Duck, Duck, Llama! - The Party Game with No Eliminations

🚨 Kickstarter Bonus

🦆 Intro

Duck, Duck, Llama! is an award-winning, family-friendly game about counting ducks, causing distractions, and calling your friends a llama.

🗝️ Key Features

• Zero elimination: you're never removed from the game and Llamas can even go on to re-join the flock and win if they play well. Fear not, you won't explode.
• Fun within minutes, not hours: rules take five minutes to learn, setup takes two, and rounds last five to eight minutes.
• Loud, silly, and slightly accusatory: llama name-calling and slippery escapes are core mechanics, not side effects. Expect terrible duck impressions, loud protests of innocence, and at least one player insisting they were framed.
• Family-friendly, strategy-approved: easy enough for kids, sneaky enough for the strategy geeks at the table. We're aiming for an official PEGI (EU) and ESRB (US) rating of 7+.
• Learning Aid: the simple plus/minus arithmetic is a great way for younger players to practice counting while having a laugh. Just don't use the dreaded "M" word (that's mathematical!)

🎲 How To Play

• Play, Draw, Count: every turn is three beats: play a card, draw a card, and say the Count out loud. The Count represents the total number of ducks in play and almost every card pushes it up or down. Turns take seconds — the trouble you cause with them lasts much longer.
• Ride the Count: the Count is a wave and you want to be the one surfing it. Crank it up and the player after you inherits the danger; ease it down and you buy the whole table breathing room. Your hand is your escape plan: spend your best cards too early and there'll be nothing left when an accusation comes your way.
• Escape by Decreasing: start your turn with the Count at ten or more and you stand accused of being a llama — think of it as being put in check. The cleanest way out is the simplest: play a card that drops the Count back below ten and carry on as though nothing happened.
• Escape by Distracting: can't bring it down? Scatter the flock instead. Start a Dance Battle or Release the Quacken and the accusation dissolves in the chaos — nobody can remember who they were pointing at once everyone's flapping.
• Escape by Accusing: the boldest way out. Point a feathered finger at another player and the accusation becomes their problem instead. This is where the memory and social game lives: who's already burned their escapes? Do you want the next player under pressure, or would you rather they owe you a favour?
• Embrace the Llama: if you can't escape you lose the round and flip your Duck card over: you're now a Llama. Losing early just changes your job description: you know exactly who threw you under the duck bus and if you catch someone else out as a Llama you turn back into a Duck. Some of DDL's sweetest wins come from players who lost round one and spent the next two plotting their return to the flock.

🎖️ Award Winning Fun

We were honoured to take home the Best Indie Game - People's Choice award at TGX in 2025.

But we also listened to our player's feedback. The message was clear: you loved the game but the art was lacking. Since then every single card has been carefully re-imagined and redesigned by Aussie artist @MintSheri and we couldn't be happier with the results!

🎁 What's in the Box

🦖 Pledge Tiers

🪿T1: The Duck

🦙 T3: The Llama

🎁 What's in the Box

The Freaky Founders meeting and closed-alpha testing invites are how these backers can play an active role in shaping the direction and vision of Bizarre Studios and our upcoming titles.

The Believer

Not ready for a full copy but want to see DDL take flight? Pledge any amount from $1 to $23.99 and you'll get a heartfelt thank-you email and your name on our Special Thanks page.

You can also simply just back us without a reward if you're so inclined and we will be forever grateful 💜

🥑 Add-Ons

✨ Foil Cards

👀 See It in Action

🪙 Quality Components

Every component, right down to the pins and stickers, is manufactured to the same standard we'd want as players and sourced from vendors we trust:

• Cards: 63.5 x 88.9mm, 300gsm bluecore stock, printed full colour on both sides and shrink-wrapped as a single deck. Bluecore is an opaque, snappy stock used in many big-name card games: no shadows showing through, no floppy corners after a dozen plays.
• The box: a two-piece 102 x 142 x 35mm lid-and-base build on 1.5mm gold greyboard, wrapped in 157g gloss paper with a matte lamination. It's the sturdy telescoping kind, not a flimsy tuck box, so it survives a backpack.
• Cardboard tray: die-cut and folded 300gsm CCNB with two compartments, so your deck and your extras each have a home.
• Rulebook: 85 x 110mm, eight pages of 128gsm gloss paper, stapled and portrait.
• Stickers: 60 x 80mm sheets. One sheet is 80gsm permanent adhesive; the rest are transparent waterproof vinyl printed in five colours — drink bottle and laptop safe.
• Pins: 38 x 38 x 2.5mm soft enamel on a metal body, three enamel colours over a silver base, mounted on a 50 x 100mm printed backing card.
• Business Chaz Model: an SLA Resin print standing roughly 200mm tall, split into keyed parts (head, suit, arms, tongue, and base) and hand-painted by a local Melbourne studio.

