Pre-Order Update: November 2025

Hello backers,

 

Your update is a little early this month, as I just completed my trip to China and am back home, at least for a little while. Read on for some important updates about your rewards (no action required), and behind the scenes deep dives.

 

Let's get this part out of the way first: since last month there has been no significant development on the US tariff's front. Or to clarify: nothing that affects us directly. There has been a rollback of tariffs on agricultural imports, but unfortunately (and contrary to popular belief) dice do not qualify as food. There is a case in front of the Supreme Court, however, and they are expected to rule on the situation early next year.

Let me start the update with the news that I have been the most apprehensive to share: Onyx and Hematite dice are still as much of a pain to make as they have been, with a scrap rate still far too high. By now, we are on attempt 4 or 5 trying to get a large-scale-viable manufacturing process together, and have just not been able to get there yet.

In fact, months ago, worried about the possibility that we would not find a solution, I asked the dice factory to switch a large quantity of our outstanding OB and HG dice order to Midnight Galaxy instead. I haven't given up on the only-the-numbers-light-up colorways, but that effort is going to have to take a backseat until we finally get lucky and find something that works at-scale. For now, I have to make the best decision I can and unfortunately, that means swapping out some of your rewards colorway choices to Midnight Galaxy.

 

In order to keep the support queue manageable, please DO NOT contact Luna to ask for a specific change. We have several thousand OB and HG dice, just not enough for everyone. What will happen is we will assign dice and sets to backers in backer-order, so earlier backers will have a much greater chance of getting their choice of OB or HG, with later backers more likely to have one or more of their reward items swapped for another colorway.

 

I considered offering you option to select which colorway you would like instead, or even give you the option to turn one of your reward item into a voucher (so you could wait for a new cooler colorway), but the logistics of it is just too much for how small our team is right now. We would need to make a portal for you to be able to make that choice, remind you about it before the deadline, eventually make that choice for you if you don't, and properly record this in your order. It should be doable, but it's not an insignificant amount of custom web development, and work that would involve private customer data, and every complication that this brings with it, which is just too much right now.

So instead, we will let you know what colorway you're getting when we're about to ship it out to you. Again, I'm so sorry it has to be this way.

 

I have been teasing updates to the large charging case for several months now, and I am finally ready to share more. So let me introduce you to the new large charging case:

I call it Hex Charging case rather than Large charging case for obvious reasons.

The previous iteration of the large charging case just doesn't work well. It is bulky. The closing mechanism is un-intuitive. There is no per-charger indicator (only leds on the side of the case, like a power bank). And with all that it is expensive to make.

 

In hindsight, the large charging case is a very good example of making the wrong assumptions and over-engineering a solution for those. For one thing, I was so convinced that because magnets can turn off the dice, it wouldn't be a good idea to use them for the closing mechanism. But since I still wanted the lid to be removable, we ended up designing a bad snap and click mechanism. The integrated battery was a similar story. In order for the case to be able to recharge dice from its internal battery, I needed to add a lot of smarts to the case. However in practice it turns out that the wireless charging is very inefficient, so the internal battery can not provide that many charges, and the dice are so power efficient that recharging on-the-go is really not that big a deal.

 

 

In essence the 500 set run we did earlier this year really gave us the "user-testing" that big tech companies do all the time. For example, if the case is charging dice AND recharging the internal battery, the power draw can be pretty high, which means you need a good USB power adapter (2A). It turns out there are a lot of sub-par adapters out there.

 

Looking into it, what it would take to fix the large charging case (specifically the injection-molded parts) was about the same as making new tooling, so that's what we did instead. Honestly, I don't regret it! The new Hex Charger looks way better. It has magnets! It turns out that we could use magnets for the closing mechanism all along, and they wouldn't interfere with the dice when the lid is open. We just had to try it and I never did.

 

Anyway, the new case is ready now; it's much more sensible to use (and easier to manufacture) and it looks great! It's small in a good way. The lid snaps on and stays firmly in place. The dice don't rattle around and there are LEDs for each charger. Finally, the side LED will glow bright orange (instead of red) if there is a problem with your USB adapter. And... that's it, it's really nice!

 

Now, some of you will notice that the case only has charging slots for the standard RPG set. I'm sorry to say that, for now, this is the only version we will make. It is quite simply a cost-cutting measure: RPG sets make the overwhelming majority of rewards, so it is the one I focused on. In the future we will make a modular version of it as well, but for now, if you are waiting on one of the odd sets (board gamer, power, etc...) you will either receive individual dice and chargers or a large charging case. It will all come down to logistics.

