The Elegant Simultaneist

Antoine Bauza solved two problems in the same year, and both solutions changed how people design games.

The first problem: how do you run a seven-player strategy game without anyone waiting? His answer was 7 Wonders — simultaneous card drafting, every player choosing at the same time, passing hands in synchronized rounds. No turns. No downtime. Seven civilizations rising in parallel, finished in thirty minutes. The mechanic became standard practice in modern game design. Post-2010, simultaneous drafting appeared in dozens of published games that traced their lineage directly to what Bauza proved was possible.

The second problem: how do you build a cooperative game where communication itself is the challenge? His answer was Hanabi — cards held facing outward, so you see everyone’s hand except your own. Players give restricted hints. You deduce what you’re holding. The mechanic inverted the fundamental information structure of card games and became a reference point for cooperative design so robust that AI researchers adopted it as a benchmark for studying multi-agent communication.

Both games published in 2010. Both won Spiel des Jahres awards in different categories. Both generated mechanisms that other designers adopted wholesale. The year Bauza turned thirty-two, he produced two of the most influential game designs of the twenty-first century.

Valence

Born August 25, 1978, in Valence, in France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. Bauza holds degrees in literature and oriental civilizations, a master’s in video game and interactive media design from the École nationale du jeu et des médias interactifs (ENJMIN) in Angoulême, and a teaching certification from the IUFM in Valence. The eclectic education matters: literature gave him narrative instinct, oriental civilizations gave him the aesthetic sensibility that permeates Tokaido and Takenoko, interactive media gave him systems thinking, and teaching gave him the conviction that elegance means accessibility.

He began prototyping games in 2003 during his studies. Serious design started around 2007. Ghost Stories — a cooperative game about Taoist monks defending a village from ghosts — published in 2008 and earned six award nominations. It announced Bauza as a designer who could build punishing difficulty into an accessible framework, and whose thematic commitments ran deeper than surface illustration.

Then came 2010, and everything ignited.

Seven Civilizations, Zero Downtime

The design problem behind 7 Wonders was specific: make a civilization game that plays in thirty minutes with seven people. Every existing solution to multi-player strategy involved either sequential turns (creating paralyzing downtime at high player counts) or simplified mechanics (sacrificing depth for speed). Bauza wanted both speed and depth, and simultaneous drafting was the answer.

Every player receives a hand of cards. Every player simultaneously selects one card and places it face-down. Every player reveals simultaneously. Every player passes the remaining hand to their neighbor. Repeat. Three ages of civilization — military, science, commerce, civic, and wonder construction — compressed into synchronized rounds where the strategic decision space expands with experience while the play time stays flat.

The mechanic works because it converts a sequential bottleneck into parallel processing. Seven players make seven decisions at once. The game scales from three to seven players without adding minutes. Tournament play is viable because the drafting creates emergent strategy that shifts with table composition — what your neighbor needs determines what you should deny, and the information about their civilization is visible across the table.

7 Wonders sold over one million copies. 7 Wonders Duel (2015, co-designed with Bruno Cathala) sold over half a million more, adapting the drafting framework for two players with an elegant open-market variant. The franchise generated an estimated ninety million dollars in lifetime revenue. In 2025, BoardGameGeek inducted 7 Wonders into its Hall of Fame. Fifteen years in print, multiple expansions, and a global tournament community. The architecture doesn’t age because the drafting generates different decision trees every game.

The Inverted Hand

Hanabi is fifty cards and a handful of hint tokens. Players hold their cards facing outward — you can see everyone else’s cards but not your own. The goal is cooperative: arrange cards in ascending order by color. Players give hints by indicating which cards in someone’s hand share a color or a number, but hints are limited, and communication beyond the formal hint structure is forbidden.

The inversion is the invention. Every card game in history assumed you knew your own hand. Hanabi assumed the opposite. The result is a cooperative deduction puzzle where the group must build a shared understanding of what everyone is holding through sparse, structured communication. It’s a game about inference, about reading the gap between what someone tells you and what they could have told you, about trusting that your partners are being strategic with their hints.

Hanabi won the Spiel des Jahres in 2013. It sold over one million copies. AI researchers at DeepMind and elsewhere adopted it as a benchmark for studying multi-agent cooperation precisely because its information structure creates genuine coordination challenges that can’t be solved by any single agent alone. The hidden-hand cooperative mechanic has been adapted by numerous subsequent designs. It opened a design space that didn’t exist before 2010.

