Takenoko was among the first designer board games I ever played. My wife pitched the idea of going to the local board game cafe as a fun date (slightly against my will actually). That date opened my eyes to the world that is cardboard within cardboard. Little did she know that she was introducing me to a hobby that I would fall deep into, hard and fast.
Shortly thereafter, while thirsting for more board games I discovered Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop show on YouTube and chose to watch the episode with Harley Morenstein from Epic Meal Time (of which I used to be a big fan). Tabletop introduced me to Takenoko, a beautiful game about trying to build an aesthetically pleasing garden and grow bamboo to specific heights, all the while a damned panda keeps eating it all.
If the panda is the symbol of harmony and diplomacy, I’m sure the gardener is the incarnation of rage and spite.
How to Play (First Edition)
Takenoko begins with a single blue tile in the centre of the table. On that lonely blue tile sits a single gardner and his eternal rival, the panda. Each turn begins by rolling the weather die (Skip this step on each player’s first turn). The result of the weather die gives you a little boost for your turn, like granting you a third action – the ability to do the same action twice in one turn, a free panda teleportation action, growing a single bamboo stalk anywhere on the map, an improvement tile, or your preferred choice of all the benefits I just listed!
The playerboard keeps track of everything you have, and the actions you’ve taken on your turn
After you apply the weather effect, you take 2 actions (3 if you happened to roll the sun weather benefit). You may not perform the same action twice in one turn (unless you have the wind weather benefit). The actions available to you are to draw 3 plots of land and choose one to add to the central play area; to take an irrigation channel; to move the panda in a straight line and eat the top section of bamboo from wherever he stops; to move the gardener in a straight line and grow bamboo on every irrigated tile of the same colour adjacent to the spot where the gardener stopped moving; or to draw 1 goal card.
The goal cards you hold are what influence all of your decisions. At the beginning of the game you’ll receive 1 card for each type of goal; plots, gardener, and panda. The plot goals encourage you to arrange certain colour tiles in specific shapes. Once the shapes have been satisfied with the required colours, and every landscape tile in the shape has been irrigated, you may claim that goal. The gardener goals task you with growing bamboo stalks to specific heights on certain tiles. Conversely, the panda goals are all about feasting on the appropriate type and quantity of bamboo, making the stalks shrink by one for every piece the little white and black bear stuffs his face with.
When an goal has been completed, you simply place the card down on the table. The first person to reach the required number of completed goals triggers the end of the game and earns the Emperor’s favour (which is worth a couple of extra points). Every other player gets one more turn to accomplish any remaining goals they’re holding before the game is over. The player with the highest sum of points on their completed goal cards has won the game and receives the congratulations of the Emperor.
Just because you’re the one to end the game and get the bonus 2 points, doesn’t always mean you’ll win the game
Final Thoughts
Takenoko is a light and charming game with bright and colourful components. I find the mechanics and goals easy to internalize, and I enjoy evoking ire of the other players by making the panda chomp down on their carefully pruned bamboo stalks that they’ve been trying to grow all game so they can accomplish their goal of having 4 green stalks, all at the height of 3.
Actually the mechanic of hidden objectives is something my wife absolutely detests. It’s one thing if some makes a decision to deny you what you need, but it’s another thing entirely when someone ruins all your plans without even knowing they’re doing so. Apparently she just doesn’t enjoy having her plans ruined.
I absolutely love the artistic direction and the components in this game. The plot tiles are thick and bright, and the panda and gardener miniatures come pre-painted. The real star of the show are the bamboo stalks that stand high off the table. The chunky wooden spires attract the eye and capture the attention of new players. Plus, it is fun to see how high you can stack them while you’re waiting for other players to take their turns.
The game itself is easy to play Each turn is straight forward with few opportunities for making any single turn overly complex or acheive big game changing combos. This is nice and keeps each turn moving quickly, but it can be frustrating when the player across the table from you had 4 more goals cards down, it can feel impossible to catch up.
