This update, directly from founder, Jean Simonet, has been adapted from the communication shared with our Kickstarter Backers and contains transparent, detailed information about Pixels production. Some details have been adjusted to focus on Pre-order info vs Backer Rewards. These updates are published at the end of each month and will continue to be re-published on the Pixels Blog with information relevant to Pre-order customers.
Dear Pre-Order Customers,
It’s been a busy start to the year, and I’m here to share some progress updates with you all. Take a seat, grab your favorite treat, and let me tell you all the things that happened this month.
👉 Highlight: Several thousand shipments going out in February, including some sets.
🎲 Production: Sets and Singles
This month marks a big milestone for us: the batch of sets are finally ready to go!

This (small) batch is currently sitting at the ‘Final Assembly’ factory, the last step before the fulfillment center. We’re waiting on some battery safety documentation so that the pallet can be transported across the border to the Hong Kong fulfillment center.
We also finished and sent several thousand Singles to the fulfillment center, as I had announced last update.
In fact, we actually hit all the production goals we set for January, including singles and sets, which is great! To be fair, our goals only included a relatively small number of Onyx and Hematite dice because of the ongoing difficulties producing them (more on this further down).
📦 Fulfillment Hurdles
As we prepared the next batch of fulfillments, we ran into an unexpected challenge with our shipping logistics partner. Right as we were ready to create our next batch, our fulfillment partner’s system canceled most of our pending orders. Turns out, their system has a ‘feature’ that automatically deletes incomplete orders after a certain period of time (between 6 and 12 months depending on the situation).
Normally this wouldn’t be a big issue—we would just recreate the orders from the data we have on our website—except that we decided to offer split-shipping and relied on the fulfillment system’s data as our ultimate “source of truth” regarding what was still outstanding vs. what had already shipped.
To make a long, slightly embarrassing story short, we were able to rebuild the data, recreate the orders, and re-upload them to the logistics backend. That was, of course, right before everybody on that side of the world left for the holidays (Chinese New Year) and were no longer available to push the approval through!
Trust me, the irony of the situation is not lost on me. Shipments are delayed because of all the delays to get to the point where we can ship.
Anyway, it’s all ready to go now, so we should have several thousand shipments going out in February!
🛠️ Onyx & Hematite Fixes
Onyx and Hematite dice are still being difficult, I’m afraid to say…
My first fix to modify the inner casting didn’t quite work. In an attempt to minimize tooling cost, I asked the mold factory to modify the existing molds to try and add little ‘fingers’ to hold the circuit board in place.

A quick reminder that these steel pieces are the critical part of the tooling that makes the molds, that make the dice. The tooling insert is the positive that makes the silicone mold (negative) that in turn makes the dice (positive). It’s perfectly clear, right? 😊
But the results weren’t satisfactory, mainly because the ‘fingers’ would break too easily. (You can also see that I missed a location to add a finger, but that would have been easy to fix anyway).
So I didn’t have a choice and had to try a new inner mold shape, with more surface area to hold the circuit board (and LEDs) down in place while also staying together better (avoiding thin features that would tear off the mold itself). Fortunately, because our tooling is modular, we’re only paying for these small pieces to get CNC’d, not the whole 30kg steel plates.

And the results are encouraging! Here are a couple test casts (a clear one to check positioning and a translucent white one to check diffusion). Unfortunately, the white samples showed an issue remaining with the LED on Face 18, that we are addressing now. In short, because 18 is a wide number, there isn’t really enough circuit board “meat” to always hold it down correctly. But by making small tweaks to the tooling (and being careful to not encroach on the number area itself) I am confident we will be able to avoid the issue entirely.

Another benefit of this new inner mold is that it gives the LED light some extra room to diffuse. In fact, LEDs can now enjoy a whole 0.42mm extra leg room so the light can spread out before reaching the surface ;). This was achieved by reducing the numbers’ depth from 1.27mm to 0.85mm. A big deal!

Please keep in mind that while we test these solutions, we are doing our best to keep production going on some quantity of Onyx and Hematite dice but that process is slow and costly.
To make sure we’re not creating more dice we’ll need to replace, we’ve had to order thousands more little spacers for the cores, and the workers have had to go really slow to make sure the numbers come out clean and the light shines through correctly. We’re in essence brute-forcing our way through to make sure we can ship something while we continue to hammer at our long-term solution. As much as possible, we’ve shifted production to easier colorways and/or shapes, as I’ve explained in the October and November updates.

D00 and D6
In parallel to improving the position and location of LEDs with better inner molds, we are considering other improvements. Particularly with double digit face numbers, even when we achieve a really good alignment, the light has a hard time diffusing properly. We’re hopeful that the increased inner casting thickness will help, but we didn’t want to leave it at that.

The D00 is a particularly difficult die to deal with (and mobile phone pictures do a really good job exacerbating the issue). It looks better in person, and it isn’t as important as with the D20, so we’re not really considering scraping our current batches. Plus who cares about the percentile die anyway? Personally it’s only ever brought me bad luck, so…🤭
But still, for future batches, it would be nice to have a solution, so… the next Onyx and Hematite D00s will most likely have double the LEDs.

In fact we are also considering updating the D6 circuit board, considering how popular that shape is and how large the numbers are on its face.
For the D6 we are testing out two ideas: bigger LEDs VS more LEDs!

These boards are just off the press, so we haven’t even had time to do test castings and compare the results. Stay tuned for that!
⏸️ Website & New Pre-Orders
As I’ve shared in the last couple updates, we’re getting ready to roll out some updates to the Pixels website. While most of these changes will be behind the scenes, to improve performance and hosting costs, you’ll notice a much slicker account and order management system, including better tracking of your split shipping items, if applicable.
We will also be closing the pre-order program for a bit while we sort out which items to continue offering for pre-order (and focus on delivering existing pre-orders). Right now some of the SKUs are so unpopular that an actual pre-order would cost us more in final assembly cost than to lose the pre-order sale.
That said, we will continue to release limited stock of immediately available dice as they’re ready.
Why would there be extra stock?
In essence, because of the way our manufacturing batches have to work, some mistakes that were made, and recently because we’ve had to shift dice types and colorways around a bunch in the past months (because of all the various issues) we have more dice in certain colorways than we need to just fulfill rewards.
Our plan is to continue offering complementary split shipping as much as it makes sense so that if you are expecting one of the dice/colorways in question, you would get it as soon as possible.
I’ve had to draw the line somewhere, and so for now the rule is that if we can send you all your Singles, then we would, and send you your sets later.
💰 Common Question: Tariffs
We’ve heard this question from several US-based customers: “What are you planning to do if tariffs are imposed?”
To address this briefly: our product currently falls under the HTS category 9504.90.6000, which—for now—remains exempt from tariffs. Of course, we’re actively monitoring the situation and will keep a close eye on any changes that might affect this status.
In addition, import duties and tariffs in the US are not imposed on individuals (up to an $800 value, I believe), so shipments from Hong Kong directly to you should still be exempt.
🌍 Game Theory Tables
Before I go, I wanted to quickly share that we’re collaborating with Game Theory Tables (GTT), who we met at PAX Unplugged in December. We demoed Pixels working with Foundry VTT on their interactive table at the show. It was really cool. As a result, GTT would like to offer a few Pixels in their upcoming campaign.
It’s a small number of dice and will not affect Pre-Order fulfillment in any way, but I wanted to mention it ahead of time. We have more info in our blog post.
More soon—thank you for sticking with us on this journey.
Warm regards,
Jean Simonet
Pixels Founder