What would you say if someone approached you with this offer: "Can I give you a hot brown surprise?"
You'd probably say anything other than "Yes, please! I can't wait for you to put that in my eager, grasping hands!"
But what if I were to tell you that Hot Brown Surprise was actually a game? After shaking your finger at me for an overly clickbaity headline, you might say, "But...why would they call it that?!" Let's dig into some back story:
In the 1920's, The Brown Hotel [in Louisville, Kentucky] drew over 1,200 guests each evening for its dinner dance. By the wee hours of the morning, guests would grow weary of dancing and make their way to the restaurant for a bite to eat. Sensing their desire for something more glamorous than traditional ham and eggs, Chef Fred Schmidt set out to create something new to tempt his guests' palates. His unique dish? An open-faced turkey sandwich with bacon and a delicate Mornay sauce. The Hot Brown was born!
That bit of culinary history is recorded on the website of The Brown Hotel, which is still open in 2026 and still serving Hot Browns — which now come in more varieties than what Schmidt originally created. Here's a paragraph from a Cami Cox article on Food Republic:
While the famed hotel is the epicenter for getting a genuine Hot Brown, the sandwich is served at countless other Louisville restaurants with different twists and variations, as well. Some spots offer a breakfast rendition of the dish, topped with a fried egg and using buttermilk biscuits instead of Texas toast or smoked ham instead of turkey; others whip up seafood, prime rib, veggie, and pizza-based versions of the Hot Brown.
In 2024, the GAMA Expo trade convention was hosted in Louisville for the first time, which led to various individuals in the game industry discovering the Hot Brown, including John Brieger, head of the Brieger Creative development studio: "A colleague took me to The Brown Hotel to try a Hot Brown. I fell in love with the story."
Brieger says they made lots of jokes about the Hot Brown's silly name and vowed to spread word about the sandwich and its story to other GAMA attendees. "When I returned in 2025," he says, "I learned that 2026 was the 100th anniversary of the sandwich. I thought this was a potential fun opportunity for a promotional game, similar to how Brieger Creative had used 2023's Murder at the Atelier."
Murder in the Atelier is an 18-card escape room-style puzzle game sold in a booster pack — although "sales" was not the initial purpose of this item. To quote the game's history from Brieger Creative:
We wanted to send out a holiday card for our friends in the industry and in true game developer-fashion, we turned it into a game! To mail it out in standard envelopes, it would need to be thin and compact — but still showcase our in-house puzzle design and production talent. After a lot of brainstorming, we decided on an escape room style experience of oversized tarot cards, packaged in a sleek booster pack.
Design was focused on puzzle variety and overall experience. We have twists on familiar puzzle types like hidden message, crossword, and logical deduction, along with some fresh concepts most players haven't seen before. We really wanted to push what could be done in the form of 18 tarot cards and convey the crafty feel of creating fashion. Cards are written on, flipped, cut, overlapped, aligned, weaved, and slotted together. The fashion studio setting ties the puzzles together, while notes from in-game characters provide an extra narrative layer and optional mystery players can discover.
In short, rather than sending out a holiday card that will be recycled and forgotten, Brieger Creative sent out an example of what it can do as both a creator of commissioned games and a development studio, placing that item in the hands of industry professionals who might decide to hire them in the future — and now it was time to do the same for the Hot Brown. Says Brieger, "I commissioned the design as a very, very expensive-to-produce business card in some ways. If something this good is what we do as a goof, imagine what we could do if you actually paid us money."
Brieger decided on the product direction and form factor, with Breeze Grigas — co-designer of AEGIS: Combining Robot Strategy Game and an on-staff developer — in charge of the game's design. Says Grigas, "After John gave us the prompt, the game's overall form came together pretty quickly in my head. The title came first, which set the audience expectation for the game, so it was important for it to be both about the titular sandwich and have a "surprise". It was always going to be a single-pack card game, too, so that restriction on components shaped it a bit. I landed on a game where players make a Hot Brown, and that its content was a surprise. I'm aware that this sounds very dumb when typed out, but committing to the bit and fulfilling a promise to the players is arguably the most important part of making games."
The "surprise" in Hot Brown Surprise plays out in three ways. Nine cards are the same in every booster pack, while two cards are surprise ingredients, mirroring the way in which not all Hot Browns are the same.
For surprise #2, before dealing cards to players each round, you burn 1-3 cards, that is, set them aside face up out of play. Says Grigas, "The idea of 'burning' a few cards to keep each game fresh came from our other game, Slambo!, which was published in 2025 by Allplay (and designed by my friend Ryan Richford)."
For surprise #3, players then alternate place cards face down to form the sandwich, stopping when each player holds only a single card. You then flip the "sandwich" face up and resolve the cards with sandwich powers from top to bottom.
Each card has a "fullness score" in its upper-left corner, and whoever has the highest score in hand after resolving the sandwich wins the round — unless someone pulls off the Mornay Sauce alternate win condition, with a similar condition also being a feature in Pocket Paragons, a game line from Brian McKay, who is also an on-staff developer with Brieger Creative. "Members of our team also worked on that game," says Grigas. "Hot Brown Surprise is kind of an amalgam of a few small card game projects our team and friends have put together over the years. Every new game you make is like the result of someone passing you a lump of clay that's been touched by many other designers."
Grigas credits Brieger Creative developer Bryan "Duckie" Lue with fine tuning the cards, which have "High", "Low", and "Surprise" printed on their back side to give players limited info about what opponents might be holding.
Adds Grigas, "[Lue] also put in a lot of research regarding different Hot Brown recipes and that determined which rare 'Surprise' ingredient cards would appear in packs. My favorite part of this game is that the Wikipedia page for the Hot Brown lists the usual ingredients, and then 'also, very rarely, canned peaches', which we could find no real-life evidence for at all. Nonetheless, this determined that Peaches would be the 1-in-100 ultra rare card in the game, and thus our game has canonized it."
I forgot to mention that before resolving the sandwich, players are supposed to chant in unison: "Hot... Brown... Surprise!" Despite being in the rules, this chant is obviously not essential to play, although Grigas says this rule was in place from the start of the design. "Instructing your players to chant is a very underrated social 'mechanic', and I felt it could really establish investment/attention in this little gag game."
What's more, if you're playing in public, chanting will attract attention to what you're playing — something designers and publishers love to see, although as with Murder in the Atelier, sales of Hot Brown Surprise are a secondary concern.
"A very limited amount of product is being sold by Kentucky-based retailers," says Brieger, "but the game will not be available in traditional distribution or as a long-term item." He says that more than two-thirds of the 3,000 copy print run is being given away. (Any GAMA Expo 2026 attendee could pick up a free copy of the game on site. Copies are available for purchase online.)
As with Murder in the Atelier, production of Hot Brown Surprise was handled by Chris Solis of Solis Game Studio. Says Brieger, "Chris wanted to use Hot Brown Surprise as a sort of semi-collectible showcase of our abilities to make collectible products for clients as it's an area he's been really seeking to grow the business in. Chris designed the Cyberpunk Trading Card Game, currently the highest funded card game of all time on crowdfunding, so Hot Brown Surprise helps show that Solis Game Studio is capable at working at all scales of TCG production, from indie to high-production IP games."
