Hi, everyone. Jason here.

As always, I want to kick off by inviting you to join us on The Gauntlet Discord server.

Before I dive into project updates, I want to shine a spotlight on the amazing work being done by Amanda and team over at Sprigs & Kindling. Sprigs & Kindling is a free Carved from Brindlewood fanzine that comes out every few months. There are now three volumes available and each is 100% FREE. Go download them!

Also, Sprigs & Kindling is going to be holding an online writing retreat in August! Here are the details: 
This free online writing retreat will take place August 11 to August 17, and is currently in planning stages. It will take place on Discord, and is open to people interested in Carved from Brindlewood game writing and design. Current sessions/workshops planned include: 

 If you are interested in participating please fill out this form! If you have any questions, please contact Amanda/iamatrex on discord or email sprigsandkindling at gmail!

I'm sorry to be crude, but the situation with the trade war is total dog shit. To be clear, I'm not speaking on the politics of the matter; there's nothing to be done about the politics at this point—it's the reality we have to deal with. And that reality, as it currently stands, is a 55% tariff on goods from China. Before Trump was sworn in, the thinking was that we'd be dealing with a 20% tariff on Chinese goods. That itself was a bad scenario, but I was prepared to make a lot of personal sacrifices so it wouldn't affect our projects (who needs dental care anyway, amirite?). A 55% tariff is... truly awful.

The problem with the trade war isn't just the increased cost of goods, which would be bad enough on its own, but also the effect it has on available shipping containers. We are a small publisher, and we depend on being able to have our products tucked into the corner of a shipping container that is already coming over to the United States. High tariffs mean even higher shipping costs, because trade is reduced and there are fewer shipping containers.

And I know this from personal experience! We had to ship Trophy RPG when the pandemic had massively disrupted supply chains. Because of those disruptions, our shipping costs tripled from what we originally estimated. It nearly ended us, but thankfully Brindlewood Bay was a big hit and gave us some breathing room.

There's also just a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what's going to happen. Some people think books aren't affected by the tariffs, but that has not been my experience. We recently shipped the Brindlewood Bay Cookbook and had to pay a bunch of extra import duties, despite the fact it was labeled as a book and not a game. Based on what I know right now, I estimate that a 55% tariff means our total costs to print and get space on a shipping container will be doubled from what you would expect in a normal environment. 

All of this is even further complicated by the fact that our business was counting on being able to do certain things not related to The Between, such as doing a new print run of Trophy RPG with cash on-hand. That's completely out the window now, and so there's a whole big revenue stream I can't count on anymore. Anticipating that, I've had to cut back on a lot of things in the community, meaning I've had to take on a lot more work than I had at the beginning of the year. 

Like I said, dog shit. 

As I mentioned in the last update, the lack of clarity on tariffs makes it impossible to plan when we can open the preorder store and BackerKit surveys. We have several unannounced add-ons we created for this project, and we have no idea how much we should be charging for them. 

That said, we're moving forward. Allegedly, we'll be getting more precise guidance on tariffs in early July. I'm not holding out much hope that this situation is going to go back to anything like it was in 2024, but who knows? In any case, we're sending surveys and launching the preorder store in late July. Assuming the tariffs don't go any higher, we should at least be able to break even on the project, and so we have some risk tolerance there. 

To be candid, knowing that The Between is likely going to just break even is demoralizing, especially since it's because of arbitrary and mercurial trade policies being forced on us. I've had to really dig deep to find my motivation here. Happily, I've managed to find it in two places: 1) the community surrounding this game and 2) focusing on the things I can control. People love this game and have been playing it for 4 years now. The community surrounding it is amazing and inspiring—affirmed by the support you've given here on BackerKit—and no matter how bad things get, that is something that gives me life and motivation. I sometimes think about the fact that my game has been played by thousands of people and it's just mind-blowing. We're going to get this done for ya'll, trade war be damned.

As for the things I can control, well, that's making sure we get the PDFs back on track and released. My revised estimate for the PDFs is late August for the core book and maaaaaybe Shadow Society. Suns of Another World is a bit tougher to predict. Three of the settings are done, but we're still waiting on Blood & Coal. Assuming I can get Blood & Coal on track, a September release for Suns feels do-able. 

I do want to share some fun stuff with you, though. Below is a folder of all the ready-for-layout drafts of the core book handouts. This includes playbooks, Threats, Mastermind Conspiracy, Mastermind Confrontation, Hargrave House Rooms, Residents, and Reference Sheet. I know some folks would like to start playing with the new rules, and these docs—combined with the old edition of the game—will allow you to do that. There's also a big homebrew community for The Between, and I know those folks want to know what the new rules and format are like so they can make their homebrews match up. This will also help with that. 

A few things about these drafts:

Honestly, even if we don't get the PDFs completely finished until September, there's a chance we can still ship books by late December/early January—we have a good working relationship with the printer at this point, and a Chinese agent who helps speed up a process that used to take many months. More likely, though, I'd plan for late February/ early March 2026.

I'd like to end the update by sharing some more of the fabulous art we've commissioned for the game...

As ever, thanks so much for your support!

-Jason

Hey everyone, Jason here.

The last 24 hours have been a real rollercoaster of anxiety, and I fear the ride isn't over yet. The massive and wide-reaching tariffs announced by the U.S. administration this week are going to destroy thousands of small businesses, and I'm going to do my level best to make sure The Gauntlet isn't one of them.

The tariffs aren't going to stop us from fulfilling The Between, but I've decided to pause rolling out the pledge manager and preorders until I've had time to talk to our lawyer and our printing partners to figure out how the tariffs are going to affect things. We had planned a number of add-ons for the preorder page, but now we have to assess the feasibility of doing those, and at what cost we have to sell them. We don't anticipate shipping costs for BackerKit pledges being higher than what we originally estimated on the campaign page, but they're almost certainly going to be on the higher end of the estimated range now.

We have some flexibility built into our business model (we learned a lot trying to fulfill Trophy RPG during Covid), but anyone who tells you they can easily adapt to manufacturing costs increasing 54% overnight is lying to you. We have to be very careful right now—any mistake we make in the printing and fulfillment could be an existential one. And so that's why I've hit pause until we can figure out what exactly is going on, and how we're going to be affected.

I will add that I'm not interested in discussing the politics surrounding this, or whether these tariffs are going to stick. The president is known to be quite mercurial when it comes to this kind of thing, but we can't count on these tariffs going away, and so we have to plan accordingly.

Speaking not just of us, but of the entire industry, I ask that you give the game creators in your life some grace over the next weeks and months. Everyone is scared (pity the poor board game people—they're fucked if these tariffs last); no one wants to see the business they've spent years building evaporate overnight because of an unnecessary trade war. Also: please do not "helpfully" recommend that we simply print our stuff in the United States. It's not that easy. There are only a handful of book printers in the U.S., and they are incredibly expensive and difficult to employ if you're not a big publishing house. As for non-book components, the U.S. is simply not set up for that kind of machine tooling for game parts. It's unrealistic, period.

On the lighter side of things, and in an effort to not end this update on such a bummer note, The Bad Spot recently started a new actual play of The Between! It's pretty incredible, and is the first AP to use the rules of the new edition of the game. Check it out 

Thanks for your patience while we try to figure out this unprecedented situation. 

-Jason