Paperback Adventures takes deck-building to a new level
A solo deck-building word game, Paperback Adventures knows just what to say.
Hello! I hope this newsletter finds you well. I’m here to talk to you about Paperback Adventures, a solo deck-building word game that dominated my weekend. It’s the latest from Fowers Games, and I think you might enjoy it. I know I did.
Before we get to the topic at hand, I’m happy to report that I played through several of the trick-taking games on my to-play list featured in last week’s issue, and I’ll be writing about those at some point in the coming weeks. But briefly, American Book Shop and Take the “A” Chord, two trick-takers from Japan, were excellent twists on the genre, and both come highly recommended. Time Chase was a little weirder, and I’m still processing it (and probably need to play again, honestly.)
I do have a few deck-building game recommendations at the end here, if you’re interested. And with that, further ado, Paperback Adventures.
Paperback Adventures is a deck-building word game from Fowers Games, designed by Tim Fowers and Skye Larsen. It’s a spin-off from Fowers’ successful deck-builder Paperback, from which this game pulls many of its key ideas. Unlike Paperback, which is competitive (unless you’re playing the cooperative variant, I suppose!), Adventures is built only for cooperative play. It’s limited to just one or two players, and the focus is definitely on a solo experience.
What’s deck-building? I’m glad you asked. It’s a style of game in which you have a limited deck of cards under your control initially, and over the course of the game, you will improve and expand upon that deck of cards. I’ll frame it in terms of the original Paperback, which we’ll expand upon when we get into Adventures. When you start the game, you start with cards representing the Wheel of Fortune letters (R, S, T, L and N — sorry, E) and five wild cards. You’ll draw a set number of cards each turn, and on each of your turns, you’ll play cards to spell a word. It’s handy you’ve got those wild cards, right? Those will also give you an opportunity to buy more letters to add to your deck. Over time, your deck will grow in size (unless you take opportunities to trim it, which you’ll have,) making it easier to spell new words, as well as increasing the likelihood that you’ll end up drawing a hand full of letters you can’t turn into a great point-scoring word.
That’s the fundamental conflict of deck-building as a mechanic. You’ll need to add cards to your deck to be able to do more in the game, but you’ll also decrease the likelihood of drawing any specific card. And so it is here in Paperback Adventures — thanks for allowing me that little detour, but hopefully you found it instructive. (Before we take the exit, a note: Both Paperback and Hardback, the latter of which is designed by Jeff Beck and Fowers, are great deck-building word games, and they both get my seal of approval. As for which you should buy — well, let’s just say I wrote down an idea in my notebook for a future newsletter. If that’s something you’d like to see, please, let me know!)
A roguish adventure
Paperback Adventures is a lot like Paperback, as you’d expect. You’re trying to build words so you can upgrade what’s in your deck. But there’s a lot more to Adventures, and it takes that base mechanic and it adds an entire Roguelike layer on top. (What’s a Roguelike game? I don’t think you want another detour from me here, so here. Have a link. But the basic idea is that you improve or gain abilities as you play the game, and if you lose, you start completely fresh next time you play.)
In Paperback Adventures, you play as a character — you’ll need to buy a character box when you buy the core box, so don’t forget! — fighting a series of escalating battles against lackeys and bosses. At the end of each battle, you’ll earn valuable rewards, like adding, replacing or upgrading cards in your deck, gaining items or McGuffins, or restoring your health. You’ll also get a chance to shop for those benefits, too, depending on what you’ve gained throughout the game.
You’ll be battling against space aliens, sludge monsters, mad scientists, and any manner of entertaining literary tropes. Each turn, your enemy will take some action. That might be attacking you, blocking your attacks, or otherwise impacting you or itself in some way. You’ll play words that give you attack points, defense points and energy, with the top card in your word providing you some benefit — but you’ll have to “fatigue” your card after using it, and you won’t be able to use it for the rest of the battle. The benefit the card provides might be as simple as letting you draw more cards on your following turn, giving you greater word construction capabilities. More complex interactions exist, and you’ll need to be at your best to figure out how to craft your turns to get a chance at defeating your enemies. This game doesn’t start easy, and it only ramps up in difficulty as you continue.