The Broader Canvas

Bauza’s range extends well beyond the two landmarks. Ghost Stories (2008) is one of the most respected cooperative games of its era — brutal difficulty, thematic depth, puzzle-like spatial optimization. Takenoko (2011) won the As d’Or at the Cannes Games Festival, a family-weight game about a panda eating bamboo in an imperial garden that demonstrates Bauza’s ability to make accessible design feel like a gift rather than a compromise. Tokaido (2012) turned travel along the old East Sea Road into a game about collecting experiences rather than resources — the player who’s farthest behind always moves next, a pacing mechanic that creates contemplative rather than competitive tension.

Draftosaurus (2019) distilled drafting to its essence — dinosaur meeples placed in zoo enclosures, simultaneous selection, five minutes of play. The Little Prince: Make Me a Planet adapted a literary classic into a tile-drafting game. Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth (2024, co-designed with Bruno Cathala) extended the two-player drafting framework of 7 Wonders Duel into Tolkien’s world.

The design voice across forty-plus games is consistent: theme drives mechanics, mechanics serve experience, experience demands accessibility, accessibility requires the elimination of dead time. Every Bauza game asks the same question 7 Wonders asked: how do I keep every player engaged for every second they’re at the table?

PlayPunk and the Next Act

In June 2022, Bauza co-founded PlayPunk with Thomas Provoost — the co-founder of Repos Productions, the publisher that brought 7 Wonders to the world. The publishing house’s stated mission: support designers through the creation process, challenge them to reach their full potential, polish every detail from game design to narrative to production.

Bauza has said publicly that after designing forty to fifty games, he felt restless — not tired of games, but seeking fresh perspective. Publishing gave him that. The role of mentor and curator rather than sole creator. It’s a career arc that mirrors the design philosophy: elegance means knowing when to step back and let someone else take the turn.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Bauza studied literature, oriental civilizations, and interactive media before designing games. The combination is the key. Literature gave him narrative instinct — every Bauza game tells a story, whether it’s monks fighting ghosts or a panda eating bamboo or civilizations rising in parallel. Oriental civilizations gave him an aesthetic of restraint — Tokaido is a game about a Japanese road where the player who moves least sees most, and the design itself operates by the same principle: minimum rules, maximum experience. Interactive media gave him the systems thinking that produced 7 Wonders’ simultaneous architecture — the insight that a tabletop game could process seven players in parallel the way a computer processes threads.

The deeper pattern is about information. Bauza’s most important designs all manipulate who knows what. In 7 Wonders, you know your own hand but not what’s coming next — the drafting creates partial information cascades where each choice reveals something about the player upstream. In Hanabi, the inversion is total — you know nothing about your own hand and must trust others to tell you. In Ghost Stories, the threat information is public but the solution requires cooperative spatial reasoning that no single player can optimize alone.

Every Bauza game is, at bottom, a question about knowledge: what do you know, what don’t you know, and how do you act in the gap between them? The games that changed how people design games weren’t about civilization or fireworks or Japanese gardens. They were about the structure of not-knowing — and the discovery that the most interesting decisions happen precisely where information runs out.

What Remains

7 Wonders (2010) — over one million copies, simultaneous drafting at scale, BGG Hall of Fame, Kennerspiel des Jahres inaugural winner, the game that proved seven players could build civilizations in thirty minutes without anyone waiting.

Hanabi (2010) — over one million copies, Spiel des Jahres winner, the inverted hidden-hand cooperative mechanic, an AI research benchmark, the game that proved the most interesting cooperation happens when you can’t see your own cards.

Takenoko (2011) — As d’Or winner, a panda in an imperial garden, the proof that accessible design can feel like generosity.

Ghost Stories (2008) — Taoist monks against spectral invasion, cooperative difficulty as art form, the game that announced Bauza to the world.

Forty-plus games. Two mechanisms adopted industry-wide. Awards in four countries. Two million copies across the franchise. A publishing house built to help the next generation find their own thirty-minute civilizations.

Total: 30 points. Year: 2008.

30 points. 2008. The elegant simultaneist.

Forty-plus games. Two mechanisms adopted industry-wide. Awards in four countries. Two million copies across the franchise. A publishing house built to help the next generation find their own thirty-minute civilizations.