Personally, I find the weather die to be a bit of a frustration. I find the sun benefit (an extra action) to be head and shoulders above the other benefits, each of which are only situationally advantageous. The other issue I have is many of the cards require specific advancements that either come preprinted on the plot tiles, or are only obtained by the cloud weather benefit. When you have one of the advancement tiles, you can only place it on a tile if there is no bamboo on that tile, meaning the tile must be either unirrigated or the panda must raze the vegetation before any advancements can be placed.
The Panda destroys what the Gardener grows
It’s not uncommon for players to creep close to the endgame without passing the line. In the 2 player game, the first person to reach 9 completed objectives triggers the end game. Often I’ll see the game suddenly stall at 7 objectives realized as each player tries to queue up extra points in their hand. Considering that each other player gets one last turn to complete as many of their objectives as possible, it just makes sense. I find that players draw several plot objectives at the beginning of the game, then slowly move to drawing mostly gardener objectives at the end as the garden sprawls further and further away and the spires of bamboo reach the sky. The randomness can be aggravating as you somehow draw the one goal card that nothing on the board is nearly close to, while your opponent draws cards that are one bamboo segment away from being finished.
Ultimately Takenoko is a lovely game that you can use to allure people who would otherwise turn their nose up at the waves of beige that dominate other board games. With a commanding table presence and easy to play mechanics, Takenoko is often a winner when I’m not playing with my normal ‘advanced’ board game group. I wouldn’t introduce this to a complete non-gamer, as the amount of decisions are a little much (5x weather effects, 5x different actions). If someone has expressed interest and is willing to be engaged in the experience however, this game is a hit!
Lesson of the day, never store Takenoko on its side
I also really like to imagine a world where a gardener is trying to carefully cultivate an aesthetically pleasing garden, but one patch of trees happens to grow much more aggressively than the rest, so his solution is to source a panda and hold it over the tall tree to cut it down to the proper size. I don’t know if that world exists, but that’s the world that I want to live in.
This week in my top 100 games series we’ll see plenty of sheep, birds and even a panda. We’ll be at odds with the weather as it controls us in Takenoko, and we’ll try to control the floods in Lowlands. Let’s stop beating around the bush and get to it!
80 – Takenoko
Takenoko is a colourful game about building a garden, growing bamboo, feeding a insatiable panda, and cursing the whims of the weather. Designed by Antoine Bauza, Takenoko has players competing to accomplish 3 different kinds of tasks with the winner being the player the one who accrues the most favour with the emperor.
I absolutely love the “toy-factor” of this game. The bamboo pieces are large, brightly coloured, and stand tall off the table creating an excellent table presence. Stacking bamboo pieces is simply fun! The game behind the bamboo spires is straightforward and easy to play. Takenoko is a great game for families to play, as the decisions you make turn to turn are simple, but there is enough strategic depth to keep older gamers engaged.
79 – Wingspan
Wingspan, designed by Elizabeth Hargave, is a wonderful game that has transcended the board game hobby. So rarely does a board game get the attention of the wider world, but damn, Wingspan has broken the glass ceiling to reach a wide demographic. Every illustrations on the (many) cards of the various birds are wonderful, and the gameplay itself is very smooth. The production of Wingspan is also a work of art. The quality of each component has been lifted to a whole new degree that board games a decade ago could only dream of.
I have heard and had some criticisms of Wingspan (such as players spending the entire last round of the game just pumping the egg engine), but the reality is that any game that can reach such a vast audience and showcase just a glimpse of how good modern board games can be, deserves to have it’s praises sung.
Get it? sung? like, birdsong?
As an added bonus, Wingspan is one of my wife’s favourite games, and it is a nice change of pace when she is the one asking me to play a game.
78 – Forbidden Desert
Forbidden Desert is the 2013 follow up to 2010’s Forbidden Island. Another of designer Matt Leacock’s co-op board game, Forbidden Desert tasks players with searching the desert for lost pieces of an airship they can use to escape the hellish landscape before they’re buried under mountains of sand or die of thirst.
If you’ve played Matt Leacock’s previous co-op games, you’ll feel right at home with the rules. Take 4 actions, the world tries to kill you, the next player takes their turn, the world tries to kill you, and so on. In Forbidden Desert the environment the players are struggling against is a sandstorm represented by a hole in the layout of the tiles. Each turn the storm will move, shifting the location of the tiles relative to each other and dumping sand on top of all your hopes and dreams.
