Hardback
From the creators of the bestselling game, Paperback, comes the next chapter in deckbuilding / word games - Hardback. As an aspiring, 19th-century author, you work to write your next novel, earning money and prestige along the way. Spend your coin on new, more powerful cards to improve your deck and write ever better novels. Be the first to acquire enough prestige to complete your masterpiece and be recognized as the finest novelist of the age!
Play as Penelope Quill - Paige Turner's great-grandmother, writing novels in the 1800s
All new illustrations from artist Ryan Goldsberry brilliantly capture the era - with some clever twists
Wordsmiths can score big by discovering the perfect word from their hand of randomly drawn cards
Strategic players can maximize the benefit of their cards by carefully crafting the perfect deck
User Reviews (1)
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I ordered Hard Back (hb) because my non-gaming gf liked word puzzles like scrabble and wordious and spends many a Saturday solving cryptos from the newspaper.
We played it twice. First time to 10 points, just to figure out the basics, second time the full game, to 60 points. It was exciting because when she got 60 I was about 8 points behind and by pushing my luck all the way got 61 points, so it was exciting.
While it is engaging placing letters and making words, it has several drawbacks:
1) the 200+ cards, 7 decks of 30-ish cards are very hard to shuffle so that the distribution is random-ish. You need a card shuffler but many card shufflers under $100 were poorly rated on the Internet.
2) HB rewards playing cards from the same suit (Red/Romance, Blue/Detective, yellow/mystery etc) in the same word, so you need to get rid of other cards, and draw more from the same.
3) while I am a fan of economic boxes, and hate to shelve boxes full of air, this one is a bit extreme in the sense that the cards almost don’t fit back in the box. As this is the final action and causes a bit of stress, it’s not good to asscociate with HB.
I’m not sure this will on the long term give enough joy about replayability. Of course assuming a lot of games, you will choose say 2 out of 6 colors, and your opponent also, in the order of 6*5 *5*4 = 30 *20 ~ 600 different combinations to explore.
That’s just the basics of the game, there are some other game modes like special player powers, and a coop mode vs the AI called evil penelope with her own rules, but that’s good for practice if you need to become better because your opponent is better than you. The hurdle of shuffling 200-ish cards well will deter you from any “casual solo”.
To be complete, not that it’s essential, the special powers on the cards that you play that trigger have some variability, and some give you ink and/or eraser ink. The ink/eraser stuff becomes clear while you play it.
Can I recommend it? Well, if you
like light games like star realms or hero realms and
are fed up with classical deckbuilding like dominion, and
are good at shuffling 200-ish cards, and
like word games and are not dyslectic,
you might like this.
If you are not yet fed up with dominion, get paperback instead: same charm, but less convoluted.
If you hate any form of deck building, get Wordious instead.