Waddle Waddle

12/15/2024

Waddle Waddle is on TikTok too! Check out TikTok.com/ where you can order Waddle Waddle in our shop and get exclusive TokTok only discounts.

If you have a TikTok account, please take a moment to follow brushtailgames on TikTok. There are a whole lot of analytics and tools that only unlock if I get 100 or more followers. Right now we’re about halfway there. Not bad considering I just started heavy on TikTok this week.

48 Followers, 325 Following, 28 Likes - Watch awesome short videos created by Brush-Tail Games

05/08/2024

Only 8 days left...76% funded!

We're 3/4 of the way there with 8 days left. We just need a few more pledges to get this amazing penguin game funded. On GameFound now through May 16th!

Compete with with other Penguin Heroes for the coveted title of Top Conservationist as you tag Waddles of penguins and their nests in the Antarctic Region in this game filled with the designer's own beautiful photographs of penguins in the wild.

05/01/2024

The worst thing about running a crowdfunding campaign is all the people who contact you trying to sell you crowdfunding marketing services. They tell you that you'll never succeed unless you hire them and give them thousands of dollars to spend on facebook ads. They're relentless. They will even back your campaign (temporarily) so that they can then message you and bypass your spam filters. Then the inevitable upsell comes.

We had a great surge after yesterday's update. We funded almost another 10% in less than 24 hours, and now we are past the halfway mark, hanging in at 55%. Keep sharing the news about Waddle Waddle and let's prove them all wrong! Just another 4 days like today and we will be at the finish line.

Compete with with other Penguin Heroes for the coveted title of Top Conservationist as you tag Waddles of penguins and their nests in the Antarctic Region in this game filled with the designer's own beautiful photographs of penguins in the wild.

04/30/2024

Waddle Waddle had a great opening weekend, funding about 40% of our goal! A million thanks to the approximately 95 GameFound followers who are now backers.

But sales dropped off precipitously in the following days. Folks, I am going to be blunt and say it. Waddle Waddle isn't going to fund unless we start to see some movement.

There are over 700 GameFound followers who have yet to back Waddle Waddle. If just 10% of you buy one copy of Waddle Waddle today, we will practically be to the funding goal.

If you've played Waddle Waddle, you know how great of a product it is and how much work has gone into it. So please, if you haven't backed Waddle Waddle yet, take a moment to pledge for a copy and help us get to the finish line. And please take a moment to share this campaign to your friends and family.

The gamefound campaign link is here:
https://gamefound.com/en/projects/brush-tail-games/waddle-waddle

04/25/2024

Whoops! I've been telling everyone that Waddle Waddle launches at 10 AM today. It actually launches at 11:00 AM EDT. I guess that's what I get for launching 2 days after a trip to Europe :) Yeah. I'll blame it on being a little bit jet-lagged.

04/24/2024

Less than 24 hours until Waddle Waddle launches on GameFound! It's your last change to lock in a $5 discount by following the Waddle Waddle project before launch:

https://gamefound.com/en/projects/brush-tail-games/waddle-waddle

03/13/2024

Kevin and I want to thank everyone who stopped by to play Waddle Waddle at Dice Tower West in Las Vegas over the weekend. It was a fabulous time!

For those of you who couldn't make it to Dice Tower to play Waddle Waddle with Kevin, Kevin is a rare Leucistic Gentoo penguin, and I was lucky enough to snap this photo on my trip to the Antarctic.

A Leucistic animal is sort of similar to an Albino animal. Albinos have a complete lack of pigmentation, but Leucistic animals don't produce the black pigment, and so that's why Kevin looks different.

And because we celebrate diversity at Brush-Tail Games, Kevin has been immortalized as a special promo card that will be included with every copy of Waddle Waddle. If you want to know how Kevin works in the game, check out the GameFound campaign link in the bio. He's got his own section in the Waddle Waddle rulebook, which is available for download on the GameFound page.

03/05/2024

Brush-Tail Games is proud to announce our partnership with two great penguin conservation organizations. For every copy of Waddle Waddle sold--including those sold through GameFound--Brush-Tail Games LLC will be donating USD $1 to the Global Penguin Society (GPS) and a further USD $1 to Southern African Foundation For The Conservation Of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB).

03/04/2024

At long last we are excited to reveal the identity of the 6th and final Waddle Waddle Penguin Hero, Dr. Katrin "Katta" Ludynia!

Katta is the Research Manager for SANCCOB (The Southern African Foundation For The Conservation Of Coastal Birds). SANCCOB's mission is to reverse the decline of seabird populations through the rescue, rehabilitation and release of ill, injured, abandoned and oiled seabirds – especially endangered species like the African penguin.

Katta was highlighted in 2023 by Penguins International and you can watch an interview with Katta on the Penguins International website: https://www.penguinsinternational.org/scientist-spotlight2023-katrinludynia/

Today Katta leads the African penguin transponder project, which has successfully marked thousands of African penguins with Passive Integrated Transponders to monitor their movements in the wild.

Learn more about Katta and the SANCCOB mission at https://sanccob.co.za/

02/29/2024

We are excited to reveal the identity of our fifth official Penguin Hero, Dr. Pablo "Popi" Boroboroglu!

Pablo is the President, and co-founder of the Global Penguin Society. He has been working to conserve penguins for over 35 years. He has received the "Honor Recognition" from the Congress of his home country of Argentina and has been awarded numerous international awards for his work in penguin conservation, including the Whitley Gold Award, the National Geographic Buffet Award, and the Rolex Award for Enterprise. He is also the winner of the 2023 Indianapolis prize, the world's leading animal conservation award.