I vastly prefer Forbidden Desert to Forbidden Island, if only because Forbidden Island felt entirely too easy. I know you can increase the difficulty, but the board was too static. Forbidden Desert addresses my complaint by shifting the location tiles all around the board, then dumping a bucket of sand on my head. I suppose I technically asked for that.
77 – Las Vegas
Las Vegas is not going to be the last Rüdiger Dorn game on this list. One of the things I appreciate most is that his designs aren’t iterative; he doesn’t retread places he’s already been. Las Vegas is a push your luck, territory control game where you roll dice, curse, claim a spot on a casino, then curse further as your friends elbow you out of all the good spots.
When approaching Las Vegas (much like a real casino) you have to be ready to lose. Armed with the understanding that your fate is at the whims of the die and your loss is practically already assured, you can cackle with glee as you make ‘sub-optimal’ decisions and spitefully deny other players the things they want.
Ironically enough, when I sit down to play Las Vegas I have a singular goal in mind. I pick a specific person and make sure that person does not win (you know who you are). According to my stats, out of the 8 games we’ve played together, he’s won 0. That’s a win in my books.
76 – Troyes
Troyes is a dice worker placement game designed by Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, and Alain Orban that no one can agree on how to pronounce. Perhaps it’s just us ignorant anglophones that won’t agree when we’re told it should be pronounced “twah”.
I don’t have a lot to say about Troyes other than it’s quite the unique game. You’re contesting for spaces that give you more dice that allow you to do more of the things you want on your turn. There’s a semi-cooperative aspect where each player MUST contribute. Players who fail to prepare for this stage can find themselves robbed of all their opportunities. You can also use money to use the other players’ dice, which can really save you from a bind, or screw you when the player to your left takes the last red 6 that was on the table!
I also really love the art direction, if only because it’s so different. Visually, it stands out from the crowd of board game boxes.
75 – Power Grid
Power Grid by Friedemann Friese is another box that stands out on a shelf due it being oversized and garishly green. Hidden inside this long and thin cardboard box is a wonderful economic game about generating power and supplying as many cities as possible. Power Grid allows you to choose to either be an oil burning magnate with cheap power plants but a requirement to continually purchase resources to generate energy, or buy the very expensive renewable powerplants that generate power without any further resources needed. Power Grid is a modern classic that is great if you want to stretch your mental math skills; the board and gameplay is littered with numbers. Players are constantly trying to balance costs and benefits while maximizing the energy they can produce and their expansion into the cities on the board.
One criticism that I would like to see addressed is the ramifications of energy production explored. I’d like to see a mechanic picketing a nuclear plant, or a ‘government’ impose carbon taxes on coal plants while giving benefits or subsidies to the green energy. Then again, not every game needs to imitate life, and Power Grid as it stands now is an excellent economic game. Adding more mechanics might just muddy the nuclear pools.
74 – Tigris & Euphrates
Tigris & Euphrates is designer Reiner Kenizia’s magnum opus. It is a cutthroat area majority and hand management game where you try your very best to manage the expanding web of tiles, deftly positioning your leaders into advantageous positions and ensuring that when the impending conflicts finally come, you’ll be the one left standing after the dust settles.
Your goal in Tigris & Euphrates is to earn the most points of all four different kind of victory points, as your final score is equal to whichever one you have the least of. It doesn’t matter if you have dominated the red military or black government points because if you have failed to get any blue trading points, you won’t be winning this game.
Conflict in Tigris & Euphrates is tense and exciting. The tiles that you and your opponents lay down on the board don’t ‘belong’ to anybody until one player has placed their leader next to those tiles. If ever a group of tiles is joined to another group and two leaders of the same colour meet, war promptly breaks out. The majority of your combat power is determined by what’s already on the board (the number of same colour tiles touching your leader before the combat began), but players can commit tiles from their hand to swing the tide of battle and cause devastating upsets to the political topography of the board.