 

As I said, the new hex charging case is much simpler than the Modular Large Charging case, but it still has some pretty neat innovations up its sleeve, not least of which are the wireless charging coils. They are now embedded in the circuit board. This is a technique that I had been eyeing for a long time, where you simply draw a copper coil on your circuit board rather than make it with actual copper wire.

Now it is pretty difficult to get the winding just right, as the formulas to calculate the coil's specs (track thickness, track width, track spacing and number of turns) are not very accurate, and simulators are extremely expensive. However, with a few test boards, and a significant amount of trial and error, I was able to create a PCB coil that matched the characteristics of the wire-wound one.

This is a huge advantage, but not so much because it saves the cost of the wire-wound coils. It absolutely does, but not as much as you might think because the PCB itself needs to have thicker copper layers than it would have otherwise, and the amount of copper is the main driver of cost for PCBs. In the end, the PCB with embedded coils is maybe only 25%-50% cheaper than a thinner PCB + wire-wound coils. The real savings are actually in the assembly and quality control. Wire-wound coils are positioned, glued, and solder by hand, which takes time and needs to be checked. PCB coils are always perfect!

Ultimately, I think I will re-tool the (previous) Large Charging Case into a 10-die modular charging case. That means taking out the battery, re-doing the circuit board and creating a new mid-plate. This will differentiate it from the Hex Charging Case and make it much more valuable.

 

I'd like to take a small detour here, as developing the Hex charger gave me a really good illustration of why so many of us manufacture things in China.

Cost is obviously what everyone thinks of, and it is a big part of it. Then of course, the other reason is that we don't have a choice anymore. In the US you either cannot find manufacturers, or if you can, their prices are terribly inflated because their main (remaining) customers are defense contractors or research institutions. In our case, we can not find a resin dice manufacturer in the US, and while we can find many circuit board manufacturers, the difference in price is at least 5-fold.

 

However - and I am pretty sure other small manufacturers will back me on this - one of the reason we generally enjoy working with Chinese suppliers is that they are happy to work with us regardless of scale, and will give us the same level of service as larger customers. Most of them won't hesitate to make (and remake) samples, and do it quickly. They will fix any issue without complaints and work with us until we're happy. And ultimately, they will do all this for a reasonable price, indeed.

While developing the circuit board for the Hex Charger, for instance, I ran into an issue seemingly related to the main Integrated Circuit we use on the board. For some reason it wouldn't start, unexplainably, and my attempts to figure out why went nowhere. We contacted the supplier on WeChat, sent our boards in, exchanged a few messages, and in 24 hours they had identified the issue and proposed a change to the design. When they sent the boards back, I realized the length to which they went: They de-lidded the ICs to look directly at the silicon and confirm the issue, then test that their workaround was effective. Now, in all, I have probably given this company a few thousand dollars worth of business. For an IC manufacturer, this is nothing. Yet their engineer messaged me at 11pm his time to let me know he had figured out the issue!

 

I mentioned last update that one of the most fun parts of being in China is visiting factories (if you're me anyway). Across my several trips I have now visited many dice and dice-related factories, and seen many types of dice.

For instance, one of the reason gemstone dice are so expensive is simply that the majority of the manufacturing process is manual. I didn't believe it myself, but yeah, most gemstone dice are made one-at-a-time, slowly, by hand, with minimal tools.

Anyway, some of the dice I saw had this really neat metallic color-changing surface effect. I'm sure you've seen some. Well, it's a process called electro-plating. So... we gave the supplier some Pixels to try and electroplate!

The end result is really cool, and there is a good chance that this becomes one of the first post-KS colorways. I tentatively call it Electric Galaxy. I was worried that this coating would disturb the wireless charging or Bluetooth, but if we keep it to a minimum, just enough to have the color-changing effect but not enough to look like metal, then both were unaffected.

 

We did try electroplating all the colorways, but I didn't really like the end result on AS and CL dice. We only had already-inked dice on hand at the time, and both the Clear and Aurora inks turned weird after applying the electroplating. If there's time we'll try again with fresh, un-inked dice and share the results with everyone!

 

That's about all for this month, thanks again for your support and continued patience.

More news soon.

Jean