Bauer - The Card Game

During the late autumn 2023 Me and Robin and Rasmus Karlsson launched a Kickstarter campaign to get our new card game [Bauer] launched! And it was a success!  The game is now poised to be printed in February 2024 and then sent out to our Kickstarter backers😄 

What is Bauer?

Bauer is a closed draft card game for 2 - 5 people.

 Its for all ages 8 and above. (why not younger? - you certainly can play with your kids younger than 8 but some mechanics and artwork have made us estimate 8 years to be a good age.) But use your own judgment.

A game can take 15 min or even a bit longer on your first games. But for routine players a round can be played in less than 5 min. 

The game consists of 55 playing cards of high quality. Accompanied with a game box, rule book and score pad. Small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, making Bauer an excellent game to bring along on travel or to play during school breaks.

A few words about the games design philophilosophy.

One big inspiration for the games design is a game i played alot as a kid with my family for fun - a version of the poker game Chicago called Sniff. It's a draft game using a normal deck of cards. The exact rules are not that important for our design philophilosophy but rather the important thing is understanding what makes a normal deck of cards so versitile.. One way of looking at a deck of normal cards is that there are multiple overlapping sets between the cards. You have 13 values (1-10 + Jack + Queen + King) aswell as 4 suits (hearts, spades, dimonds and clubs), You can also split it in red and black cards aswell as numberd and suited cards. With all of these groupings you can than design unlimited cardgames with huge depth and verity.

In Bauer we tried to utilize this way of diving the deck of cards into overlapping groups. in our case we have 4 cardtypes (Event, Travel, Danger & Characters). And then we introduced the 5 colortags that show up on each cardtype in a couple diffrent ways. and lastly we have another split between day and night cards. Who are played either face up or face down. These catagories and the fact that each card has a cardtype a affiliation to tag if they are daycards and are either day or night makes it so that each card will fit into several game strategies. And have combo potential with several diffrent types of cards.

Another design decission we have made is to divide up the tags in a structured but unbalanced way. For those who are eagle eyed amongst our players and have a good memorie and understanding of the cards.. You might have noticed that each tag has two neighbours and will only show up on Event and Danger cards with one of their neighbours at the same time.. For instance Yellow only shows up with red or green. Making it a good idea to collect say - Green or red if you also collect yellow. And more difficult to collect purple or blue if you are collecting yellow.. further more character awards have been somewhat balanced and also follow the neigbour system.

There are also the same amount of all tag colors 10 of each. The way that they are purposely unblanced is how they are divided between the card types. The easiest example to look at is for blues.. Who are skewed towards travel cards. There are 3 travel cards that have blue tags. While there are 2 travel cards with green and then 1 for each of the other colors. This makes it generlly good to collect blue or green together with travel. while it is still possible to have a travel game without collecting either given you draw such cards. making one strategy better in general while others are possible in certain situations and may leed to new ways to play.. for example a red-yellow travel game has huge potential to combo with event cards and charcters.

Even as our Kickstarter has finnished and before the game gets printed there is some options of getting your hands on the game!!