If you are a fan of area control games (which I usually am not) and have not played Tigris & Euphrates, you owe it to yourself to play it (hopefully multiple times with the same person). Each subsequent play enriches the overall experience.
73 – La Granja
La Granja is a lovely euro game designed by Andreas Odendahl and Michael Keller. In La Granja you’re tasked with expanding your farm, growing and processing goods, and delivering your goods to the market to score victory points.
What sets La Granja apart from the (many) other farming euro games is the multi-use cards. When you play a card you have to decide if you want to use the top, left, right, or bottom edge of the card, slotting it into the appropriate spot on your player board, hiding all the options you chose to forgo. This forces you to to decide what’s most important to you on each particular card. A card in your hand may be the only card that will let you grow olives, but you already have all the products to fulfill the order at the top of the card for victory points! But if you don’t choose the olives, how will you grow the olives you need for next round?
La Granja is a wonderful game with many options for players to explore. It’s also available to play on Board Game Arena and Yucata!
72 – Caverna: The Cave Farmers
Another farming theme board game hits my list at #72, Caverna is the big brother sequel to Uwe Rosenburg’s classic, Agricola. In my experience Caverna offers players more varied paths, allowing each player to do their own thing and avoid stepping on each others toes.
In Caverna, you play as a family of dwarves, carving out a life on the side of a mountain. Each player has their own ‘farm’ board with 2 halves. The left side is dedicated fields and pastures, where you can pen in animals and grow crops. The right side is the cave where you can hew out dwellings and build rooms that will offer your dwarven family special bonuses that assist as you amass a fortune.
Each of your dwarves has a ‘level’. You may chose to forgo the regular actions on the board and instead send that dwarf out on an adventure, with the higher levels allowing them to go on longer and more lucrative quests. This feature of the game can help you get resources that you desperately need if there is somehow a dearth of that resource available.
If Agricola’s cruel and unforgiving mechanics rubbed you the wrong way, I’d suggest giving Caverna a try, as it may have addressed some of your grievances. Personally, I liked how tight and punishing Agricola can be, and found Caverna to deliver a cornucopia of resources that robbed the game of it’s difficultly. I have been informed by trusted friends and advisors that my feelings in the matter are ‘wrong’.
71 – Lowlands
Ahem. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Lowlands is yet another farming themed euro game. Luckily Lowlands by Claudia and Ralf Partenheimer has shifted the focus from growing vegetables, to managing the exponential growth of breeding sheep and stemming the floods that threaten to wash away everything you’ve built.
In Lowlands each player has a farm and can produce sheep. At the end of a round if you have two sheep, you’ll earn a third, because… that’s how sheep grow. As the game goes on and on you may find yourself trying to cram 8 new sheep into your overcrowded paddocks like some kind of crazed sheep horder.
At the same time, a flood is coming. All players may contribute to a shared dyke that will hold back the floods. Should the dyke hold against the tide, and no precious sheepies will perish. If the dyke is poorly built, the waters will rush over your board and many sheep are swept away never to be heard from again. Because this is a cruel village, everyone knows who has and hasn’t maintained the wall. Along with some nasty gossip, you’ll also be faced with harsh penalties being doled out each player who prioritized their own farms’ needs and let the flood cause untold mayhem.
There is a balance to be struck; if you’re the only player who is contributing to the wall, everyone else will be spending their time growing their terrifying sheep engine. At some point it will be beneficial to let that flood come, especially if you have no sheep to care for. At the same time, there are benefits to be earned by contributing to the dyke, but not enough to offset a massive sheep monopoly. Lowlands offers a rare semi-cooperative mechanic that I just can’t get enough of!
There are few games in my collection that get the chance to leave my doors once its been slotted into a spot on the bookshelves. Qwirkle By Susan McKinley Ross is not one of those games. I own the travel edition of Qwirkle, which has small tiles and a zipper bag to hold everything together in a conveniently tiny package. The ease of transportability coupled with the fact that this game only needs a relatively flat surface to be played means we have played this game in locations from sea to shining sea. As an added bonus, it is a relatively wind-resistant game, so playing it outdoors is less of a challenge.
