There's no need for bridged networking in this case, because no external system needs to access the VMs. This is a use case for NAT (VMnet8).
What you may want to do is to reset the host's VMnet8 configuration to its defaults (before you changed them), set the VMs to NAT in the VM's settings and set the gateway address as well as the DNS server entry to 192.168.196.2. That's really all you need to do.
André