Paperback - Tue 03/03/15 17:04 UTC
Paperback is a new game that has gotten a lot of buzz after its successful Kickstarter campaign. I happened to pick it up at a local game store, and everyone I've played it with has loved it.
It is most commonly described as "Dominion Scrabble," which is a pretty apt description. It's a deck-builder in which your cards are letters (or pairs of letters), with which you try to build words. You get some assistance from a single "common" card that everyone can use, and each letter card has a value. You add the total value of the letters in your word and can use them to buy more letters, and/or "novels" (the nominal theme of the game is that you are a writer trying to make it big as a novelist). Novels are much like Estate cards in Dominion - worth victory points, but not as useful as other cards during play. However, unlike Estate cards, they aren't useless in your hand, since they can be used as wild cards.
The letter cards also have special abilities, like adding to your score if you use a particular letter first or last in a word, a bonus if you make a word without wild cards, reversing two letters, increasing your hand size, or imposing penalties on everyone else.
If you like deck-builders and word games, this is the perfect combination. There are a number of optional rules to add variety and/or make the game more challenging. It's completely self-contained as is, but I'll bet there will be expansions in the future.
It is most commonly described as "Dominion Scrabble," which is a pretty apt description. It's a deck-builder in which your cards are letters (or pairs of letters), with which you try to build words. You get some assistance from a single "common" card that everyone can use, and each letter card has a value. You add the total value of the letters in your word and can use them to buy more letters, and/or "novels" (the nominal theme of the game is that you are a writer trying to make it big as a novelist). Novels are much like Estate cards in Dominion - worth victory points, but not as useful as other cards during play. However, unlike Estate cards, they aren't useless in your hand, since they can be used as wild cards.
The letter cards also have special abilities, like adding to your score if you use a particular letter first or last in a word, a bonus if you make a word without wild cards, reversing two letters, increasing your hand size, or imposing penalties on everyone else.
If you like deck-builders and word games, this is the perfect combination. There are a number of optional rules to add variety and/or make the game more challenging. It's completely self-contained as is, but I'll bet there will be expansions in the future.