Friday Filler: Paperpack

Paperback: A Novel Deckbuilding Game is a clash of the old and the new. It combines concept of classic word games like Scrabble with the very modern playstyle of the deckbuilding mechanic from games like Dominion and Star Realms. In Paperback, each player is novelist, desperately writing one novel after novel, jumping from one genre to another with titles such as The Chinatown Connection, Dead Planet, and The Angel of Death, all to satisfy the voracious demands of their editors. Pump out enough of this pulp fiction and perhaps the novelist will get a bestseller and make a mint! That though is the extent of the theme in Paperback, the game being more mechanical than thematic, since what each player will be doing is spelling out words using Letter cards and generating a score which can be used to buy both more Letter cards and Fame cards, which will be used to spell out more valuable words and so on and so on until the end of the game when the player with the most Fame points from his Fame cards wins the game. Paperback is published by Fowers Games, best known for the heist themed Burgle Bros. and Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers. It is designed to be played by two to five players, aged ten and up, and has a suggested playing time of forty-five minutes.

Each player begins play with a deck of ten cards—five Wild cards and the letters ‘T’, ‘R’, ‘S’, ‘L’, and ‘N’. On his turn a player will five cards from his deck and attempt to spell a word using both the cards drawn, whether letter cards or Wild cards and the current Common card, which anyone can use, typically a vowel. If it is a viable word—it cannot be a name, place, or proper noun—then it generates a score. Whilst Wild cards can substitute for any letter and so help spell a word, they do add to the Score value of the word. The value of this score be used to either purchase a new letter or letter combination card (such as ‘ST’ or ‘ER’) or a Fame card. Letters purchased will all generate a greater score than the base cards in a player’s deck, but they often have special abilities. For example, the letter ‘M’ costs seven cents to purchase and generates a score of two, but if the word is correctly spelled, it doubles the total score value of the word. It also has to be placed in the trash after use. The ‘V’ costs seven cents to purchase and generates a score of four, but if the word is correctly spelled, it allows a player to draw an extra card on his next and potentially spell out a bigger word. Some letters are Attack cards, which means that their special ability affects other players. For example, the ‘H’ letter costs six cents to purchase, and generates a score of four, but if the word is correctly spelled, its attack is that the other player cannot purchase anything with a value of greater than eight cents. The ‘Q’ letter costs eight cents to purchase and generates a score of five, but if the word is correctly spelled, its attack restricts another player to just using the ability on the one his next turn.

Alternatively, a player can purchase a Fame card, each of which has a cost and depicts the cover of a fairly pulpy book from various genres. For example, The Angel of Death is a pulp novel, whilst Dead Planet is Science fiction. These generate four, seven, ten, or fifteen fame points, so generating enough score from the correctly spelled words is the aim of the game. When added to a player’s deck, the fame cards work like Wild cards in that they can be used to substitute for any letter, but do not add to a player’s score.

Game play continues until either of two conditions are met. One is to exhaust two stacks of the fame cards, each being organised by price and adjusted according to the number of players. The other is when the last Common letter card is taken. Throughout play, the current Common letter card can be used by all of the players to help them spell their words, but if a player spells a word of sufficient length, he can add the current Common letter card to his deck. This will bring in a new Common letter card into play and if a player wants to add it to his deck, then he needs to spell an even longer word. There are only four Common letter cards available throughout the game and the length of word required to add them to a player’s decks goes from seven to eight to nine, and then ten letters long. Once the end of the game is reached, each player adds up his Fame points from both the Wild cards and the fame cards in his deck, and the player with highest total wins the game.

The play of Paperback is about increasing word length. Increase the length of the words that he can spell, and player has a greater Score with which to buy better or more letter cards and fame cards, and potentially more abilities to bring into play. It entirely possible that a player can spell a word and bring two, three, four, or more abilities into play. Balanced against keeping an eye out for letter cards with special abilities, a player needs to keep an eye on the letter cards available and what he thinks he can spell with them. He also needs to bear in mind that the higher the score a word will generate, the more difficult it will be to successfully spell a word with it is. He will also want to maintain a good mix of consonants and vowels too, along with the two-letter combinations on some letter cards. Favour one letter type over the other and a player will have difficulty finding words that he can spell. It is also possible to combine special abilities for enhanced effects, but these are not as common as in other deck-building games.