Qwirkle, aside from being awkward to spell when you’re sleep-deprived, is a tile placement game for two to four players. You begin the game with 6 tiles in your hand. Each tile has two attributes; a shape and a colour. On your turn you place any number of tiles in a single line as long as every tile in that line shares one attribute (either all the same colour, or all the same shape). You earn one point for every tile you place from your hand onto the table.
A game of Qwirkle starts out simply enough
Very quickly the common play area becomes a sprawling mass of tiles. The rule of lines of tiles only a being a single attribute quickly becomes a thorn in your side as you search for a spot to place your 3 green tiles that doesn’t abut against tiles that are not green, or worse, the exact copy of what you have in your hands.
As you add onto and spin off of lines of tiles, the length and score will creep higher and higher. Placing a 4th tile in that green line earns you 4 more points. The next piece placed will earn that player 5 points, and if someone can complete the line with the 6th shape or colour, they get 6 points, plus a bonus 6 points for a “Qwirkle”. They are also contractually obligated to shout out the word “Qwirkle” as they tap that piece onto the table.
The play area quickly sprawls out
The challenge with Quirkle is that the player’s best move also tends to set up other players for even better moves. The more lines on the board, the more likely someone is going to earn 5 points or more per turn. Knowing what’s left in the bag isn’t to hard to parse. There are 3 copies of each tile in the bag at the beginning of the game. Subtracting the 6 tiles that each player has in their hand gives you a pretty good idea of what you can and cannot hope for. If there are 3 orange circles on the board, you had better not be hoping for another orange circle to come out of the bag or you’re going to find yourself quite disappointed.
This placement is a no-no
One issue that does come up is the fact that it can be hard to tell some of the colours apart from each other. Trying to differentiate the purple and blue colours, or the orange and the red colours, on the black tiles feels nearly impossible if the lighting is anything less than perfect. Also, if you’re colourblind, give this game a pass; there is no way to differentiate the the tiles from one another other than colour.
Qwirkle has traveled across the country with me and has been played on a dozen different surfaces. It’s an easy game to teach the in-laws while being just competitive enough that keep players engaged. The smaller travel edition makes a great stocking stuffer (I know because I stuffed it into my wife’s stocking one Christmas) and comes in a lovely zip-up pouch. The full size game comes in a larger cardboard box. I understand the concept of ‘shelf appeal’, and I’m not the one bringing these products to market. I’m just the guy who needs to find new and creative way of storing board game boxes lest my wife pitches my newest acquisitions onto the lawn because I stored games in the towel closet again (Note from the wife: It isn’t that I mind his board game collection; it’s just his choice to displace the towels in favour of his games!). Maybe my ‘travel’ games will just live in a backpack from now on, perpetually ready to go. I’ll tell my wife it’s motivation to travel! What could go wrong?
I’ve said before that I am not a solo gamer. Playing board games by myself was something I did as a wee lad living in a small village in northern Manitoba where there was no one around who wanted to play games with me. Since then, I have grown up, moved to a place where there is more than one street, and vetted a pretty fantastic friend group with whom I regularly play board games. Needless to say, I’ve never felt the need or draw to explore the world of single player board games.
Cue the pandemic. The world shut down, and so did in-person gaming. Although my group quickly adopted Tabletop Simulator so we did not have to survive the pandemic without ANY board games, it just hasn’t been the same. I’ve missed the tactile experience of moving meeples, placing game tiles, and holding a hand of cards. To fill this aching need in my soul, I decided to explore the solo modes in the games that I already own, and to my amazement, I kind of liked some of them.
After I wrote about Paperback and posted it on my Twitter, designer Tim Fowers reached out to me and offered to give me a preview of his latest game, a fully solo experience called Paperback Adventures. I leapt at the chance.
