US board game market revenue

In a development that will surprise no one who spent 2020 playing Catan in their living room, the American board game market and USPS package volume have been marching in lockstep since 2010. One can imagine the postal workers, buried under an avalanche of Ticket to Ride expansions, developing an unironic appreciation for the hobby. The correlation of 0.9721 across fourteen years suggests that tabletop gaming and cardboard-box logistics have entered into some kind of sacred covenant.

Both the board game renaissance and the USPS package boom were fueled by the same underlying shift: e-commerce. Tabletop gaming's resurgence through the 2010s was driven largely by crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and direct-to-consumer online sales, which meant board games were primarily shipped rather than shelf-bought. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 then supercharged both trends simultaneously — lockdowns drove record board game sales while e-commerce penetration surged across every retail category.

The USPS and the board game industry are, in a very literal sense, in the same business: moving cardboard rectangles from one place to another and hoping the contents survive the journey. That they grew together is less correlation than logistics.