We think anyone can be good at Abducktion, but you’ll be a pro if you’re good at spatial reasoning and moving shapes around in your head. Tetris and Candy Crush players, you’ve got a head start!

The base game is for 1-4 players (yep, it comes with solo play rules so you can play as a logic puzzle on your own!) and you can play with up to 6 players with the expansion pack.

It’s a flexible, durable material in the plastics family that’s perfect for making a ship that would hold its shape, dispense ducks easily, and be super fun to touch.

They’re non-toxic acrylic. Still, don’t put them in your mouth.

80! We wanted there to be enough ducks to ensure statistically random probability of drawing any color duck. The Expansion adds an extra 40 standard ducks, and 10 Glitter Ducks.

Flaps on the top of the ship are flexible and allow players to easily reach in to remove single ducks, or put a handful of ducks back in the cargo hold. There’s enough empty space on the inside that you can shake up the ducks real good to make sure you’re pulling them out randomly (also function as an excellent maraca.) 

Short answer: exhaustive playtesting.

Longer answer: we imagined all the different formations that could be realistically created by 10 ducks spread evenly across two rows and played each of them to see if they were doable, fun, and appropriately challenging. The process for the Action Cards was similar, but it was more about what players wanted to be able to do to move ducks around their board and then making sure the Action Cards weren’t too powerful. In general, if it wasn’t fun or fair, we scrapped it.

Grab them out of the spaceship, of course! Once you’ve captured a Formation Cards, the ducks remaining on your board all move downstream immediately, leaving no empty spaces between them. Then, players will take ducks from the ship, one at a time, and refill the empty ponds.

Playtesters were finishing their turns in 30 to 90 seconds. Plus, we’ve designed the game so the majority of the “duck refilling” activity happens after you’ve already passed your turn to the next player, which really keeps things moving.

At the beginning of each game, you’ll randomly count out a stack of 12 formation cards that you’ll all compete for (the game comes with double that, so you won’t see every formation every game). Once all the Formation Cards have been captured, the game ends, and whoever has the most points wins!