Adventuring Basics
I’ve already written aboutPaperback at length, and if you know how the word building in that game works, you’re already halfway through learning how to play Paperback Adventures. The other half of the rule load comes from understanding how manage the AI enemy and the round structure, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
In Paperback Adventures you begin by choosing one of two asymmetric characters; the rogue Damsel, or the robot, Ex Machina. Each character has their own starting deck of 10 cards, plus a deck of 50 cards, some of which that may make their way into your deck over the course of the game. Each character has 3 sets of 2 core items. These items change how you interact with the ‘boons’ that you accumulate on yourself, and the ‘hexes’ you’ll inflict on your opponent. Each set of these core items will drastically change how to approach each combat and any future upgrades you may get. In addition, each character starts with 2 items unique to them that offers even more options during a combat, and one wild letter card that is essential when it comes to making words.
Once you have your deck and all your items, it’s time to embark on your adventure. Paperback Adventures is broken up into 3 books. Each book features 2 regular enemies and 1 boss that must be overcome. Each enemy you face will provide you with a vowel card that can be used in each of your words. On each of your turns, you’ll draw 4 cards and decide what word you want to make out of the letters the deck has decided to give you, including the wild card and the vowel the enemy is providing if you wish. Each of your letter cards has symbols along the left and right edges, these symbols provide attack, blocks, and mana (which is needed to use your items). In addition to all that, every card has an ability that can be triggered if the letter is the top card of the word.
Top card of the word? What does that even mean? Well, when you decide on what word you want to play, you also need to decide if you’re going to ‘splay’ your cards left or right (splaying is laying your letter cards in a line, showing only the left or right half of each card). Once you’ve splayed, the one card that doesn’t have anything covering it will trigger it’s ability. Then, you’ll count up all the symbols on the left or right sides of your letters, apply any hits you’ve accumulated, then perform the enemy’s action which varies depending on the enemy you’re facing. Assuming that neither of you have died after trading blows, your top letter card (the card which power you activated) moves into a ‘fatigue’ pile, and the rest of your cards go into the discard (except for your wild and the vowel provided by the enemy, those are available to you every turn). You advance the enemy action marker (so you don’t lose track of what they’ll do on the next round), then draw a new hand of 4 cards. As per expected deck building rules, if you need to draw a card, but can’t, shuffle your discard and keep going.
Once you knock the enemy’s health down to 0, they become stunned for the rest of that turn. You flip over their card, reset their health to it’s new value, and prepare for the second half of the battle. The enemy will now have different or stronger abilities for the rest of the combat. Assuming you’re able to overcome the challenge presented by the enemies second side, you’ll be rewarded with riches beyond your imagination. Just kidding, but you do get some rewards for surviving each encounter.
After each encounter you’ll draw a card from a basic rewards deck that will offer some bonuses. Perhaps you’ll be offered new letter cards from your character’s deck that you can use to replace existing ones in your deck (hopefully stumbling upon a wonderful synergy that you’ll be able to exploit to crush the upcoming enemies). You may upgrade cards that are already in your deck (more on this in a minute), obtain new items, find macguffins that offer you special abilities, and perhaps take some penalty cards that feature hard to play letters, no attack or block symbols, and often some drawback for not playing them in a word on the turn that you draw it.
After you’ve reaped the fruits of your combat, you set up the next enemy, steel yourself for the challenges ahead, and press on.
Review – How this game made me feel
I have not had a run where I’ve beaten all 3 books in a row yet. Only once I got as far as the boss in Book 2’s. Too many penalty cards and inopportune card draws sank my character. Paperback Adventures is a “roguelike” game; you always start from the same static and weak position. As you play the game, you gain random benefits and just might come across an incredible combo that breaks the game apart, while on your very next play of the game you’ll find yourself begging for mercy in the first encounter due to some terribly unlucky circumstances. The randomness is what makes a game like this so addicting. When you finally do win, you feel vindicated; powerful; unstoppable.
Paperback Adventures utilizes randomness in a satisfying way. By placing you into a situation with your hand of cards and perfect knowledge of what your enemy is going to do, it’s entirely up to you to decide how you want to tackle the challenge. You’ll weigh the costs and benefits of attacking vs blocking, and decide if you’re willing to take the 3 damage now in exchange for a big hit on the enemy, or if you should just bide your time, hoping your next hand will bring you the cards you need to bring home the victory.
