The Nyawice puts a leaf-spring F1 mount under a friction-fit-cat-ears Alice

Alice boards open most weeks somewhere on the custom side of the hobby; the layout is not scarce, and "another Alice" is not, on its own, news. What earns the Nyawice a column at thock is the combination underneath the silhouette: a less-common leaf-spring F1 mount, a 9-degree typing angle at the upper end of what Alice-style boards ship, and a decorative-attachment system — friction-fit silicone cat ears and a nose in four colorways — that treats the case as a surface to dress rather than a sculpture to leave alone. The group buy is open at CannonKeys through 2026-05-17.

The mount is the story

Most Alice boards in 2026 land on one of two mount families. Gasket-mount is the dominant choice on the premium tier; tray-mount survives at the budget tier and on older designs that haven't been redrawn. The Nyawice picks a third, less-trafficked option: a leaf-spring F1 mount, where a sprung leaf carries the plate at defined contact points and acts as a tuning lever for both typing feel and case acoustics.

The acoustic case for leaf-spring is straightforward in theory and unpredictable in practice. A well-tuned leaf decouples the plate from the case shell enough to keep the spectrogram clean, but unlike gasket strips the leaf transmits a defined amount of resonance back into the chassis. A leaf-spring F1 build can come out either crisper or hollower than its gasket sibling depending on the case wall thickness, the plate material, and how aggressively the leaves are tensioned. Reviewers will spend the next month figuring out which of those the Nyawice is. The mount choice is what makes that worth watching.

The 9-degree typing angle compounds the question. Nine degrees is high — toward the upper end of what Alice-style boards ship, and a degree or two past what readers with rest-flat wrist posture will find comfortable without a palm rest. Higher angles do interact with leaf-spring mounts in non-obvious ways: a steeper plate sits at a different load distribution on the leaves than a flat one, which can either tighten or loosen the perceived feedback. Readers cross-shopping the Nyawice against a flatter gasket Alice should not assume the same plate material will sound or feel the same in this chassis.

Where it fits the layout picture

The Alice category has been cooling on thock's snapshot for most of 2026 — the trends piece on the slow fade of Alice layouts has the layout down 18 percent on this week's tracker, and the shape there is more drain than collapse. The Nyawice is not a counter-argument to that read, but it is a counter-example: a vendor with a real audience betting that a specific combination of mount, angle, and aesthetic still has a buy-through audience inside the cooling envelope. One group buy is a data point, not a trend reversal. If it sells through cleanly, it complicates the "Alice is stalled" thesis at the margin; if it doesn't, it confirms it.

The broader split-ergo cohort the corpus has been tracking is adjacent but not the same conversation. Alice fits the split-spacebar bracket without being a true ergo board — the splay is fixed by the designer, not the typist — and most Nyawice buyers will be choosing it for its aesthetics and feel, not as an ergonomic intervention. Treating the Nyawice as a flag-bearer for the ergo cohort would be a misread; treating it as a quietly-engineered Alice with an unusual mount choice is closer to right.

The cat ears, on purpose

The friction-fit silicone cat ears and the matching nose are not a marketing add-on; they ship as a defining feature of the buy, in four colorways — orange, pink, baby blue, lilac. Editorially this is the part of the story that's easy to dismiss and worth not dismissing. The custom side of the hobby has spent a decade making board aesthetics a fixed property of the case at fabrication time: anodization, top weight, badge. The decorative-attachment idea — pieces a user can pop on or off without a screwdriver, in colorways picked from a 4-option palette — is a different posture toward the object. It treats the case as a surface that can change moods between Tuesday and Friday.

Whether that idea travels past the Nyawice depends on whether buyers actually swap the colorways, or whether the cat ears end up as a single permanent install per board. The friction-fit choice is the right one for the experiment: a magnetic or screw-mounted attachment would have implied a forever commitment, and silicone friction-fit reads as deliberately impermanent. If the swap rate is real, expect other vendors to start sketching their own decorative-attachment ecosystems within twelve months.

Buying notes

The buy is global through CannonKeys, with one checkout and one fulfillment timeline. The window is 2026-04-17 through 2026-05-17 — a four-week buy, opening today. PCB choice includes a hotswap option, which materially expands the cross-shop set against any MX2A-era switch a hotswap-Alice build might land on without solder. Soldered PCB remains the default for buyers who want the cleaner board feel. Pricing, plate options, and the per-colorway availability of the silicone pieces are listed on the vendor page; thock is not republishing them here because configurator prices on CannonKeys group buys can move during the window.

A note on links: group-buy URLs published on thock are auto-flagged with rel="sponsored noopener" at render time. The tag is applied by the site, not the editorial team. thock has no affiliate arrangement with CannonKeys for the Nyawice.

Full configurator and the current window are at CannonKeys's product page; the live entry alongside the other open buys lives on /group-buys.

What we're watching

Two questions hang off this buy. The first is sales velocity: a clean sell-through is a small but real counterweight to the Alice-decline read; a soft close inside an expected-extension window would confirm it. The second is whether leaf-spring F1 shows up in any other 2026 board project after the Nyawice ships. Mount choices propagate through the custom side slowly — a single high-profile build with a different mount can move the next eighteen months of designer conversation, or it can vanish without an echo. The Nyawice is the cleanest test case of the year so far for both questions. Reports back when the window closes.