When you defeat an enemy (each has two forms, like every great Final Fantasy boss,) you’ll get valuable items and upgrades. Items will give you bonuses that you can use so long as you’ve collected the requisite energy. McGuffins will give you ongoing bonuses that might radically shift the way you think about your strategy. They’re two-sided, so you get to choose the side that benefits you the most. Boss McGuffins are McGuffins, but they’re even better and more ridiculous.
Bosses let you add letters to your deck, while lackeys will let you replace letters in your deck. With both, you’ll need to exercise some caution. You might love the ability a letter card provides you, but if it reduces your ability to spell words and use cards that provide you good attack and defense, you might find yourself in a difficult position.
Unlike in the original Paperback, you have just one wild card to use, generally speaking, and one vowel, which varies depending on the enemy you’re facing. That vowel is their weak point, like the enemy is some sort of literary Zelda character. This really does show a lot of love to video games, and it’s no surprise, given Tim Fowers has a background in the video game industry. But there’s more here, and we’ll get to it.
Slaying rogues, deck-building, and innovations
I chatted with Tim over lunch recently while picking up my copy of Paperback Adventures. I’m a patron over at his Patreon, where he has an early access tier, and he’s also in northern Utah, so it was a short jaunt to his neck of the woods. We talked about this game and some of his current projects1. While telling me about Paperback Adventures, he brought up the hit video game Slay the Spire, which, incidentally, has a board game adaptation set for a 2023 release.
Slay the Spire is a deck-building Roguelike video game (see, I told you we’d get back to it!) that feels more like a digital adaptation of a board game. It’s not the first to make that combination, but it’s easily the most popular. In it, you fight enemies, upgrade your cards, gain new cards, and get powerful effects.
If that sounds familiar, it’s probably not a coincidence, but not because I’m trying to imply there’s some intellectual impropriety going on here. If anything, it’s representative of the way ideas travel through gaming. Thanks in part to the difficulties involved in copyrighting specific mechanical systems, there’s a rich tradition of innovation, in which ideas are riffed on, improved, changed, varied, and it’s made for an incredible field of games to play.
Deckbuilding traces back through Donald X. Vaccarino’s Dominion, which has gained a reputation of one of the classics of board games. Roguelike games have been around since the late 1970s. That these ideas eventually met should be no surprise, given the ways tabletop gaming pulls from video games, and the ways video games pull from tabletop gaming.
What we see with Paperback Adventures and Slay the Spire are two games that take the same ideas and present them in different ways. Slay the Spire is about optimization, combining effects from each of your cards with the rest of the gamestate and progressing through a game that grows impressively difficult. Each time you play, the direction your deck takes will vary wildly based on what’s available. In Paperback Adventures, you always start in the same place with each character, and the game more slowly develops. You won’t get 15 new cards after 30 minutes of play. Maybe you’ll get two or three, and that’ll be enough to shake things up. In a way, it’s a more parsimonious game, which is probably better for a tabletop experience — you don’t need thousands of options to vary the game every time you play.
Solitary play
Paperback Adventures is a game that forces you to be thoughtful about how you play. You might see how to progress quickly through the first enemy, but will that strategy apply to future enemies? In one of my plays, I defeated the front side of The Baroness in two turns. I felt pretty great about myself, as I had plenty of health, a good amount of energy, and was generally in a good position — but that’s usually a sign that something’s about to go wrong, and so it did. I was quickly demolished by the enemy, prematurely ending my run. Knowing I’d have to start over from the beginning of the run, I took a little break to play some other games before coming back — another feature, for me, of a great Roguelike game. If I’m perfectly happy to die and start over, it probably means I’m not feeling a great connection to the progress I’m making.