In comparison to other deckbuilding games, Paperback is not necessarily all about trying a way to find a way to get rid of the initial cards in a player’s deck. This is because there are special abilities which work with the Wild cards in a player’s deck and all of the cards in a player’s deck, whether Wild cards or starting letter cards, are useful throughout the game. Nor is Paperback as adversarial as other deckbuilding games. There are elements of it with the attack cards, but these impede player for a turn rather than directly attacking him. Rather it is competitive, not combative.

Beyond the base game, Paperback adds various options and extra rules. These include adding a reward if a player helps another who is stuck on what word he can spell out using his current hand, adding awards and themes as bonuses to towards a player’s final score, playing in simultaneous mode, and even a co-operative mode played against the game itself. These all change the game in various ways, but do not stray too far from the core mechanics of spelling words, purchasing further letters and Fame cards, and so on.

As clever a combination as Paperback is, it does suffer from the problems of both game types. As a word game, players with greater word knowledge and vocabularies will be at an advantage and often, players with lesser word knowledge and vocabularies will sometimes lead to slower play as they try and work out what they can spell. The deckbuilding means that it can be more adversarial and fiddlier with a lot of cards than a word game like Scrabble. Yet, Paperback does not rely on needing to know lots of short, high-scoring words or needing to have to put them on a board building from what is already there, and as deckbuilding games, the focus is on the letters rather than the special abilities per se. However, the use of the special abilities on the cards do go towards countering the spelling, so that a player who is more used to word games such as Scrabble can still play against players more used to deckbuilding games.

Physically, Paperback is well produced and well designed. The cards are colour-coded according to cost making them easy to tell them apart, the artwork on the Fame cards—each is done as a pulp novel—is excellent, and the cards are all easy to ready. The rulebook is also decently done. Lastly, it all fits into a neat little box which comes with dividers so that everything is neatly organised and easy to find.

Paperback: A Novel Deckbuilding Game is a novel clash of two game types that surprisingly, work well together and can be used to introduce the fan of one type to the other. So, a fan of word games can be introduced to a deckbuilding game (that fan of word games also likely to be used to family games too), and the fan of deckbuilding games to word games. As a word game Paperback forces a player to strategise beyond the spelling to gain extra abilities through latter cards’ special abilities and as a deckbuilding game, it forces a player to think about what he can do—rather spell—right now rather focus on the strategy. Paperback: A Novel Deckbuilding Game is a witty, wordy game, that as hybrid deserves a place on your shelf between the traditional and the modern game designs.

Friday Filler: Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers

Some games have a table presence as soon as you have them unboxed and everything is out on the table. Others have table presence as soon as you look at them, and that presence follows through from the moment you hold them in your hand to point where you are actually playing them. Colt Express, the 2015 Spiel des Jahres Winner from Ludonaute is an example of the former, taking place aboard a card board train which you set up and attempt to rob. Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is an example of the latter. It comes in a block-shaped box which when you stand it up, looks a cartoonish rendering of a Las Vegas casino. Open—or rather unfold—the box and everything inside comes stored in plastic trays and once these have been removed, a leg is inserted into the receivers in each of the four corners of the box and the box itself is then flipped over to stand on those legs. A playmat, showing a four-by-four playing grid, is placed both on top of the box and under the box. Together these two playmats, when laid out with the rooms and locations of the casino, form the playing surface for Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers and the target of the players and their characters and their heists. Add wall sections and playing pieces or meeples illustrated with yet more themed artwork and what you have in Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is a board game with table presence. And yet… Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers looks a little rickety. The top of the box is not quite flat. Plus playing under the box is a little fiddly. Which is all a bit of a shame, because Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers really does look like a great game, with great artwork that supports its theme. However, Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers does not have to be played using this three-dimensional set-up, as clever as it is. It can be played using just the playmats, and it works just as well.