📖 Rulebook

Prefer to read the rules before you pledge?

Fair enough — we do the same! Click the Rulebook graphic above to be taken to our rules or simply click here instead.

🐣 First Time on Kickstarter?

🕰️ Estimated Timeline

The game is finished so this timeline is about funding, production, and distribution rather than design. We've built buffer into every stage as we'd rather quote you a date we can beat than one we have to apologise for.

🔱 Shipping Estimates

Shipping, tariffs, and taxes are charged on top of your pledge as part of the backer survey as is commonplace for tabletop and physical products.

The reason we chose this approach is so that we can get an accurate, up-to-date quote for rates as close to fulfilment as possible which will allow us to charge only what is required to ship the game and not a penny more.

💭 Our Story

We are Zach and Che, two friends who have been crafting tabletop and computer games in lieu of doing our homework since we met back in high school, close to two decades ago.

Zac is the dreamer and designer — always cooking up new card mechanics and entirely new games (he has another five unpublished titles on the backburner!), he also brings serious business savvy to the table having run his own café and managed other high volume brick-and-mortar businesses for over a decade.

Che is a principal software engineer — he comes with games industry experience, having worked on the mobile CCG Star Admiral featured on both the iOS and Android stores in 2015. He brings a decade of start-up experience, some impressive data analysis skills, and is a constant thorn in Zach's side ensuring every new card and mechanic is balanced and fair.

Larry the Llama is our mascot and the star of DDL — he has finally stopped spitting at people but will eat pretty much everything that isn't tied down and then some. He reminds us to keep things light and to remember that we are, finally, living our dream.

🤝 Our Partners

Both partners have already agreed to a pricing model we know works for us. We will update this space and graphic if any new partners come on board (watch this space!). 

🎯 Risks

Every crowdfunding project carries risk and we'd like to be upfront about ours:

• Manufacturing delays: production timelines can slip. We've partnered with Panda Games Manufacturing precisely because of their track record of delivering on schedule, and our timeline includes buffer for the unexpected.
• Shipping volatility: global freight costs and timelines fluctuate. GamesQuest's crowdfunding-specific logistics network gives us the best possible protection, and shipping is charged after the campaign so estimates stay accurate.
• We're a small team: it's just the two of us (and Larry). The upside: no bureaucracy, and the people answering your comments are the same people making the game.

The game itself is a battle-hardened and complete product that was play tested at over ten different conventions over the course of 18 months.

The game is thus mechanically and aesthetically complete (all art and illustrations are also finished) and we have printed and iterated on over five different prototypes to get to where we are now.

The remaining work is manufacturing, production, and delivery. To de-risk the production of the game we've chosen experienced partners for both.

🌏 Environmental Commitments

A card game is paper, board, and ink, and we'd rather be honest about that than greenwash it.

• Cardboard insert, not plastic: the tray is die-cut and folded board rather than a vacuum-formed plastic shell and the game itself is paper and board throughout. The deck ships shrink-wrapped and the pins in a PE bag, which is plastic — we're looking at paper-band and glassine alternatives and will say so plainly either way.
• Right-sized packaging: the box is built to fit the deck and the tray, not to look bigger on a shelf. Smaller boxes mean more units per carton and less air shipped around the planet.
• Print to demand: We're printing to the number of copies actually pledged plus a small retail buffer, so we're not warehousing pallets of unsold games.

🏦 Retailers

Want to stock DDL on your shelves? Awesome! We offer discounts for retailers depending on:

• Total units: big orders mean steep discounts
• Collaboration: cross-channel branding, promotions, and advertising
• Reach: how many stores are you and can you Llama like it's 1969?
• Fit: if you're starting out like us, are a non-for-profit, or have some other motivator for a retailer pledge or discount reach out and we'll see what we can do

For retailer pledges, collabs, or general order enquiries please reach out and send us an email at contact@bizarrestudios.com.au and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

🥹 Thank you

We wouldn't be here without all of you and we are eternally grateful.

To everyone that helped play test and refine the game, provided expert advice and input, and who made time for us: thank you for helping us bring DDL to life.

Our fans and backers are our investors and we answer to you, which is exactly how we want it.

We are beyond excited to launch on Kickstarter and we cannot wait to bring it to a table near you!

🦆🦆🦙