Waddle

About Waddle

Waddle is designed by Corné van Moorsel and published by Allplay.

This family-friendly strategy game has players strategically placing penguins to form groups and claim fish to score the most points! Place penguins to form groups, called "waddles". The bigger the group the more points!

The game rules are simple, but don't let the cute penguins fool you! There are some tense strategic decisions to be made here. On your turn, you can only place one of your penguins around the current lowest numbered water hex, meaning you must build your groups of penguins and surround lakes cleverly over time. By scouting ahead, you can skip your turn, giving up additional penguin placement now yet changing player priority and turn order.

Project Overview:

Brieger Creative;s job involved figuring out what worked well from Corné's original design, what to adjust, and what to add. This was not a project of big, sweeping changes. Rather, it was blending dozens of impactful yet smaller changes to fine-tune an existing game to make the best it could be.

Work involved tweaking gameplay in a variety of ways including gameplay length, tile distribution, player scaling, scoring, and component interaction and clarity. Brieger Creative also created the expansion, which combines 3 different gameplay modules that can be used in any combination.

Services Provided:

Case Study: Updating a Previously Published Game

Corné's original design is a solid game that was already complete and loved by players. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be better given new life by adapting it for the publisher's brand and today's game market. We played the game a lot internally and externally, as well as researched online forums and videos to gather data on how to best proceed with development.

One early change Brieger Creative made was game length and pacing. The original title was essentially played twice per game session: once in clockwise starting turn order, then while keeping the same map layout and score, playing again in counter clockwise starting turn order. We saw why the original design might have done this — it is the most fair, it gave players a way to adapt over time to opponents, and it extended what would often be too short of a play experience.

However, we found that players really didn't care to play a second reset game - they would much rather do an entirely new session with a different map and random starting turn order. Also, if one player took a commanding lead in the first game, players were committed to playing a second game they were very likely going to lose. Our solution for Waddle was to play once, with more tiles, giving players a more satisfying game length while also allowing for more strategy with a larger map.

Another significant change was fish scoring. In both versions of the game, players scored fish based on having a majority of penguins around a pool. The original had fish scoring rules that varied at multiple player counts, and was often confusing to players. The updated Waddle captures the essence of fish scoring in a clearer way, while greatly increasing points per fish and number of fish on the map, making fish scoring much more engaging overall.

Expansion Design

Additionally, Brieger Creative made the expansion Waddle: Orcas and Ice Floes, consisting of 3 small modules.

Ice Floes reimplements an old bridge expansion of combining groups that we think works great with a slight modification. Orcas create a map wide objective of 3 orcas, with the player who best avoids the orcas gaining points and the player with the most penguins near orcas losing points. Eggs provide extra scoring opportunities and allow players to place penguins in future locations, greatly changing priorities and strategies.

Brieger Creative Team