Braumeister Brawl

Braumeister Brawl Logo

This logo ties the game’s identity to traditional beer culture, drawing on German brewing heritage. The font evokes classic German design, while the word 'Brawl' is textured with the image of a frothy, traditional German beer to deepen the thematic connection.

Play session

This mid-game snapshot highlights the board’s structured layout, optimized for clarity and ease of play. Shared cards and resources are centrally organized, while player markers on the right track betting positions, providing players with insight into their opponents’ goals. Resource availability in the bank is presented to support strategic decision-making.

Game board

Designed to be printed at A3 size, the game board supports quick setup and maintains a structured play area, keeping all components clearly organized during gameplay.

Sample card sheet

These cards are designed for efficient physical prototyping: simply print, cut, fold, and secure with tape or glue. Each card clearly defines its in-game ability, which is determined by the dominant resource spent during acquisition.

"On your turn" cards

While not used in gameplay directly, this reference card guides players through the turn sequence, helping them navigate complex rules by providing a clear, step-by-step reminder.

Rule sheet

This one-page A4 rule sheet includes visual guides to support comprehension as players read. While fitting all content on a single side allowed for quick reference, the resulting text size compromised readability. In hindsight, expanding to both sides would better balance accessibility and clarity.

This game was inspired by German beer purity laws which require all beers to be produced using only wheat, hops, barley, and water. There’s a sense of magic in this, that such simple ingredients produce such a wonderful array of products with wildly varied tastes, colors, and textures. I leaned into this magic and pictured the beer masters (or braumeisters) as wizards who battle each other using different recipes of beers as weapons of magical warfare.

To design the game itself, I drew from a few major inspirations. The most obvious perhaps is Splendor, a card game in which players vie for dominance using a shared pool of resources and cards which can be purchased by any of the players at the table. I wanted to subvert with these mechanics by allowing players to trade in the cards they purchase to alter the balance of resources for all players, hopefully shifting the odds of winning to their favor. Should a player keep a card that offers a victory point? Or should they use that card’s ability to alter the balance of resources at the table?

At the same time, I didn’t want players to have too much control of the playing field, after all, their resources are the fruits of the fields, and harvests can vary from year to year. With that in mind, I took a page from Settlers of Catan and introduced a mechanic in which you roll dice for resources each turn, introducing randomness and straying from the deterministic play seen in Splendor. On each players’ turn, they roll two die, a d4 and a d8 to determine which resources they collect that turn. While the d4 only has the ability to award one of the rolled resource, the d8 offers the ability to provide one or two of the rolled resource. Like the mechanic in SoC, I wanted all players to be able to benefit from the randomness, so I introduced the “bookies;” places where players could bet on the outcomes of other players’ rolls and gain resources they need to enact their plans even when it isn’t their turn. Players who roll a resource they have a bet on will also benefit from their bet on their own turn as well, providing the opportunity to gain up to four resources each turn.

The abilities on the cards themselves was influenced by my long love of Magic: the Gathering, a trading card game in which each card tells you how it alters the playstate of the game. The underlying issue with M:tG (and all trading card games, for that matter) is that the wealthiest player is often predetermined to be the winner of any particular contest. By sharing the cards on the table, we avoid the pay-to-win mechanics found in such games while maintaining the “spend resources to enact change” mechanic.

Magic: the Gathering also influenced the design of this game through its color system in which each color of card influences the abilities available to the player. I borrowed from this idea for my design of Braumeister Brawl by tying a particular mechanic to each color, then increasing the power of that mechanic with purchase price. For example: green (hops) are associated with “growth.” Each green dominated card provides the ability to produce extra resources when used as an action. Likewise, I associated blue (water) with stealing (fluid movement of resources), red (malt) with destruction, and yellow (wheat) with protection. The more you pay for a particular card, the more power granted by using that card.

I didn’t want the game to be dominated by this mechanic, though, so I attempted to balance player choice by giving each card with a cost above 3 a number of victory points. As the goal of the game is to be the first player to end their turn with 10 victory points, this presents the player with an interesting choice. As I mentioned before, players must choose whether to use the ability provided by a card, and therefore losing its victory points in exchange for the benefit provided by its colored ability. These abilities can often be game-changing and lead to even more victory points if played well, so the choice can be an interesting one.

Design problems:

There are some issues with the design of this game. The main one being that there simply isn’t enough player interaction. Players can steal from one another or opt to destroy another’s resources, but it rarely came up in play testing as players often opted to retain their cards in favor of interacting with others’ resources. I am currently redesigning this game with this in mind, but the more I try to redesign, the more of the game I change. In truth, the game is morphing quite dramatically into another game entirely. While the resource collection is interesting, I am now leaning into providing players with the ability to bet more heavily and to interact more with other players’ cards and ability to bet instead of simply altering their current resource pools. The main reason I’m making this change is that it is far too easy at times for a player who just lost resources to roll those same resources back into their pool on their next turn, thus leading to no effective change in their play choices.

As this game was created for a class over the course of a week and then modified and graphically designed over the course of another two, I don’t feel too bad about how it turned out. There are a lot of changes that could be made to increase the playability and especially the player interactions, but it’s still a fun game to play with a few friends.

If you’d like to try it out, here’s a link to a page where you can download it for free.

Free download