Mayfair Games has been in business for over 30 years, with hundreds of popular and lauded games published spanning that time. A few of those from the early years, like Empire Builder, Alibi, and Family Business, are still in print decades later! So, we’re a company that understands how to manufacture a game, and what the advantages and disadvantages are to the variety of production options open to us.

Many companies choose to print their game overseas, and there are economic reasons to do so. But, there’s also underlying challenges when your products are crafted thousands of miles and an ocean away from you, thus, if a component is accessible in the United States for a fair price, we would rather have that element produced within reach.

So, when we make a commitment to print as much material in the U.S. as we can, we know how to make that happen. As of this writing, over 90% of the material we use for our manufacturing comes from the U.S. The boxes for many of our games come from Master Paper Box on the south side of Chicago (delivered across town to our warehouse in Skokie for our assembly line). Games like Costa Rica and Patchwork, as well as many of our card decks, are handled by Delano Services in Michigan, and tile sheets for numerous games are produced by Ludo Fact USA in Indiana. Our rulebooks, catalogs, and printed material are also printed in the Chicago area by A to Z Offset Printing and Publishing, which makes our turnaround time days rather than weeks. We have Cartamundi in Texas on hand, as well as others within the U.S., to produce card components for us.

Our in-house production facility employs up to 12 people, who, at full production, can assemble over 25 games a minute in our production line. This allows us to maintain quality control over the material during the assembly process. A large percentage of the remaining material that we use is locally purchased as well, taking into account that our oversees partners at Lookout Games in Germany mirror our ‘buy local’ philosophy, which produces games like Agricola, Caverna, and Isle of Skye in Altenberg, Germany through Altenberger. Our partnership with AMIGO, based in Frankfurt, Germany, means that local for them is about three hours south at Ludo Fact GmbH, between Stuttgart and Augsburg. Our Saboteur, 6 Nimmt!, and other AMIGO-partnered games are produced there and make the trip from Germany to the United States.

Wooden pieces are a major component of our games, and one of our biggest U.S. suppliers is Creative Game Bits in Ohio. Not only are their pieces pivotal in many of our games, they’ve also created some of the oversized game pieces that we’ve used over the years for our giant and mammoth game events during conventions. Seidenstücker, located in Steinebach, Germany, is another member of our production group. They are one of the largest manufacturers of wooden components for the game industry, and we work closely with them to coordinate and produce the tokens for our games. They are a very important part of the Mayfair Games family (and if you’ve ever lifted a case of Agricola wood, a very hefty part of our family, as well!). One fun fact about the Seidenstücher facility is its ‘zero-waste’ program. The castoff wood from the production of the components is recycled into pellets, that are in turn used to generate heat for their facility. German efficiency for the win!

Our philosophy of buying local comes from our desire to support the communities that we live and game in. Games are a luxury commodity, and when you buy a Mayfair Games product, we want people to not only know that they’re buying a quality game, but they’re also part of a grand network of people working to improve the communities they live, work, and play in, both here and abroad… and, we at Mayfair Games thank you for helping us support our neighbors and partners!