Pre-Order Update: January 2026

Hello Backers,

 

Here is your (belated) January update with the latest on production and shipping. It will be a short one again, as I just came back from China for the third time in the last 6 months. I went over one more time to make sure everything was ready before the Chinese New Year, when the entire country shuts down for several weeks.

 

For our US Backers, I'm sorry to say nothing has changed regarding the tariffs. We are still waiting on a possible decision from the Supreme court in April or so. Although, with everything else going on, I wouldn't be surprised if the conservative justices find a way to avoid making a decision and angering the administration...

Speaking of everything going on: if you are out there protesting, thank you, and please be safe!

 

Our non-US backers should receive notifications this month. A reminder that you will receive multiple emails from us. The first email will let you know about any colorway swap in your order, and the next email will be a shipping notification. There should be no required action on your part after you get the notification emails. However, now is a good time to update your shipping address if you need to. You should be able to modify it yourself on your gamewithpixels.com order page. If not, let Luna know and we'll make sure to process all those tickets before we send out packages.

 

As I said, I went back to Shenzhen this month to make sure everything goes smoothly, and for the most part, it has. There has been plenty of small issues, as always, and being on-site really made a difference in resolving those issues quickly so that the stock is ready before everyone goes on vacation.

 

For those following along, this does mean we will be shipping rewards directly from China again, contrary to what I had been planning (and telling you) for the last few months.

After going back and forth with warehouses and fulfillment centers to find the best deal, and navigating the maze of paperwork needed to get products stored locally, we stumbled upon a new China-based fulfillment service with good rates and reliability.

 

Doing the math, it will cost us roughly the same to use them as it would shipping to local warehouses and then using local postal services, and significantly less than using our previous Hong-Kong-based partner. All that without the hassle of importing goods ourselves and having to split the inventory into multiple countries. This new partner will take care of the customs fees and paperwork for us, but for much less overhead than the Hong-Kong-based solution.

 

The only issue is that we already have a stock of finished and packaged singles in Hong-Kong, while this new center is in mainland China (Dongguan), and we can't just move stock back and forth easily. So in the end I decided to just make more Singles in China so we can fulfill rewards for all non-US backers form a single location.

 

We moved the Hong-Kong stock out of our previous fulfillment partner into a cheaper warehouse, and will keep it there until at some point we can ship it to the US.

 

 

Last time I was in China, I visited a Gemstone dice factory (I shared pictures of their "inventory" in the November update). While I still haven't figured out how to make a proper Gemstone Pixel Die 😉, I did get a really nice surprise from the factory this visit: they made us some custom dice. That one crystal has got so many facet, it's almost too hard to tell that it's a D20. It is absolutely gorgeous though, so many reflections and colors...

 

Anyway, more Pixels news soon,

 

Jean