Just in time for Gen Con 2024, Maestro Media announced a new game called Donald Duck in Happy Camper would be hitting store shelves later this year. The game, which will celebrate Donald’s 90th, was co-designed by Daryl Andrews. Known for his work on a variety of games (some of which you can see in his photo below), Andrews has definitely gained a majorly positive reputation in the gaming community. That’s why I was excited to have a chance to chat with him while at Gen Con and get more info on the upcoming Happy Camper game.
Kyle Burbank: So first, congratulations on the game. It must be really exciting to be able to announce it right before Gen Con and be here.
Daryl Andrews: It was right down to the wire because of approvals and everything, and we didn't want to miss Gen Con, one of the biggest celebrations of games. We wanted to tease it here and get the excitement starting to build.
KB: So my first question is, if you were going to explain the gameplay of Donald Duck in Happy Camper to someone who's maybe a hardcore Disney fan but maybe not as familiar with these board games, how would you do that?
DA: Absolutely. I mean, for me, that's my excitement is that everyone loves Disney. And so we designed it intentionally so that it doesn't matter if you played games before or not, we want to make it approachable and we want to capture the experience of just the Americano camping trip, going out there, the Junior Woodchucks kind of out in the woods, earning merit badges.
It's a tile exploration game. And so it's very simple. The board grows as you play, and then you're moving around, setting up camps, earning merit badges, getting gadgets to help you work your way through the forest, and trying to capture the great photos at these photogenic moments and these cool spots.
We really tried to make sure that anyone could learn the game very quickly and get into the game. We don't want people to spend hours learning a game. We want them to open the box and we know you're excited and you want to play it. So let's try to make it as approachable as possible.
KB: Looking at your resume, some of the games that you've worked on, I noticed a lot of them are based on existing IPs. So I'm curious how you approach it – Do you have ideas for game mechanics that you want to use and it kind of lends itself to characters, or how much of the characters and the worlds you’re working with influence the game?
DA: Yeah, no, great question. I think it's both. I approach it from all sides, and ultimately I'm going for an experience. So my goal is, and what worked out well with this was we actually worked from a game that Wolfgang Kramer had already made, called Goldland, and it was the exploration already. It had a lot of the mechanics worked out.
But the reason we picked it and we signed it and merged these worlds together is when we were asking people, when we thought about Donald, we thought, "He sometimes gets a bad break about being angry and frustrated, but there's all these classic videos of him out camping, and he was in the Navy and he's taken on the nephews as a single dad." And so we just kind of thought about what are those warm feels that you associate with that?
Camping and exploring seemed like a good fit, and Donald can do everything. There's so many little moments that Donald shows up throughout history, 90 years. And so I think Donald's just a really interesting character because he's complex, he's not just one dimensional. He figures it out and they always persevere to the end. And we thought, "That's kind of the story you're doing here. You're going out in the woods. You don't have it all figured out. You're going to have obstacles along the way, but you are always fine by the end." And so we thought that merger of the mechanics and the gameplay just really married well for this license.
KB: On that note, on the box art, which was released, you have Donald and Huey, Dewey and Louie, which I think most people probably know about. But then you also have one of Donald's nieces, and I think there are even some pretty big Disney fans that don't even know about April, May and June. So my question is, how much did you learn about Donald lore during this project? And was there anything you had planned that needed to change as a result?
DA: I mean, I'm still always deep diving. I love research. I mean, geeks love diving into the nitty-gritty. And so for me, I studied the family tree and Duckburg and all the other elements, and we tried different things with the team. And the nice thing is the Disney team's intimately involved. We meet with them every week and sometimes more than once a week.
The cool thing is they obviously know their brands really well and help steer us. So an example, we snuck Webby on the cover. It's actually based on a painting that I love that I actually pushed them to use that painting that's on the cover. But as we were discussing what other characters we wanted in the game, we originally suggested Daisy.
One of the things that came out of it was while celebrating Donald, we said, "Well, we want Donald to actually not be a playable character. We want Donald to be the troop leader out there causing little high moments and also frustration moments and have Donald be almost like him that none of us can play." And so as we were exploring that, then we thought, "Well, it's kind of weird to have Daisy and the kids as playable characters. We want them all to be the kids." And it was actually the Disney team that suggested switching Daisy to Webby.
KB: Okay. So it's Webby, it's not April, May, or June.
DA: No. And so we just snuck in Webby as a way to bring more of the characters into it, and we have ideas for expansions if the game took off more. We don't know yet, but that was a way to work in another character in the full picture of Donald, which we were really excited to do.
And it gave us an excuse to ask the artist to paint Webby into the old original piece, which we thought was really fun and exciting to breathe fresh life. We used an older game, we restored it, we used an older painting, we restored it, and Donald is always being reinvented. 90 years, and it's so relevant today.
KB: I know they're all your babies, but if you had to choose, in addition to this game, one other game of yours that you think people should check out?
DA: I mean, my traditional answer is I made a game called Sagrada. It's a dice game that you make stained-glass windows. It's very… it scratches the same itch as Sudoku, feels like a Sudoku puzzle, but with dice. Everyone feels quite proud of the window they made. Even when I was making it, and it was a prototype, people would take pictures when they were done. And I was like, "Why are you taking a picture?" And they're like, "Because I made this."
And so we realized one of the things that I try to do, don't always hit, is make the player feel good about themselves. If you're going to spend 30 minutes hanging out with friends and family or whoever, at the end hopefully everyone feels good, not just the winner. So I think that would be one that I recommend to people to check out. It's in 20, 25 languages even now.
KB: Oh, wow.
DA: Yeah, so I'm very thankful that that has caught on. I'm always really excited to hear about people saying, "I've never played a board game, but I got my grandma or my brother or whoever into games, and I used Sagrada." That's kind of a proud moment to go like, "Yeah, I'm recruiting gamers!”
Donald Duck in Happy Camper is now available for pre-order and is expected to be released in late December 2024.