and both times, when pressed, they had to refund me for items I hadn’t received (the first time they claimed it was a “goodwill” gesture and the second time were reluctant to hand the money back – when I demonstrated that they were in breach of UK trading law, they *did* refund the full payment for goods not received).

This idea that “it’s your game and look, it’s over there” is a pretty shitty take.

My guess is that Mantic knows this. They’re a UK company and bound by UK law. They’ve taken money. They need to produce the goods for the price they offered them for sale at (in UK law, they make an offer for sale, during which time they can change the price, but once a sale has been agreed, a contract is entered into and they’re contractually obliged to honour that price – something the car showroom I once worked at learned to their cost, when someone mis-advertised a £12k car at £1200 !)

I understand the position Mantic find themselves in, and can sympathise.

But I doubt that “that game stuck in a port in China is yours, you’d better fund getting it to the UK” would hold any water legally. And it’s a really crappy way to (mis)represent what’s going on. All those board games stuck in China? They belong to Mantic.

Which makes you wonder why they even put that in there. For me, any goodwill evaporates immediately with that kind of veiled threat.