Crowdfunding to buy a vowel: Paperback review (advance print & play version)

After being away on a holiday with more beaches than boardgames, I'm getting back into the swing of things with a preview of a card game due for release in the next few months. The kickstarter for Paperback: A Novel Deckbuilding Game was funded a few months ago and is due to ship in January, and backers were provided with print & play files to get playing right away (a thoughtful addition, especially given Kickstarter projects deserved reputation for delays). Paperback is a word building game like Scrabble, but folded into a deckbuilder format like Dominion. Those two things might sound weirdly incompatible, but despite some hiccups Paperback manages to blend them more smoothly than might be expected. This version is lacking only the colour cards and art, the rules are the same as the forthcoming commercial version.


Paperback: A Novel Deckbuilding Game
Designer: Tim Fowers
Self-Published via Kickstarter 
Players: 2-4

Paperback is all about making and scoring words, like Scrabble. Instead of a rack of tiles however, each player has a deck of cards. Each turn you will draw a handful of cards, make a word out of them, and use the points scored by that word to buy new cards which are added to your deck. To aid in making words, there is always visible a 'common' vowel that any player can use in making their word, and a number of wild cards that substitute as any letter (though usually they are worth 0 points themselves). The overall goal is to buy up the victory point cards, which also function as wild letters - when two piles of victory cards (or all the common vowels) are gone, it's game over and the person who scored the most victory points is the winner. Paperback is a deckbuilding game, a genre of games where players all begin with a small set of cards, then progressively acquire more cards from a common supply over the course of the game to each end up with a unique deck.

'The Offer' - the common piles of cards available for players to buy

Each player begins with the same deck of 10 cards (5 Wilds, R, S, T, L, N),  which they will shuffle and draw 5 cards from to form an opening hand. Each turn you will make a word from the letters in your hand, total up the points the word is worth, then use those points to buy one or more cards from the table. Many cards also have bonus effects, such as drawing you extra cards next round, scoring your wild cards or allowing you to trash (remove) cards from your deck. Cards for purchase are sorted into piles by their cost, with cards costing more usually having more powerful effects or just higher points values. All the cards of one value are shuffled together and form one pile, with the top two cards of each pile left visible and available for purchase. When you buy a card, it goes to your discard pile. At the end of the turn, you discard all your used and unused cards and draw a new hand of 5. When your deck runs out, you shuffle up your all your discards (including those purchased but as yet unused cards) and begin again.

In this way over the course of the game your deck grows to include the new letters you buy and lets you aim towards a strategy of sorts, either in terms of the letters themselves or the special bonus effects attached to them. Rather than pulling letters from a bag, you will know roughly what your deck contains, though the individual cards will be dealt out randomly. You'll get some degree of control over what words you can make instead of the frustrating word game scenario of staring down at a rack of a 'Q', a 'B' and 5 'E's. You might go for big long words by buying up the double-letter tiles, or you may prefer prioritising bonuses and high value letters to make 3 and 4 letter words that score way above their weight. Either way the core scrabble mechanic of wordbuilding remains rewarding, and the various bonuses and card buying add a pleasing amount of complexity to the decision making. The bonus abilities are also varied enough that these decisions aren't simply mathematical (like a double word/letter score tile in scrabble for example), as you'll be thinking about the future composition of your deck, the bonus powers available and the letters you're likely to draw next rather than just 'what is the highest amount of points I can put out with these letters'.

A starting deck, which players shuffle and draw a hand of 5 from

Paperback does bring along some word game baggage with it. Most obviously, the skill/vocabulary factor. Paperback is best played among people of comparable ability, or someone is going to end up having a bad time. There is an optional 'bounty' variant for family play that allows players to reveal their cards and have another player make a word for them (and they receive a bonus point) but I feel that's not really dealing with the problem. If the solution to an unbalanced game is to let the other player take your turn, that's not really a solution at all, but I can see it helping in an adults & children playing together situation. This imbalance isn't Paperback's fault though, it's inherent to any word construction game. Just something to be aware of. If your friends aren't the type to like word games, they aren't going to like Paperback just because it's wrapped in a deckbuilding skin.