Pablo grew up in Patagonia, Argentina--Argentina is home to 40% of the world's Magellanic penguins. As a young man, he witnessed first-hand the impact of mankind's activities on penguins. At the time, up to 40,000 Magellanic penguins a year were being killed due to oil spills.

Through the efforts of Pablo, his team, and other scientists, 32 million acres of penguin habitat in Argentina are now protected, and oil tanker lanes have been shifted to avoid seabird habitats. As a result, now fewer than 20 penguins are year are killed by oil in Argentina.

We are also excited to announce that $1 from each copy of Waddle Waddle will be donated to the Global Penguin Society.

Read more about Pablo and the Global Penguin Society at www.globalpenguinsociety.org

02/24/2024

I am very excited to share with you the identity of Penguin Hero #4--Dyan deNapoli.

Dyan, AKA "The Penguin Lady", has authored two books on penguins, including her fascinating account of participating in the rescue of over 40,000 African penguins from an oil spill off Cape Town, South Africa--a subject she also gave a TedX talk on.

After 9 years as a penguin aquarist at the New England Aquarium, Dyan began a career as a science communicator and has captivated hundreds of thousands with lectures on penguins both in person and in the media for outlets like CNN and the BBC, and onboard Antarctic and Galapagos cruises.

Learn more about Dyan on her website thepenguinlady.com

02/23/2024

We are excited to reveal the identity of our third official Penguin Hero, Dr. P Dee Boersma!

It’s safe to say that there is no one who has studied and conserved penguins longer than Dee Boersma. Dee has been working to conserve penguins since the 1970s and is still going strong today. In fact this announcement had to wait for Dee to get back home from another field trip to the Antarctic!

Dee has done so much for penguins that we had to reduce the point size on her Waddle Waddle bio to fit just a tiny fraction of her work in the rulebook! Her latest title is Founder of the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels at the University of Washington, an organization that advances the conservation of species that are sentinels in their ecosystems—like penguins.

There could literally be a book on Dee herself (and maybe one day there will be), so rather than repeat it all here, you can start your journey of learning about Dee’s work by checking out the website for the Center For Ecosystem Sentinels: https://ecosystemsentinels.org/

02/07/2024

We are excited to reveal the identity of our second official Penguin Hero, Dr. Lloyd Spencer Davis, AKA "Professor Penguin"!

Lloyd, who resides in New Zealand, is an award-winning scientist, writer, photographer, and science communicator. He has been studying penguin since the 1980s. He has written 10 books on penguins and was the Senior Editor on the landmark textbook about Penguins: Penguin Biology.

There's much more than I can fit in an instagram post, so take a look at Lloyd's official website, which is chock full of photos and information about his work:
https://lloydspencerdavis.com

02/01/2024

We are excited to reveal the identity of our first official Penguin Hero!

There's so much I could say about Dr. Heather Lynch--from her pioneering work using satellite imagery to track penguins to the numerous awards she's won to her work as a National Geographic Explorer. But rather than rewriting all that's been written, take a look at her work using these links:

https://science.nasa.gov/people/heather-lynch/
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/ecoevo/_people/_faculty_pages/lynch.php
https://www.lynchlab.com/
https://explorer-directory.nationalgeographic.org/heather-joan-lynch

01/31/2024

Waddle Waddle could use some love on BoardGameGeek.com

If you view the BoardGameGeek entry for Waddle Waddle, you can be a "fasn" by clicking the heart icon, and you can add it to your "wishlist". If you've actually played Waddle Waddle, you can also give it a rating (1-10 scale), and more.

All of these things are good for Waddle Waddle's presence on the platform.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/386015/waddle-waddle

Penguin scientists complete in the Antarctic to earn the title of Top Researcher.

01/28/2024

If you haven't been following along on instagram, Natalia started work on the new cover artwork for the Waddle Waddle box this week. Here's the results so far. That's a baby Emperor penguin.

01/17/2024

Hi Waddlers. Time for another update!

First, this morning I had a call with the development team from SANCCOB. If you're not familiar with them, you definitely should check out their website. SANCCOB is a South African nonprofit that protects seabirds, and in particular they are the leading organization working with the now endangered African Penguin. Any zoo or aquarium (including Sea World) that has African penguins in all likelihood is working with SANCCOB. Sea World is in fact a major sponsor of SANCCOB.

Nothing is official yet, but the call was very positive and I hope to announce soon that our 6th and final Penguin Hero will be the lead researcher from SANCCOB, and that SANCCOB will be one of the organizations that receives a donation every time a copy of Waddle Waddle is sold. Learn about SANCCOB here: https://sanccob.co.za/

I've also made massive updates to the gamefound site, so please go check that out. A gamefound update email is coming shortly.
The gamefound site is here: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/brush-tail-games/waddle-waddle

And despite having COVID last week, I spent the entire week working on Waddle Waddle artwork and getting assets formatted to send to the manufacturer. More on who the manufacturer is in the Gamefound update.

One of those assets that I worked on this week is what you see below: a draft of the bottom of the Waddle Waddle retail box. It's missing the just final product barcode and a couple minor details.

It does have the logos of three penguin nonprofits. Please note that I do not yet have an official relationship with any of these organizations, but I sincerely hope that they will be part of the Waddle Waddle team. So please don't construe the presence of their logos as any sort of endorsement of Waddle Waddle...at least not yet.

(Though I suppose Penguins International did endorse Waddle Waddle unofficially this month when they featured us in their quarterly newsletter.)

01/10/2024

We reached a new milestone today! If every single follower buys a backs the Gamefound campaign in April, the campaign will succeed. That's pretty unlikely, which is why I need to see that number keep going up between now and April 25.