It’s important to note that you can’t stay defensive forever, or even for very long. Because you have to fatigue a card out of your deck every turn, every encounter is on a timer. After half a dozen turns your deck is down to just 4 cards, which means you’re drawing your entire deck for your hand! The knowledge that each turn from that moment on will be drastically weaker propels you forward, encouraging haste as you to take a hit on the chin to frantically lunge for the kill before your deck becomes too weak.
I found the AI opponent and game system as a whole very easy to maintain. The round to round upkeep was quick, simple, and got me back to making interesting decisions quickly, rather than bogging me down with upkeep and game maintenance. The decisions that went into this design were obviously careful and deliberate. Tim Fowers has crafted an experience that is satisfying and sticks in my head like a catchy tune so I’m musing about it during the moments where I’m not playing this game.
A really neat feature that Fowers used for this design is the use of card sleeves to facilitate upgrades to the cards. Each card in your deck comes sleeved. When one of the letters in your deck gets upgraded, you take the card out of your deck and flip it around, showing off the upgraded abilities on the back, and place it back in its sleeve. Each card has a note on the bottom of the card telling you what the upgraded ability will be, so you don’t need to pull all the cards out of their sleeves to decide which one you’ll want to use. I have only played this game on Tabletop Simulator, so I cannot attest to the physical quality of the experience, but I do applaud Fowers for his creative genius when it comes to innovative design.
Final Thoughts
I really like Paperback Adventures. Were I younger, I’d say I “like like” Paperback Adventures. It’s the kind of game that lived rent free in my mind for days following my first couple plays, which is always a good sign. It’s challenging, entertaining, and it utilizes a theme that I truly enjoy. Having said all of that, I admit that I am biased. I love deck builders, I love word games, and I really enjoy Tim Fowers’ designs. For people who share my tastes, this is an excellent design.
All in all, I really enjoyed my plays of Paperback Adventures. Playing through the entire 3 book campaign in one sitting may be a tall order, as each book takes between 60 and 90 minutes. It’s easy to ‘save’ your progress after a combat and jump back in when you have more time. I’m absolutely looking forward to getting my hands on a physical copy and really diving into the adventure, probably dragging my friends into it with me, playing cooperatively. When I tell my friends about this game, I don’t say “It’s pretty good for a solo game”, as if it’s simply understood that solo games are somehow inherently inferior. I tell them that Paperback Adventures is an excellent game.
Bullet♥︎ exploded into into my life from seemingly nowhere and consumed my soul for nearly 3 weeks. I was drawn in by the promise of fast paced shoot-em-up (SHMUP) action and a gorgeous anime aesthetic. What I got instead was a compelling puzzle game where the player manipulates sliding discs to match patterns while learning how to best use each heroine’s abilities to defeat the multitude of bosses.
Adelheid, one of the eight playable heroines
Bullet♥︎ is a game that offers numerous play modes. You can play the head-to-head mode, which is designed for multiple players to battle to the death; the score attack mode that lets players see how long they can survive when their neighbours aren’t trying to kill them; or you can explore the co-op/solo option, the boss battle mode. Bullet♥︎ is designed so that players learn the head-to-head mode rules first, as that forms the foundation for the rest of the play styles.Bullet♥︎’s head-to-head mode begins with a real-time 3 minute timer dictating when a round ends. During each round players put a certain number of discs (called bullets) into their own bags and start the timer. As soon as the timer starts ticking, they’re free to furiously pull bullets out of their bags, one at a time, and place them on their board (players’ boards are referred to as their ‘sight’) according to the colour and number depicted on the bullet.
Each bullet colour has its own lane, and the number on the disc tells you how many spaces down your board the bullet must be placed, skipping over any spots that already have a bullet occupying them. Players can be as quick or slow as they want when pulling bullets out of their bag, and can spend energy freely to use their heroine’s skills to manipulate the bullets that are already in their sight. The goal is to utilize pattern cards to remove bullets from their board and send them off to an opponent. However, if the timer runs out and they still have bullets remaining in their bag, the bullets must be drawn and placed in the sight with no opportunity to manipulate or clear them. If a bullet ever hits the bottom row of the sight, the player loses 1 hit point, and if they run out of hit points, they’re out of the game.
