Once upon a time, I was learning about the difference between lived experiences and observed experiences. The teacher split the class in half. One group sat back and recorded what they saw, while the other group had to run up a staircase, breathing only through a straw. Then the class switched roles.

Unsurprisingly, the observers didn’t quite grasp how difficult the task really was until they experienced it themselves. And that lesson came back to me when I sat down to play Tearable Quest, designed by Shintaro Ono, with art by Sai Beppu, and published by Allplay in 2025.

Because on the surface, Tearable Quest looks like nothing. You get a sheet of paper absolutely littered with icons like swords, spells, slimes, goblins, bows, and so on. Your job is to rip out only the icons you need to score points. Each round introduces a different monster with specific scoring requirements, alongside a boss card that’s always available to be tackled, tied to its own icons. Over three two minute rounds, you’re trying to earn the most points by carefully tearing out exactly what you need to match those recipes.

And I do mean exactly.

You can’t have extra icons present in your piece. You can’t have half an icon. It has to be a clean, precise tear of only what’s required. Which sounds easy until you actually try it. The timer starts, you identify what the recipe is, then look down at the sheet. The paper is cluttered, the icons you want are never conveniently grouped together, so you end up carving these awkward zig-zag paths through the paper, trying to isolate just the right pieces without ruining everything around them. To make matters worse, if you flip the sheet over you’ll find treasures that boost your score and curses that bring it back down, adding another layer of consideration to every rip.

Now, Tearable Quest is not just about precision, it’s about speed. You’ll be halfway through a tear, trying to grab one more icon for maximum points, and suddenly you realize there are only a few seconds left. Do you commit to your rip and risk everything, or do you play it safe and just lock in what you have? That tension, that split-second decision-making, is where my heart started to flutter and a smile crossed my face.

And all of this ripping and tearing is happening on a single sheet of paper that has to last you all three rounds. If you go too hard too early, you’ll massacre your page, and you might not have anything usable left in the later rounds. But if you’re too cautious, you fall behind. It creates this surprisingly compelling push and pull between greed and restraint that I wasn’t expecting at all.

That’s where the lived experience hits. From the outside, Tearable Quest looks like a throwaway gimmick. Ripping paper as a game mechanic sounds more like a novelty than something you’d actually want to play. But once you’re in it and the clock is ticking and your hands fumble as you try to make clean, efficient tears, you start to notice how awkwardly fun the game is. You’ll curse how big your thumbs feel. How unpredictable ripping paper can be. How badly you want just one more icon before that timer runs out. You’ll feel jubilant that you managed to complete your rip before the timer runs out, but you’ll flip the paper over and find 2 curses, rendering your score nil. Oh, the hubris…

The art plays a big role in selling the experience. Sai Beppu’s illustrations are bright, cartoonish, and disarming in a way that makes the whole thing feel playful rather than ridiculous. You’re still an adult sitting there gleefully ripping up paper, but the game leans into that energy instead of fighting it, and it works wonderfully.

There isn’t a huge amount of variety here. There are two different sheets to play with, four different monsters (you’ll use 3 during each game), and half a dozen bosses. There are some bonus cards to mix things up, but the core experience doesn’t really change. You’re always doing the same thing, ripping, optimizing, and hoping you’ve left yourself enough icons to work with for the next round. It’s always a bit frantic, certainly a bit messy, and very consistent in the experience that it offers.

That consistency is part of its charm. It’s light, it’s quick, and it never feels like too much. You’re not going to build a whole game night around Tearable Quest, but it’s really easy to fit into the beginning or end of one. Because it’s so light and fast, It’s the kind of game you’re almost never going to refuse, even if you’ve already played it a few times.

Tearable quest is charming and genuinely unique. I can’t think of anything else that turns ripping up a piece of paper into the main event and actually makes it fun. And honestly, it doesn’t really need to be anything more than that.