Bauer - The Card Game

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.

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.