by Simon

As with many games, it is astonishing to look back at the origins of Bayou Boss and realize that I started with a completely different idea!

Bayou Boss is a trick-taking game with three twists, which I’ll come to in a moment. As a recap, a classic trick-taking game like Whist involves a player leading a single card of a certain suit. Players must play a card with the same suit (“follow suit”) or, if they cannot because they lack the suit, can “trump” if they want, with the trump suit being designated at the start of the game. The winner of the trick is the player who played the highest trump, or if no trumps were played, the player who played the highest card in the suit led.

When I was a kid, my family played one trick-taking game avidly, and that was Solo Whist, or “Solo” as we called it. In this four-player game, you evaluated your cards, then there was a single round of bidding during which you said how many tricks you thought you could win. The player who bid highest would win the bid, and all other players would pit themselves against the bid winner to prevent them from winning that many tricks.

The bid I liked the most in Solo was the “Misère” bid – literally “misery” – which is what it could feel like because you vowed to take no tricks, then everyone tried to make you win by playing their lowest cards!

Perhaps a better-known game in which you try to avoid tricks is Hearts, although in this case you try to avoid only heart cards and the Queen of Spades, which is slightly more forgiving than in Solo.

The idea of Bayou Boss is that each trick taken is worth 1 point. The player with the fewest points after several rounds wins, so players will try to avoid winning tricks — and now for its three twists:

▪️ The first twist is that players are obliged to trump when they can’t follow suit, whereas in Solo and Hearts there is no trump suit. Fortunately, there is a way to change the trump suit — even during a trick round — by playing a raven, of which there will be a few in the game.

▪️ The second twist is that only half the cards are dealt out at the beginning of the game; the rest will be collected by players and added to their hands during the game, with the winner of a trick being first to choose.

One card per player is turned over into the “swamp” in the center of the table, so you can see what’s on offer and decide what to play. Winning no tricks with your initial cards will usually ensure that you collect only bad or fairly bad cards as you play, with “bad” meaning good since you’ll likely win tricks with them later. This means that you must decide when to use your stronger cards to win a trick and take a point you don’t want in order to get a “good” card for the future.

▪️ The third twist is that the swamp will contain character cards that do special things to mess with the game. Some characters guarantee you will win a trick, some guarantee you’ll lose, and some will mess with who wins a specific trick or allow you to do other sneaky things – like give your trick away or determine who is start player. Then there’s the raven, which allows you to change trump mid-term and stitch someone up.

The game includes more characters than you use in a single game, so each play should feel different depending on who shows up in the swamp.

Anyway, back to its origins…

Bayou Boss started life in September 2023 as an idea to, like in Solo Whist, bid the number of tricks you wanted to win. I had a special idea for how to do that in which you reserved a bid so that no one else could make it. This seemed like a good idea…until I discovered that I had just reinvented Oh Hell! — or at least a variant of it that I found online. Oh well, oh Hell.

I didn’t give up, though! The next idea that occurred was to build your hand of cards during the game by having cards in the middle that you won and added to your hand. This then led to the idea of having bad cards as well as good cards to take, which ultimately led to my first prototype with the additional idea that you try to avoid tricks.

The first special cards I had in the game were the “Change trump”, “Always win”, and “Always lose” cards, which are called “Raven”, “Heron”, and “Manatee”, respectively, in the final game. I also had a title for the game: “Mea Culpa”, which is the rough Latin equivalent of what the Australians might say as “Sorry, not sorry!” This was also the name for the card changing the trump, which can be very powerful.

Within ten days I had a working prototype, and I put it to one side to test at the Gathering of Friends, an invitation-only event held each April. The event in 2024 included a day of playing trick-taking games, and we played the game with six players.

It went down so well that I was approached by Brent Lloyd, who kindly wanted to playtest the game and help me find a publisher. Along with his friend Darren Bezzant, Brent playtested the game extensively, while I was able to test their suggestions in parallel. What came out of this was tweaks to the character card distribution and the endgame scoring.

In addition, originally I had used several characters more than once, but in the end I added new characters that we tested so that every game could feel different.

Then Brent approached me, explaining that he had decided to start a publishing company called Thunderbolt Games and would like “Mea Culpa” to be his first published game! I was honored. Brent explained that he would be working with Frank DiLorenzo from R&R Games, who would help in every aspect of the game as Brent learned the ropes.

Fast-forward a few months as Frank and his team came up with a new name and theme for the game, with fabulous artwork from Brandon Lewis. Bayou Boss is a great name that fits well with the game as the central pool of cards became the swamp and the characters became swamp creatures whose nature is linked to their special abilities. The beautiful and fun art really gave flavor to the game, and I love it.

Bayou Boss is great fun with all player counts, with the deck being designed to be adapted for the number of players. There are always twists to be discovered in the combination of the characters, with laugh-out-loud moments when a player is victimized or shoots themselves in the foot! All in all, it’s a quick fun game that should go down well with gamers and families alike.

Bayou Boss should be available in the UK, the U.S., Canada, and Australia at the time of writing. I hope y’all enjoy it!

Simon Weinberg