Endangered Rescue Galápagos Penguins

Review

Game Description

“As the host of the conservation TV show WildWorld, you’re currently in the Galápagos Islands filming a special in order to bring attention to the plight of the endangered Galápagos Penguin.”

Personal Experience

It’s been a few years since I’ve had a chance to play a new game from Bluefish Games creators Ace and Anna Ellett, so when I heard that they were creating a new puzzle game for a good cause, I was very excited to back the campaign.

Endangered Rescue Galápagos Penguins is a puzzle game offshoot of Grand Gamers Guild’s equally eco-focused board game series Endangered. While Endangered was created to raise awareness for a broad array of endangered species, Endangered Rescue Galápagos Penguins is designed to raise awareness specifically for the endangered Galápagos Penguins and Penguins International.

The game arrived earlier this year in a package only slightly bigger than a CCG booster pack. Despite the diminutive package, Anna and Ace—being the crack designers they are—had no problem creating a really enjoyable puzzle game with a lot of penguin facts and personality to spare. Overall it took me about 50 minutes from start to finish to play through.

Narrative

The narrative in Endangered Rescue Galápagos Penguins isn’t deep, but for a title like this, it doesn’t need to be. The game’s framing device places you in the role of the host of a wildlife show trying to get your piece about Galápagos Penguins out in time for air, in order to raise awareness about the penguins. While the game is about an endangered animal, the story is presented in a fun, lighthearted manner.

It’s a nice little meta-wrinkle that your fictional goal in the game matches the actual goal of the game and solving one solves the other. And it worked! I went from someone who didn’t know that Galápagos Penguins were their own species, to knowing a fair bit about them, what makes them unique from other penguins, and what’s being done to help protect them. So from an edutainment perspective, the game is a big success.

Puzzle Play

Team Bluefish is no stranger to fitting a full-sized game in a small package and their skills are on full display, as no surface of the game is wasted. Even the card packaging is used to its fullest extent, being both reusable and explaining how to play the game.

While the gameplay is solely through the 18 playing cards, there is an online component to both check your answers and keep the experience running by telling you which cards to flip over next. The website also contains information both about penguins and describes some encoding techniques that are used in the experience.

The game has thirteen puzzles overall, and each one feels different, well-written, and fun. The vibe is less whimsical than the games in the Hinck’s-verse, but the puzzles are all of a similar style to those; if you enjoyed Bluefish Games previous works, you’ll really enjoy these puzzles.

The overall difficulty is easy to low-medium, and the website does provide hints for anyone that gets stuck. The puzzle themselves solved really well, with clear answers and no ambiguity about what you should be doing at any given time. For the competitive, there’s a time and a star rating system based on your time and hints used, if that’s your jam.

Only one of the puzzles used color as a component, and it’s an excellent example of how to do a color-accessible puzzle correctly. Each color coded component also has a secondary attribute, so no one is forced to rely on color alone.

Recommendation

Endangered Rescue Galápagos Penguins is a cute, educational game that is punching well above its weight for a good cause. It’s great to see Team Bluefish back in action and hopefully we’ll see more from them sooner rather than later.

I’d recommend this for anyone who is interested in conservation, who misses their monthly Hinck’s Gazette, or has an older child they’d like to play a fun and educational game with.