Bacon Card Game
| BACON Card Game is a cute, silly, simple game about pigs!
Raise your own piglets, fatten them up, and slaughter them for BACON! Steal from, trade with, and sabotage your friends and family while you fight for the fattest piggies and the most bacon to win the game! |
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General Game Info:
Number of Players: 2-6
Playtime: 15-30 min
Age Recommendation: 8+
Theme: Food, Bacon, Farm, Pigs
Categories: Card Game, Victory Points, Sabotage
Designer: Jordan DeYoung
Artist: TBD
Publisher: BaconGamesLLC
Price: $25
Complexity: 2.0/5.0
Game Components:
BACON Card Game comes with the following Components:
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Rules/Game Terms:
Basic Rules:
- You can only hold 5 cards in your hand at the end of each turn.
- You can only play or discard up to 3 cards each turn.
- Piglet cards are played into your field and never taken into your hand.
- Feed and Slaughter your piglets for bacon!
- The amount of bacon you need to win varies depending on the number of players.
- Steal, trade, and starve your opponent's piglets to sabotage and stop them from winning.
Game Terms:
- Feed: Feeding refers to playing a feed card onto one of your piglets. This increases your piglet's fatness, making it worth more points when slaughtered.
- Starve: Starve cards can be played on any piglet, and decreases their fatness, making them worth less points when slaughtered.
- Slaughter: When you play a slaughter card onto one of your piglets, it dies and is removed from the game. You collect bacon point cards equal to the amount of fatness the piglet had. If the piglet's fatness is equal to 0 or is negative, you receive no bacon.
- Steal: Stealing a piglet allows you to take one piglet from any player, along with any feed and/or starve cards, and play it into your field.
- Force Trade: Trading a piglet allows you to exchange one of your piglets, along with any feed and/or starve cards, with any other piglet along with the feed and starve cards.
- Discard: You can discard piglets from the field when playing a discard card. This takes any piglet, discards all feed and starve cards from it, and places the pig face-down on top of the piglet deck.
- Stop: Stop cards are the only card that can be played out of turn and do not count as a card being played. These cards are played to Stop any action card from being played, including other stop cards, played by any player.
Gameplay:
At the beginning of gameplay, each player is dealt 1 piglet card that goes face-up into their field and 5 action cards that go into their hand.
The player who last ate bacon goes first!
Players take turns by doing the following steps:
- Draw so you have 5 cards in your hand at the start of your turn.
- Play up to 3 cards and follow what they say to do.
- Turn ends and it is the next player’s turn.
As you play you will accumulate bacon cards to indicate your points.
The game ends as soon as any player gets enough bacon cards OR when all the piglets that can be slaughtered have been slaughtered. If this happens the player with the most bacon wins.
How I made the Game:
I started making this game about 2 years ago. I first came up with the idea of making games after my wife encouraged me to find a new hobby, something that I think I might enjoy. This got me thinking, “What DO I like to do?” And then I remembered my childhood. Growing up my family were avid tabletop gamers. We would play games like chess, monopoly, sequence, risk, and all sorts of other games. My brothers and I would even make games all the time to fill our time with. Taking scrap papers and drawing out boards and maps to play on (some of which were 3 dimensional). Making custom cards to play with and using whatever we could find for the game pieces. I wanted to start making games like that again, but with a bit more skill than my younger self had. So, I set off trying to make a game!
My first attempt at a game was one I figured I’d base on Greek mythology… long story short it was a trainwreck. I had hundreds and hundreds of cards, a board that was so incredibly big and complex I don’t think I would even be able to explain it to anyone. I had no skills doing this at all and I was getting frustrated trying to force this idea into existence. After a while of trying to get this idea to work, I found myself working on it less and less. I wasn’t really enjoying working on it, and that was kind of the whole point of me doing this. I was wasting my time with this game that would never be finished.
One day though something changed. I had a new idea! A new game idea came to me in the weirdest of places. The bathroom. While I was on the throne taking care of some business, I had a silly idea for a game where you feed pigs and kill them for bacon. So, I opened up a note page on my phone and started writing out my game idea right there in the bathroom.
As soon as I got out, I went and grabbed my laptop and started to get to work designing the game, writing out rules and making the card files. Me in my limited resources used the only program I could think of, Google Drawings, to do all the artwork and designing. My first draft was a bit rough, but after several hours of work I had my piglet designs and all my cards' files downloaded.
So, what next? How do I see if it works? Well, I popped over to google and searched up “how to make a game prototype”. Of course, this gave me a whole slew of options and articles on how to do it, but I found one site that I liked and could make my game for me. So, I put in all my files and bought my first prototype!
A couple weeks later my game arrived in the mail. “Awesome! Now I can test it and see how cool my game is!” It was not very good. I found as me and my in-laws played it for the first time that it was very slow-going. There weren't enough cards for it to play smoothly and the game dragged on for hours.
After this disappointment, I went and wrote down what I thought the game needed, a couple rule tweaks, some extra cards, etc. And then I ordered some more cards from the same place and waited…
After a couple weeks passed my new cards arrived and I was less excited than the first time. I was worried that nobody would want to play it again with me after the first failure. I delayed my next playtest simply because I didn’t want to fail again.
Eventually though I did retest the game and it was good! It went by much faster this time and was fun to play. After several games and feedback from my family I found that the game could use a couple tweaks.
I added a few more cards to the game, changed a lot of wording on the cards to make it more understandable and redid all my artwork to make it look nicer (on google drawing still). After doing all that I was convinced my game was perfect and I ordered a nice new prototype with a fancier box!
After I got the new cards, the game played very smoothly and I would routinely bring it with me to game nights at friends' houses, group activities, and family gatherings. Each time we played I would get asked, “where can I buy this?”, or something similar, and I’d respond with a general, “Oh it’s not for sale yet, I don’t have the funding to make it”.
Can you guess what I did next? I decided to make a Kickstarter for it! Brilliant! I was convinced I was a genius.
I was not.
My first attempt at a Kickstarter was terrible. It was designed terribly, I tried doing everything by myself and then I just launched it with no prep, no research, nothing.
I texted a few people letting them know I did it and posted a couple things on social media about it. That’s it.
Well after a month of my Kickstarter going it failed. Surprised? I wasn’t. I was ashamed of it! It looked terrible, I barely put any work into it at all! I was acting stupid with it. I didn’t do the work and it showed.
So, several months after this happened, I started thinking about trying it again. This time with more research and using other successful game projects as a template for mine.
I worked with my wife and in-laws to clean up wording and help me design a new and improved Kickstarter for it!
In my research I found that projects that had stretch goals with bonus content and rewards were generally more successful, so I started thinking of what a good goal would be to add. New artwork! I’m not an artist, but I know a few. Maybe they would be willing to show me a couple mockups and I could use that as a stretch goal for the game.
I reached out to a friend of ours and she gave me a couple mockup designs based on my cards… WOW! They were spectacular! It was the best thing I’ve ever seen! I had to have them! I didn’t want to have that be a stretch goal anymore, I wanted that to be what it started at. I ended up commissioning her to do some artwork for me and that is where we are right now.
Where can I buy it?
I hope to start a new Kickstarter for this game by the end of April 2023, and have games made and available to purchase from this website by the end of November 2023.
Want to give it a try?
Bacon is currently open for playtesting on Tabletopia.com. Click here to try it out for free!
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