The other major concern here is the dreaded analysis paralysis. Players dragging out their turn forever looking for the best possible word is made even worse here. When you include possible bonus abilities on cards, the decisions on purchasing new cards and trying to figure out when to start buying victory cards over letters etc, given the opportunity paralysis-prone players will grind the game to a halt. Depending on the people you play with, you'll want a timer for turns. Adjust the time limit for the number of players and the crowd you're with, but there's no excuse for someone just picking up their hand and looking over their cards for the first time when their turn comes around then taking 5 minutes to choose a word. AP will be the death of this game but as long as you're on top of it can flow as quickly as any other deckbuilder. Yes, given enough time you could probably construct an 8 letter masterpiece from all the double-letters, wild scorers and common vowel you have available. But if it's going to hold the game up a lot, just consider playing the good decent-scoring word that might not be the theoretical longest/highest scoring word you could make if you could just use all those letters at once.

The other quibble with the word game part of Paperback is the necessary consequence of allowing you to control what letters you acquire. At some point, more likely as the game goes on, you will probably end up recycling words with some regularity. Especially when you're on the stretch of buying up victory cards to end the game instead of new letters, you're likely to see similar hands of cards and barring the changing common vowel, you'll probably be looking at the same options for words at least a few times in a given game. But this isn't too much of a drawback, and can in fact feel like a payoff for good play - having those words available for consistent scoring is your reward for choosing your letters well and building a deck that works. In this way Paperback demonstrates its synergy between word-game and deckbuilder-game formats. Pleasingly it's neither one tacked on to the other, but a definite merger of the two. I like the idea of scrabble rewarding you for tight deck construction!

Word game fans have a lot to like here, and this general overview gives you a good idea of whether you're in the major target audience. The other group who could be expected to like Paperback are fans of other deckbuilders, and from here I'm going to address Paperback in terms of deckbuilding games rather than word games. For several reasons I'm going to be referring to Dominion a ton here - if you're not familiar with it yet you should check it out as it's an amazing game in its own right that single-handedly created a genre overnight, and the base set is a perfect entry level game. This is going to be heavy on deckbuilder terminology so if you're not up to speed with that feel free to skim over it. You can probably already tell if Paperback is going to interest you, which is to say if you like word games, it most definitely will. In fact for better or worse, Paperback leans more to the word game side of its heritage than it does deckbuilding. For those interested in the DBG analysis, carry on!

Victory point cards - the common vowel and wildcards

Paperback cribs a lot from Dominion. A lot. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as despite spawning a dozen imitators I'm firmly of the opinion that Dominion is still head and shoulders above every other deckbuilding game on the market. However at the same time, it has if not missed then misapplied some of the crucial elements that make Dominion the fluid, elegant experience it is. This could just be down to the format, ultimately there is a marriage of two majorly different gameplay types here and it's a testament to the quality of Paperback that it works as well as it does, but there are noticeable issues.

First and foremost, the victory cards. The big difference here is that victory points are not dead weight cards, functioning as wild letters. Those wilds still score for 0 but one of the key deckbuilding mechanics is the tension between cards that provide utility to the deck, and cards that provide VP but negative utility. It's the driving factor behind Dominion play, that is, when do I stop building the engine and start running it? Start buying your greens too early and you're crippling your ability to build a useful hand.

In Paperback those victory cards are still useable, and in some cases might even be necessary to fill out a word. You still don't want too many of them at once as they won't allow you to score big, but the result is that the actual composition of your deck feels less important than in Dominion. Also easy to overlook (but a bigger weakness, I feel) is the diluting effect this has on the relative importance of victory cards at different stages of the game. Victory cards are an ok buy throughout, neither truly disadvantageous early on nor the natural must-buy game clock they should be later on. It's difficult to score large enough words to be buying the top tier of victory cards, but they don't have a unique depletion condition like provinces so you still need to finish another pile. They'll be a pick up when you can thing, not a build your deck to consistently achieve them thing. There's also just too many VP cards, 4 tiers not counting the 1-point wilds you start with in your deck. It doesn't have Dominion's smooth sense of timing. The first two games I played didn't end until we realised how long it had been going and we consciously chose to buy out the second/third tier VP piles.

