NEW DELHI: Often, the easiest way of describing something is to relate it to other things that your audience might be familiar with.
“Oh, you’ve got to try X, it’s like Y+Z.”
You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? Now, it may come across as lazy but sometimes it’s the most effective way of getting your point across, such as right now, for example, when I tell you that Paperback is basically Scrabble plus Dominion.
A lot of people are wary of word games, probably as a result of playing Scrabble with people who’ve memorised every two-letter word out there.
Even if you’re one of them, you should still give Paperback a shot because it’s that good.
On the other hand, what if you love Scrabble or Boggle, or Words With Friends? In that case, you should definitely try Paperback, it’s a wonderful take on word games.
Okay, enough praise. Let’s start talking about the game. Paperback is a deck-building game where you buy cards with letters on them (mostly single, but some doubles too) and add them to your personal deck of cards.
Over time, your deck becomes more powerful which, in Paperback, translates to you being able to make better words.
However, cards don’t just have letters on them; they also have powers that can radically change what you’re trying to do on a given turn. Maybe this card doubles the score of an adjacent one, or maybe that card adds two points to your score if it’s the first letter in your word; the variety of powers available in Paperback is huge.
There are three systems at work here that make this a substantially less frustrating experience than, say, Scrabble.
First, you start off with five wildcards in your deck that can be any letter you want (and everybody also has access to a common vowel).
Secondly, you choose the cards you’re adding to your deck; so if you get stuck with a crappy hand, it’s at least partly your fault.
Finally, if you know that there’s a good word there but you just can’t think of it, you can reveal your hand and ask other players for help.
If anybody suggests a word that works for you, you can salvage something from the hand and they get a bonus point on their next turn; win-win!