Muvuca

calendar_today 2025 settings Gabriel Toschi palette Carol Sá factory Ludens Spirit person 2 players timelapse 15min

Strong sun, sand on your feet, and the smell of the Atlantic sea... While some go to Brazilian beaches to have fun, others go to try to make a living! You are street vendors taking advantage of the hustle and bustle to earn some money. Who will win over the crowd?

A fast-paced, tactical duel microgame whose objective is to win a two-dimensional tug-of-war. In each turn, you place a new card on the grid, pushing rows and columns to create the largest groups of customers who want to buy identical items. Each move you make helps you, but also hinders your opponent: a tactical, fast-paced, and portable experience.

At the end of a round, you score points by each one of the 5 things you are selling on the beach (food or objects), choosing between the largest adjacent group of cards on the "crowd" that wants that thing, or the cards you held in your hand (or was it around your cart?). Whoever scores the most points wins the round, and the game continues in a best-of-three format.

The game was launched as part of Ludens Spirit's Linha Slim, a really affordable line of microgames that comes on a plastic package.

Check the game on BoardGameGeek

Check the game on Ludopedia

Behind the design process

The fact that Muvuca exists in a physical form is nothing short of a miracle. I started creating this game so many years ago as an 18-card experiment just because pushing card rows was fun. For most of their life as a prototype, it was about planetary alignment, even having names like Syzygy and Planet Push for months.

After being declined by a lot of publishers, I sent it to Ludens Spirit to see if it would fit their new line, and I got a yes! But the new Linha Slim was so cheap because it uses leftover space on printed sheets for other projects and they would have the opportunity to print it in, like, 2 days. I didn't have nothing than a prototype and they were asking me if I could send the final printing files on the next 24 hours.

If this sounds like a crazy proposal, know that apparently I am crazy, and so is my illustrator friend Carol Sá. We worked on "game jam mode" for a whole night and the game was printed some days after it. The game was far from a commercial success, but realizing that I had the necessary knowledge to create something so quickly and with such good quality was very important.

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