![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/OCM_RICK_GARDNER_003-1024x668.jpg\")
Credit: Irvin Rivera<\/p>\nRick Gardner of Orange founded Blue Rondo Games in 2020 while getting his Ph.D. in sociology at UC Irvine. The company is known for the card game Crabs in a Bucket.<\/p>\n
Credit: Irvin Rivera<\/p>\n
What is Crabs in a Bucket?<\/p>\n
Crabs in a Bucket is a shedding style game, the same genre as Uno, where you\u2019re trying to get rid of your cards as quickly as you can. So you try to match the same suit or the same value of a given card. But the special sauce for this game is the Joker Crabs. These are special cards that are based off of real crab species that all have special abilities that you can use to take down your opponent.<\/p>\n
How many have you sold so far?<\/p>\n
We\u2019re at just about 8,000. I thought\u2014naively, before I published the game\u2014that if you make something that\u2019s incredible, suddenly all the companies will come to you and want to work with you. And I found that\u2019s not true in practice, unless you have the sales to back it up. It\u2019s a kind of weird chicken-and-egg, cart-before-the-horse sort of problem. So it\u2019s been slow getting things to move, but things are definitely accelerating now.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s your process like?<\/p>\n
We work together, bringing something to life organically through a collaborative process\u2014kind of like how jazz musicians slowly build together a song based off of a little bit of a riff that a saxophonist or drummer might have. That process is what I\u2019m in love with when it comes to the way that we create games.<\/p>\n
Tell us about an achievement you\u2019re proud of.<\/p>\n
One of the things that I\u2019m extremely grateful for is that last year, we won the Horizons Fellowship, which is a highly prestigious and very difficult to achieve fellowship that\u2019s given by the Game Manufacturers Association. And that opportunity has been a strong feather in our cap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rick Gardner of Orange founded Blue Rondo Games in 2020 while getting his Ph.D. in sociology at UC…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-413983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}