The listing looks exactly right. Same box, same beloved brand, same smiling dog, half the price of the vet's shelf. What arrives might be the genuine export stock. It might also be a tube of flavoured nothing, or a cat product's chemistry in a dog product's box, and with medicines the difference is not a disappointing purchase. It is an untreated infestation at best and an emergency visit at worst.
Regulators in the US and Europe have warned about counterfeit pet medicines for years, and seizures keep turning them up in the same discount channels that move fake everything else. The packaging is the easy part to copy. The pharmacology is the part that matters.
Counterfeit board games are usually printed from scans of the genuine components, so the tells are physical: thin card stock, washed or misregistered colours, soft focus art, and rulebook text with translation artefacts the original never had. The price gap exists because scanning is cheap and licensing, illustration, and decent printing are not.
A real game's components are expensive in boring ways: thick card with a linen finish, colour calibrated printing, plastic or wooden pieces made to survive a thousand plays, and a box engineered to hold it all. The counterfeit keeps the art and cuts every one of those costs. Cards feel like cereal box stock, colours drift, faces in artwork blur, and tokens arrive as the cheapest approximation the printer stocks.
Text betrays the process. Scanned and retyped rulebooks collect small errors, odd phrasing, and mistranslated terms that no publisher's proofing produced, because the text went through scanning software and hurried translation instead of an editor. A game whose genuine edition is in your language but whose rulebook reads like a back translation is telling you its family history.
The buyer gets a worse object that wears out fast, cards that shuffle poorly and mark easily, which in games with hidden information is a rules problem, not just a quality one. The publisher gets the support emails anyway, from owners asking for replacement parts for a product the publisher never made, and the secondhand market gets poisoned for everyone when fakes circulate as genuine at game swaps and resale sites.
Designers of smaller games feel this disproportionately. A print run is a large bet for an independent publisher, and a counterfeit wave during the game's best months takes exactly the sales that fund the next design. Buying the suspiciously cheap copy is rarely a victimless bargain, even before the cards start delaminating.
Before buying, compare the listing's weight and dimensions with the publisher's own specifications; copies are often slightly smaller and noticeably lighter. Check the seller's catalogue: a shop offering dozens of unrelated hit games at uniform deep discounts is describing a print source, not a stockroom. After purchase, compare card stock and print sharpness against any genuine component photos on the publisher's site, and weigh the box.
If it is a copy, report the listing with the physical differences documented; marketplaces act faster on specifics, stock thickness, misprints, wrong weight, than on suspicion. And buy expansions from the publisher's listed retailers, because a genuine base game with a counterfeit expansion recreates every problem in miniature.
Keep reading: Counterfeit Pet Medicines: Flea Treatments and Wormers That Do Nothing, or Worse, Fake Concert Merchandise Online: The Tour Shirt That Never Saw the Venue, and Counterfeit Bike Helmets: The Certification Sticker Is Printed, Not Earned cover the nearby cases in this series.
Compare the physical object: thin, untextured card stock, soft or misregistered printing, lighter box weight and slightly smaller dimensions than the publisher's specifications, and rulebook wording with translation errors the genuine edition does not have.
The copyist skips licensing, illustration, editing, quality printing, and durable components, which are most of a game's real cost. What remains is scanning and cheap printing, so the price gap maps closely onto everything that was skipped.
Publishers cannot supply parts for products they did not manufacture, and counterfeit components often differ in size and finish anyway. The practical route is a refund from the seller and a report to the marketplace with the differences documented.
Yes, and they hurt more. A counterfeit wave during a small game's best selling months takes the margin that funds the next print run and the next design, while the publisher still fields the support complaints the copies generate.