Paperback
Paperback is a word game where players create words. You score words in order to buy better letters with cool abilities. But scoring won’t win the game – you must finish novels to make it as a paperback writer.
Paperback blends the skill of word games like Scrabble with the interesting choices of deck-building games like Dominion. There are many ways to win – making short powerful words, long clever words or possibly a double word score. Each card has a distinct ability that can dramatically help your score if used wisely.
In each hand there is usually one perfect word that will use all your letters – you just need to find it! Flexibility comes from two elements: a ‘common’ vowel and wild letter cards. The 'common' vowel can be used by all players and changes throughout the game. You will have several wild cards in your deck - wilds also double as victory points, which determine the winner.
User Reviews (2)
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So my wife’s favorite game is dominion. She is also known to do crossword puzzles and other word games. This game blends the two very well.
Dominion like
Player deck: Players start with 10 cards in their deck.
Hand size: They draw 5 cards.
Player action: On their turn they lay cards down and review how many points you have to spend on purchasing cards from the center.
Special actions: Some cards have special actions.
Duration cards: Some cards have actions that last for the whole round and affect the play of others.
Victory point cards: Cards that have victory points should be collected since the player with the most points wins the game.
Expansions: There are various expansion modules to choose from that continue to add challenge and interesting twists to the game.
Unlike Dominion
– When you lay down cards to make a word, all letters have point values. Wild cards do not. Spell out a word and add up the letters you used. That word score is how many points you have to spend on purchasing newer cards.
– Special actions do not have their own part of the turn. If you use the letter in the word or in the right way, the action is activated.
– There are victory point cards – but they work as wild cards rather than just dead weight in your deck.
– There is a common card (like a vowel) sitting out on the table that anyone can refer to and use in their words.
– There are incentives to making longer words.
Conclusion
I like it. My wife likes it. Even my poor speller 15 year old joined us for a game and won. He had to check with us about if something was spelled right, but he came up with great words. My mom who is a scrabble player also enjoys it.
We decided that paperback does take more brainpower than Dominion. Sometimes you are up for the challenge and other times you just want to relax and play the standby.
Paperback is a unique word building and deck building game rolled into one. A kind of Dominion meets Quiddler, if you will.
Players begin the game with a standard deck of ten cards – five standard letters and five wild cards. On a player’s turn she draws cards from her deck, places them into her hand and then builds a word using some or all of those cards. The word is then scored and the points are used to buy new letter(s) (or letter combinations) from the face up offers. Players may also buy fame cards which are used as victory points for end of game scoring. When the game ends players count up fame points and the player with the most wins.
I absolutely love this game, it is on my top 10 card games list for sure. It is a super easy to teach (taking less than 10 min) and plays quickly. Some of the letter cards have “powers” that give additional benefits to buying them which requires strategy and planning ahead so the game is more enjoyable than standard word building games. The deck building aspect is great as you can really see your ability to create better words come into play as the game goes on. It also comes with play variants which I haven’t even touched yet, but am really excited to do so.