As you can all tell by the lack of Honor Bound on your favorite store shelves, this product has been recalled. A mistake was found late in the packaging process that made the product defective. Here is the whole story as of 6/29/99. We're sorry this story is a few weeks out of date by the time you get this in your hands, but we're going to press tomorrow, and we thought we'd tell you everything we could. For the latest details, please visit www.frpg. com.

After cards are cut from a press sheet they are put through a cutting die; it's sort of like a big cookie cutter for cards. These dies get dull after repeated use and need to be replaced. Our press checker stayed with the packaging company for quite a while, making sure they were operating to our specifications, and when he felt everything was well in hand, he returned to Seattle. Unknown to our checker, after he left, a die needed to be replaced and the packaging company replaced it with the wrongsized die. It was close enough not too look different, but it was off by enough to make the cards "marked" in competitive play. The cards were hard to shuffle, and very easy to cut too.

After getting some samples here, we tried to assess the depth of the error. It looked like anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 the set was affected. After finding out how pervasive it was, we realized that we couldn't do a redemption program, that the product had to be recalled.

We felt we made a promise to stores to run pre- release events, so we continued with the US events, and asked that all the oversized cards be returned. Since the product was defective, we didn't charge the stores for the product and asked that they pass this savings to the players.

Tons of other things came up in this situation that would take this whole magazine to explain (like how Dave's car was impounded at the Canadian border along with the product he was trying to deliver to our British Columbia stores), but needless to say, people were scurrying all over the place trying to do what we could to make things right. We are in the process of doing a reprint right now and we hope to have it soon, but at the time of this writing, we have no idea of a release date. Keep your fingers crossed.

We also don't know if Honor Bound cards will be legal at the big GenCon tournament since the cards aren't widely available. Please check our website for the latest information.

While we know this is a pain for all of our retailers, distributors and most importantly our players, we hope you all understand that our decision to hold back product was the only possible solution to the problem. The real killer to me personally is that the cards in this set are incredibly cool.

See you all at GenCon!

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