I love Hardback. It is my favorite word game. by a lot. I should really rate it a 10 on BGG to reflect this I guess.
And I really really want to like Paperback Adventures. Tonight was my third game. I only have 1 of the character boxes. And maybe that is for the best. Maybe it was a mistake to listen to SVWAG talk about it while I played it.
But they really just confirmed the niggles I already had about it. I present evidence #1: the components. Well the component that they call the „dealbreaker“. The idea is good. Track the HP, energy, crowns and poison values for yourself and your opponent in these pretty plastic trays. I do seem to remember that during the campaign they struggled to make it all fit. The end result is: it fits so snuggly that if you are not careful it pops right back out. Also if by chance you have two trackers in the same slot (3 fit in there) if you have to get out the first one … you have to get out the other ones, too. And guess what you have to move around at least 1 marker on each board per round. More often it is 2 markers per round. Up and down. If I could take time on how much of the play time is spent fiddling with these things… I stopped putting them into the slots and just dropped them on sideways.
For me the component thing is meh but not the dealbreaker.
I love books. I love the idea to have a wordgame about books. I love all the cards the Mc Guffins and what they do and the items… I love that this game has a card called Chekov‘s Gun. Except the gun is mostly useless. Like most of what is in the picture. It is all mostly useless.
#evidence 2: please see the upper right corner of the previous image. You may see the „shop“ sign. Well, I just played a 90 minute campaign of 6 fights and I bought 1 letter from the shop and I couldn‘t even upgrade it. I played a whole game and didn‘t upgrade a single card (they have really pretty sleeves that allow flipping the cards to the upgraded side). I got all the items and McGuffins as rewards for the fights, I got 2 full crowns over the course of the entire game… (crowns is what you use to buy stuff but what one of my character specific items also uses to do stuff… so not getting any is pretty much eliminating a lot of the game).
So maybe this is just not this character‘s specialty? She is a poisoner after all and not after Crowns. So I use the poison track and my other special item to deal damage to opponents in a sneaky way. And on 1 of 3 games this actually worked because I lucked out and drew an item that allowed me to pay energy to further poison opponents … this time not so much. So my special did a grand total of 3 damage this whole game.
More complaints:
- What really bugs me the most is that I stopped caring about the words. I draw 4 cards each turn. I get to add 1 vowel from the boss and 1 wild. And in 2 of 3 games I actually had items that allowed me to draw an additional card for a total of 7 letters. But then some cards give bonusses for being discarded and the boss vowel has strategic use that supersedes it‘s use as a letter: including it in your word skips over an action that might be worse than the next one. The wildcard gives you energy to spend on items if not used. Quite a few letters give bonusses for short words. So I end up making words like „At“ or „Gun“ or „Sing“ …
- tricky housekeeping issues: you only get the bonusses from the word in the „clash“ phase but have to use all items before that and then need t keep track of what you did and when and…
- the game purports to be a deck builder. But it is more of a deck management game: except for 2 of the boss fights all cards you add to your deck are not added but replace other cards. So you begin the game with 10 cards and you end it with 12. Those 12 may be better than the starting cards sure…
- at least you gain a lot of items and McGuffins in the game more than anything else but those are more or less random draws from the decks and once again in this game I had at least 2 that didn‘t do anything the whole game.
- to win the game you have to rush each boss with maximum damage. I have rarely ever found it useful to splay left for defense. The strategy seems to be to do damage quicker than the opponent and use the boss vowel to skip over actions that would damage you to badly. And since this is not in line what this character box says it should feel my guess is the other boxes would play very similar. Edit: reading through this again there is also another reason to rush: each word you make exhausts the top card from your word so it is out of this particular fight. As each opponent has two sides and you have a maximum of 12 cards to exhaust playing for time and going slow is just not a valid strategy.
Finale: The arc of the game is flat. There is no real trilogy with a suspenseful opening and a climactic boss fight to remember at the end—it feels like 3 books of boring „middle part“. After half the game I get bored… is it unfair to think I would rather have played Ark Nova tonight? After all that game is Top10 now on BGG. But I also think I‘d rather have read a book than played at being in one. Or lost more at Agropolis (More on that in another post). This game frustrates me, the little jokes, the cards, the ideas and the theme speak to me and I have nothing else except Hardback that hits that note… but I don‘t think I want to play it.