Bronzefall

We have been working on this project seriously for one year, but the story of Bronzefall goes back much further. I always knew I wanted to be a game designer. I made my first videogame at 10 years old in GameMaker Studio and in high school I dreamed up a card game that used two packs of regular playing cards. My friends and I always finished our schoolwork early and would have extra time in class. We filled that time with card games. I wanted to make a game that used only regular decks of cards, so it could be played anywhere by anyone with no extra materials. Castles and Keeps was a prototype that came out of this, over ten years ago. We never finished the rules fully, but you played cards out in front of you, one of the suits was wall cards, another suit was units, and diamond cards were the currency. I had tons of ideas but the hard constraints of 4 suits and the cards you got in two standard decks of playing cards made design very tricky and the gameplay not fun, the constraints were just too much.

About 10 years later, I was struggling to find a career after college. ChatGPT released the semester I finished college for Computer Science, and was taking all of the jobs I went to school for... I felt I needed my own thing. I founded CowHammer Studios in 2024 with my friend Robert,who I met at my IT job at the time. We made a 2D Roguelike-diner sim called The Forbidden Flask and released it on Steam in late 2025. After work on the Flask had concluded, I decided I wanted to take on this card game I've always wanted to make and it slowly turned into Bronzefall. I had been thinking about the card game here and there over COVID and college, but now I had time on my hands and a company I was building that could actually publish it.

In my first year of college, I was introduced to Magic: The Gathering but I didn't really care for it at the time. In 2023, I had found a new group of friends who played Magic and that's when I discovered Commander, a "party mode" way to play that was much more interesting to me than the 1 vs 1, more serious way to play I was introduced to in 2018. Planechase is a specific way to play Commander, and I really liked it. In Commander, you and three of your friends are very powerful wizards, slinging spells at each other until one remains. Planechase is this, but while we are fighting, we are traveling to different planes of existence via a deck in the middle. Each plane that flips over adds a new environmental effect that can completely change the strategy of the game. Commander is notorious for requiring players to have expensive decks, so there is this underlying problem of accessibility in this new game that I loved. My main goal for my card game became "Deliver a fun experience that feels similar to Planechase, but make it more affordable and more accessible," and what came out of that was Bronzefall. It's a card game that plays like a board game, centered around replayability. You don't need four friends to each spend $500+ on Commander decks to get that experience. Everything four people need to play is included in one box for the cost of a board game.

Bronzefall is the conclusion of a dream game I wanted to make over a decade ago. Hundreds of iterations happened between then and now. It started with adapting regular playing cards into pieces of castles and medieval military units. Now it's a fully custom game with a Late Bronze Age theme, specific historical and mythological references, and beautiful human-made watercolor art that we paid for out of pocket. Game design is my passion and I hope to one day be able to do it full time.