I think the way to fix this is to mostly pretend the top tier of VPs (Best Seller $17/15VP) aren't there. If you hit a massive scoring round great, grab one. Otherwise it should be a case of building your deck to the point where you can consistently score the second highest, and that's your 'province point'. eg If I reach this many points in a round, I should obviously buy a VP in almost all circumstances, and I should aim to build a deck that can score this many points consistently. It's a simple enough fix, it's just that as presented it's natural for people to keep trying to build up their word scoring power to the point of being able to grab the best sellers, when realistically the score threshold is too high to hit consistently and you'll be playing for ages when you could have been winning by buying up the 2nd tierof VPs instead of more expensive letters. The other end game condition - all common vowels taken - is also not a fast clock, as these are awarded on being the first to reach a word of a given length, starting at 7 letters and increasing to 10 for the last game-ending vowel.

Actions and buys are simplified compared to other deckbuilders. Since the core action every turn is to make a word rather than playing cards as such, the bonus effects of all the cards you played are applied. These are pretty straightforward, but can add up to a bit of bookkeeping when you've got 4 or 5 different actions applied in order when resolving the word. As there's no action 'resource' to manage there's less decision making when it comes to each card's bonus, just the choice of whether or not to use that letter/action at all. Buys are unlimited, you may purchase any number of cards up to the total value of points you have to spend. All these elements together make for a somewhat lower skill ceiling on the deckbuilding side of things.

Higher cost cards get better abilities and high scoring letters. $8, $9, and $10 cards are shuffled into a single pile

Trashers have been included, but I think without a clear direction. Trashers exist mainly to remove dead cards from your deck, but there are no dead cards in this game. No do-nothing cards, no outright negative cards (ie curses) and far fewer cards even of objectively low utility. There are the lower scoring generic consonants that you start the game with, but despite being lower scoring they don't really lose actual utility as the game progresses, if you need an S you need an S, even if it's only a one point letter. This makes trash cards feel like a bit of an afterthought, included because they're an element of deckbuilding games rather than because they serve a definite purpose in this deckbuilding game. They have their uses still, you may want to cut cards that no longer fit with your strategy, or letters you've got higher cost versions of, but thinning doesn't feel like an essential part of the puzzle as it does in other games because you won't be worrying about countering genuinely bad cards, just tweaking less than optimal ones. The one-use "[effect] then trash this" letters are the best implementation of this mechanic.

Finally let's look at the board layout ('The Offer', equivalent to the kingdom in Dominion) . The randomisation here comes not from the selection of cards, which are the same every game, but the order, much like Ascension in this regard. This works well and the fact that two cards are available from each pile at any one time does a lot to mitigate being stuck with just crappy letters to buy. The luck of the draw is still a factor on the table, assessing the best buy is much more a tactical exercise in what is the best available right now than a strategy-focused Dominion game of picking a plan upon seeing the board then executing it for the rest of the game. You'll also have to factor in the cards you've bought previously as unlike action cards, no letter stands on its own.

Higher cost letters will have better bonuses, but the score of a given letter is always the same

Given that the card abilities are second to their function as letters, there's never a case where certain cards are obviously much better than others and people won't be getting put out about unfair or broken cards. I think that Paperback really excels here. Everyone is just trying to do their best, it's not a hugely interactive game (to be honest it's not really interactive at all, even less so than base Dominion) but the game facilitates everyone getting a fair shot to make the best words possible and test their skills. The constant cycling through decks of letters evens out the probabilities, in the long term nobody is going to be screwed by blind chance. It's less likely to come down to the one person who managed to drop a Q on triple letter score than being the person who picked up letters with synergistic abilities and played solid words consistently.

All in all Paperback is a great game. In isolation, it's not a great deckbuilder - but it's not trying to be a pure deckbuilding game. If you're not interested in it for the word game aspect, the deckbuilding side is not going to save it for you. The word construction mechanic is clearly the meat of the game, and the deckbuilding facilitates that rather than the other way around. As long as you're ok with that priority and you have friends who feel the same, you will love Paperback. I love both word games and deckbuilders and this game went over great for me, the best elements of both genres work together to more than compensate for the areas of each where it falls down. And the broad appeal of word games means if you can get your words-with-friends playing friends interested, you're only a half step away from getting them stuck into Dominion: Intrigue...