Designer Diary: Push Push Penguin, or A Bias Towards Waddling | BoardGameGeek News

by Christopher Chan

It’s amazing what three bored board game designers can do on a six-hour car ride.

Push Push Penguin began when David Gordon, TAM, and I were carpooling to CuseCon in 2021. It wasn’t the first time that David and TAM brainstormed a game on a trip to a convention, and it won’t be the last because they’re game design machines — but this time, I was lucky enough to be there.

We came up with a bunch of games on that ride and scribbled prototypes onto note cards when we arrived at the convention. We playtested each concept that evening. Push Push Penguin was the one that we wanted to keep playing by the end of the convention.

Three things never changed about the game after those first few days:

• The Narrative: It was always about penguins shoving each other into the sea while an orca approached.

• The Goal: It was always a race for second place.

• The Twist: You always pushed other penguins from behind when you moved into an occupied space.

Points 1 and 2 always worked beautifully together, but the reason the game stuck was point 3. In many racing games, the correct design decision is to either let players skip in front of each other or prevent them from advancing when they encounter another player’s piece during a move. However, when you’re racing for second place in a game with a colliding track, it’s more than an interesting decision to push someone in front of you — it’s funny!

With those three conceptual anchors in place, we iterated wildly. Push Push Penguin started out as a card game with a gateway level of complexity.

The board had avalanches, slippery ice floes, and other features that added chaos and texture. As it turned out, the design had too much silliness to match the tastes of a new hobby gamer. When we tried to fill the game with fine moves and clever moments, it lost something intangible even though it got better feedback from playtesters.

But we followed that thread because good feedback is seductive. Around this time, I began illustrating the game, guided by an instinct that it needed something that we’d engineered out. It seemed like a good, pitchable package when I was done with those illustrations.

Unfortunately, no publishers bit after our initial flurry of pitches.

The problem was positioning. We’d made a game that was too slippery to fit the gateway world and too nuanced to be a family game. We had to make a choice, but it wasn’t a difficult one.

Push Push Penguin was always about vibes and comedy, so it would be better off as a family game. The question was how to get it there.

Our breakthrough moment came in 2022 after a conversation with Jonathan Gilmour-Long. He suggested that we remove the cardplay from the game entirely in favor of dice. We were already using dice for the ever-advancing orca, so why not replace the players’ hands with a few dice as well?

I’ll admit I was skeptical, but shortly after we got this suggestion, David and I met up at Long Island Tabletop Gaming Expo to do some playtesting.

We spent the day exploring how dice could replace cards. This also is when the cups first appeared in the form of coffee cups we begged off of a vendor. By the end of the day, we had a new system running smoothly. It felt like the magic was back. The dice allowed us to streamline the game down to a true family weight and begin a fresh round of pitches.

Finding the game its home brought things full circle. When we came up with the idea at CuseCon in 2021, Danielle Reynolds had been part of our ad hoc social bubble. Though the game waddled off for a few years to find itself, Danielle was there at the beginning and at Long Island Tabletop Gaming Expo with our friend, Amanda Rivera, when it found its final shape (and goofy penguin cups). That made it stick for her, so when she helped launch the Wacky Wizard Games imprint as the Project Director of Wise Wizard Games she reached out. We were thrilled to take the next step with her.

Then I had to redraw all of the art.

The Wacky Wizard team liked much of the world building we’d already done as a proof of concept. However, the illustrations I made during the pitch process were never meant to be final. With almost two years of perspective on the art, I knew there was a lot of clean-up to do. I made the linework finer to make way for brighter and more nuanced colors. The track that the penguins follow to the sea was attached to a nearby landmass and the sea became a bit calmer. Developmental updates were applied to the track length and the positioning of the special animal spaces.

Speaking of those animals, we had sleepy seals that introduced chaos with a special die and fish scraps that needed to be updated. We initially tried to make the seals more scientifically accurate, but they felt too scary when we did that, so they went back to a simplified brown that felt friendlier. Also, I made the fish scraps into living, individualized characters instead of skeletons for the same reason.

I updated the penguin pawns as I developed concepts for the cover art, and the shape that they took would inform that art. However, because the penguins were originally designed to fit onto a Game Crafter template, I wanted to find a more distinctive silhouette for them with the real thing. That form threaded a needle between expressiveness and enough roundness to survive rough handling by young hands.

After we locked in the penguins’ new shapes, we went back and looked at the cover sketches I’d made to find the best fit. We wanted to show the penguins’ personalities in a composition that could introduce parents to the premise of the game. I’m pretty pleased with how it came out, but if you want to see a little bit of the exploration, there is a rejected cover concept on the back of the rulebook.

We received our advance copies of the game recently, and all collectively marveled at the production Wacky Wizard has done with the game. It’s wild seeing this game come to life, and David, TAM, and I are so excited to be able to share it with you.

Happy gaming, and try not to get chased off into the sunset by an orca!

Christopher Chan