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Pengu Clash has kicked off its launch today by letting in a portion of its waitlist ahead of a full public release.
The new Telegram game featuring the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection’s cutesy seabirds is a 1v1 multiplayer battler. Players can dress up their penguins and fight each other at different types of minigames, whether it’s curling, darts, football or something else.
Pengu Clash isn’t a pay-to-win game but instead rewards skill, Michal Dabrowski, CEO and founder of crypto gaming protocol Elympics, told me in an interview.
Elympics built Pengu Clash for Pudgy Penguins with the goal of starting a trend around skill-first crypto social games.
“Pengu Clash is created with great care for actual gameplay,” Dabrowski said, emphasizing that it’s different from other Telegram-based crypto “clickers.” Such clicker games have short lifespans because they revolve around users farming for an airdrop, he added.
“I have mixed opinions about some games that have been out there on Telegram. But this…this connects to the trend and to the topic [of] why crypto gaming has not, you know, fulfilled its promise to bring a lot of users to crypto up until now. I think that a lot of the games created were very superficial, let’s say.”
Dabrowski continued: “So ‘crypto’ was just to have some kind of trading, or have some kind of crypto component, and not really focusing on the gameplay. And I deeply believe that it should be the other way around.”
The game offers quickplay matches, a “PVP arena,” and a shop tab as of right now, with quests coming soon. The waitlist currently consists of more than 1.1 million Telegram accounts.
Like other crypto Telegram games, Pengu Clash is using TON for its in-game NFTs and optional wagering component (the original Pudgy NFTs are on Ethereum and the Pudgy memecoin is on Solana).
Players can enjoy Pengu Clash without logging in or creating a wallet, but those who want to buy cosmetic items can connect the Telegram built-in wallet (that’s not yet available in the US, UK, and some other countries), or connect an external TON wallet to the game.
Pudgy Penguins has also recently made broader consumer plays toward younger audiences, like releasing a children’s picture book and a kid-friendly animated series on YouTube.
When asked why Pudgy Penguins chose to build a Telegram-based game using TON — instead of its own Ethereum L2 Abstract — CEO Luca Netz told me in a message that their goal is “to become the face of crypto” and the world’s “most popular penguin.”
“That vision is chain-agnostic,” Netz said, adding that a desktop version of Pengu Clash using Abstract is also part of the plan.
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