Before I move on from Paperback Adventures (in this newsletter, I mean. I still have to beat the game, and I have two more characters to play through with — and then there’s the two-player variant to play with Ginny!), a few things probably deserve a mention. First, the game’s components are nice but not excessive. There are some nice plastic trays, which you can see in the photos above, that make turn upkeep nice and simple. Second, there’s such a rich tapestry of items and McGuffins here that I really want to continue exploring. See that Strategy Guide? (Another video game reference — coincidence?) It’s a Boss McGuffin that gives you a chance to stun the enemy if your top card is the enemy vowel card. I didn’t use it as much as I should have, and I’d love to give it another shot. That’s part of why I’ve been building words in my head every time I close my eyes. (It’s a lot like the Tetris effect that way.)
The best games stick with you after you’ve played. When you lose a run and you keep thinking about words you could have played, strategies you could have tried, and why you needed just one more turn, that’s a sign that you’ve got a good game on your hands. That’s why I’ll be coming back to this one, and it’s why I’ll be giving the two-player variant a try, too.
If Paperback Adventures sounds up your alley and you’d like to give it a try, Fowers Games is publishing a digital version. Talk about coming full-circle, huh? There’s a free demo to play, too, which could be just the experience you need to decide whether you want to pick up a physical copy. If you’re into solo gaming already, you probably get it, but for me, solo board gaming is a relaxing, almost meditative endeavor. Sure, I could probably play a video game instead, but sitting at a table, thinking about the game, putting my attention there — well, it engages the brain differently, doesn’t it? And I like that a lot.
Paperback Adventures is available for preorder from Fowers Games. From indications on their Kickstarter, it’s inching closer to U.S. fulfillment, and pre-orders wouldn’t be far off from that, I’d imagine.
Five more deck-building games to consider
I couldn’t end without giving you a few more recommendations that aren’t called Paperback. As I said above, I would recommend Paperback Adventures if it’s something that sounds up your alley, but I totally get if it doesn’t. The digital version might actually be just what you’re looking for.
Clank!: Collect treasure, but avoid making too much noise or you’ll wake the dragon — or maybe that’s exactly what you want?
Dominion: It’s a classic, like I said above. I also just love trying to cycle through my entire deck in one turn, even if it ends with minimal gains. Maybe I should be more competitive when I play, though. Anyway, there are reams of content for Dominion, so if you enjoy it, there’s no end in sight.
Hardback: Hardback is a lot like Paperback, but there are more abilities, no wild cards (because any card can be used as a wild!), genres. Space Biff! compares it to Star Realms (which you’ll see below), and I think that’s a great way to think about it.
Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game: Classic Marvel Comics characters face off against enemies in this cooperative deck-building game from 2012. There are tons of expansions and versions under the Legendary Encounters moniker, too, so you can find the universe that calls most to you.
Star Realms: It’s lighter than the others on the list, and it can get a bit chaotic at times, but I’ve had hours of fun playing Star Realms. It’s easy to introduce to players, has a tendency to overpower players if they get a great card, and generally makes for a fun time.
All of this is a good reminder to me that I need to play more deck-building games. In a way, deck-building has merged with pool-building of all sorts, but there’s something pleasing about just holding a hand of cards in front of you.
Thanks for reading Don’t Eat the Meeples! If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to get more of it, just hit the handy Subscribe button below. If you’ve got thoughts to share or a game you think I should talk about, feel free to respond to this email or leave a comment on this post.
Tim and I played RUN by German designer Moritz Dressler, which is available for preorder. Incidentally, Dressler’s also designed some German word games, which, in an issue that seems to talk about things coming full-circle with a weird frequency, really does come full-circle. (And if you think about it, a deck-building game is all about coming full-circle, isn’t it?) Anyway, I’m really excited for RUN. It’s a real cat-and-mouse game.