Three of Mariel’s patterns. Each character has up to 10 different patterns.
At the end of a round, every bullet players have managed to clear from their sights gets put into the bag of the player to their left. As as the rounds proceed, more and more bullets get added to everyone’s bag from the supply. The game continues until there is only one player left standing. While this is supposed to feel like a victory, proving your superiority over your friends, in reality it feels like the winner is just the person who was able to tread water the longest. The head-to-head mode helped me to learn the fundamental rules of Bullet♥︎, but I’ve spend the vast majority of my time with this game in the solo or co-op mode, the boss battle!
The Intensity track adds bullets to every players bag at the start of each round
Every character in Bullet♥︎ has a boss mode that presents you with a wildly different challenge to overcome. The boss battle mode plays very similarly to the head-to-head mode, except all of the bullets coming into your bag are dictated by the current level of the boss, and how far you’ve broken down their shields. As you continue to send bullets and break the boss’ shields, the number of bullets that will get added to your bag each turn usually increases.
In addition to the multitude of bullets that you have to deal with, the boss has a pattern of their own that you must match in the end of the round, or suffer their penalty. In the case of Adelheid, your bullets are turned upside-down, which can make them difficult to use in your patterns. If you happen to break one of Adelheid’s shields while you have face-down bullets, the face-down bullets will automatically hit you.
Adelheid, how could you turn against us? We trusted you!
Each character and boss is wildly asymmetric in nature, to a degree that I didn’t think was possible when I first learned the Bullet♥︎ system. Playing different characters can feel like an entirely different game because the ways they interact with their boards is so diverse. To compound on that, every boss presents you with a fully different challenge, which drastically increases the replayability. Some bosses are a cakewalk to defeat when using a specific character, but feel completely insurmountable when using the other characters. It’s incredibly fun to explore each of the characters and change your strategies depending how they play off each of the bosses.
The boss battle mode does away with the real time aspect. This allows you to slow down and puzzle out exactly how you want to approach each wave of bullets as they enter your sight. I understand why you wouldn’t want to use a timer during this mode, considering the additional cognitive load of running the AI and ensuring that you’re not going to trigger an effect that will deal 4 damage to you in a single move. However, it does remove the action-packed, fasted paced nature the game promised to emulate.
I love Bullet♥︎, and whole-heartedly recommend playing it. I’ll be the first to admit my biases; I love the anime asthetic, I’m an avid gamer (even if SHMUPs aren’t my genre of choice), and I love puzzle games. Bullet♥︎ checks each one of those boxes. The publisher, Level 99 Games, has also released a soundtrack of 3 minute long character themes that you can listen to via Spotify while you play the game, which is a wonderful addition to the experience.
One of the major downsides of me playing Bullet♥︎ 40+ times over the last month is that when I return to in-person gaming and I introduce my friends to this game, I’m sure I’ll wipe the floor with them. There isn’t anything to assist new players against veterans, other than making the veteran use a character they’re unfamiliar with, but who knows if even that will be enough slow me down. I did have some success when introducing this game to a new player by playing 3 co-op rounds of the boss battle mode first, and then moving into the head-to-head battle. This way the other player has SOME familiarity with the system. Still, it’s hard to close the gulf separating our experience levels when I have dozens of plays under my belt.
The entirety of my experience with this game has been via Tabletop Simulator, which also gave me access to Bullet🍊, a 4 character expansion to the game, based off Orange_Juice games (Sora, Flying Red Barrel,SUGURI, and QP Shooting – Dangerous!!). This expansion adds even more asymmetric heroines and bosses to face off against, further expanding the matrix of play options available, and offering even more different ways to interact with this system.
While it does feel weird to recommend a physical product while having never put my own hands on it, the digital implementation allowed me to fall in love with the challenge presented within the box. As soon as this game lands in my FLGS, I know I’ll be picking it up.
3 – That Which Points was a tough nut to crack. Oh my elation when I finally knocked her ass to the curb
All above images ofBullet♥︎are screenshots of the Tabletop Simulator mod.
