Yuga Labs' Mudwater: Bored Apes Get a Card Game Where the Winner Takes Your Card

Bored Ape Yacht Club made its name in 2021 with cartoon apes that sold for small fortunes. In November 2026, the apes' owner is trying something more playable: a card game with a swamp full of creatures, a three-by-three board and one rule that will make some players nervous. In its collectible mode, the winner keeps the loser's card.

Yuga Labs has launched Mudwater, a trading card game that expands the Bored Ape universe and mixes a competitive game, physical collectibles and digital cards on the Solana blockchain. Its first collection is Swamp Origins, and the game is playable in a web browser, with a free-to-enter Exhibition mode for people who do not own any cards.

How Mudwater plays

Matches are quick, two-player duels on a 3x3 grid. Each card has numbers on its edges. When you place a card next to an opponent's, you compare the touching edges; win the comparison and you capture that square. Stronger cards are built up through successive levels. When the board is full, whoever controls the most squares wins.

In Exhibition mode you can play against the computer, through matchmaking or with friends, without owning anything. In NFT play, each player sets aside one random card before the match, and the winner keeps both.

The setting is new territory for the brand. Instead of a yacht club, Swamp Origins is built around creatures of the swamp, and the cards live on Solana, while Ethereum-based "Totems" are used to make claims, a sign of how multi-chain even Ethereum's most famous NFT brand has become.

How the cards are split

Swamp Origins is a fixed collection:

• 120 card designs, including foil and serialised versions and eight unique "cracked-ice" editions.
• 240,000 packs of 10 cards, which makes 2.4 million cards in total. Packs come in boxes of 24 and cases of 10 boxes, and each format trades separately.
• 71% of the supply goes to existing holders: every Bored Ape holder can claim 10 packs and every Mutant Ape holder 2, with claims closing on 19 January 2027. 3% goes to partner communities such as Otherdeed holders, and 20% is for direct sale.

Every trade carries a 2.5% royalty plus a separate 2.5% "reflection" fee, which buys ApeCoin for Mudwater holders. Digital cards can be redeemed for the physical card, and a service to tokenise physical cards, stored in a vault, is listed as coming soon.

The early numbers

In early figures from the OpenSea marketplace, Mudwater had recorded roughly $954,000 in combined trading volume: about $620,600 for packs, $294,900 for single cards and $38,500 for sealed boxes. Around 1,700 wallets held at least one pack and around 1,825 held a card. The cheapest pack was listed at about $72, while the cheapest single card sat at roughly $0.87. These are early, dated figures in a market where prices move quickly.

WGC's take

Mudwater is a smarter design than most NFT spin-offs: a simple, readable board game that anyone can try for free before deciding whether the collectible side interests them. The ante rule is the part to watch. Wagering cards that have real market value is exactly the kind of mechanic that regulators in many countries look at closely, and it raises the stakes of every match in a way Exhibition mode does not. If you are curious, start with Exhibition, where nothing is at risk.