Published by Fowers Games, Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is a sequel to Burgle Bros. and both are co-operative games. In Burgle Bros., between one and four players perform a heist on an office or bank, attempting to locate a safe whilst dodging patrolling guards, all done in the style of a sixties heist. In Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers, between one and four players attempt to break into a Las Vegas casino, locate and open a safe, and get away with the loot. However, Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is much more of a challenge than Burgle Bros. This is no night-time burglary—it must be performed during the day. Security is tighter and the safes are tougher, plus there are Bouncers who will follow patrol routes, but who are always on the lookout for any Commotion which they will want to break up. And since this takes place during the day, the casino is thronging with guests. Some are customers, some are not. Some are helpful, most are not. A player might be forced to make a detour to avoid a drunk or get caught up with a saleswoman who never stops talking, be spotted by an undercover member of the casino’s staff or hide from a Bouncer in a crowd. On the plus side, the players are skilled and have gear too, but both only have a limited use. And when the crew manage to get to the safe and crack it open, they have to take the loot and get it out of the casino in an exciting finale!

At the start of the game, the game’s tiles are randomly placed on both floors of the casino, face down. Each floor must have an ‘Escalator’ and a ‘Monorail’ tile. The ‘Safe’ tile is placed on the second floor, whilst the ‘Owner’s Office’ tile is on the first floor. The Patrol Cards for each floor are shuffled and one drawn for each floor to determine where the Bouncer on each floor starts from and where the guests are placed. Guests are represented by poker chips, and these are also placed face down. A second Patrol Card is drawn to indicate where the Bouncer is going to move to, at least initially. Each time a Bouncer reaches his destination, a new Patrol Card is drawn to determine the new destination location, and so on and so on, until the Patrol Card deck is empty. In which case, the Bouncer will start hunting for the nearest player. Eight walls are placed randomly on each floor. These block movement and sight between locations. Then the first—or the next, if Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is being played a campaign—Finale card is drawn out of its envelope, and its text read out. This adds flavour and detail to the heist. The rules on the back will only be revealed and come into play after the players have emptied the safe.

A player receives a character and the character’s three pieces of Gear, either by choice or at random. There are a total of nine in the game. With a maximum number of four players, this adds variety and replay value to the game. For example, Rook is an Elvis impersonator who has an ‘Earpiece’ which enables him to move any player to an adjacent tile, but not through a wall; a set of ‘Facemasks’ which enable two players to swop places; and can ‘Impersonate’ another player to use one of their already prepared items of gear. All great takes an action to prepare, but no actions to use. All have a limited number of uses before they are flipped over granting a last one-shot bonus action before being discarded, and for the most part, an item of Gear affects another player rather than the one using it.

The aim of Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is for the players to enter the casino, locate both the Owner’s Office and the escalator on the first floor and then go up to the second floor. They must find the safe and open it. Not only do the players get the loot, but they also get to turn over the Finale Card and bring its rules into play. The Finale Card also details the players’ means of exit. There nine heists in Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers and thus nine different Finale Cards. Initially, Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is designed to played in order, but once they have been played through once, the Finale Cards can still be played again, but in a random order.

A player’s turn consists of two phases—the player phase and the Bouncer phase. On the player phase, a player can take up to four actions from a choice of four. These are ‘Move’, ‘Peek’, ‘Use While Here’, and ‘Prep’. ‘Move’ is to an adjacent tile, revealing any face down poker chip and resolving it, and then resolve any ‘When You Enter’ effect if the tile has one. ‘Peek means to look at an adjacent tile, whilst ‘Use While Here’ is an optional action on a tile, again if it has one. Lastly, ‘Prep’ means to ready a piece of Gear for use.

In the Bouncer phase, the Bouncer on the same floor as the player moves three spaces towards the destination on the current Patrol Card. If the Bouncer moves through any tile occupied by a player, that player gains two Heat. If a player gains six Heat, either from encountering a Bouncer or from particular locations, not only does that player lose, but every player loses! If a Bouncer is hunting after running out of Patrol Cards and their routes to follow, he moves directly towards the nearest player. So it is very much in the best interests of the players to avoid the Bouncers on both floors. Out of the Bouncer phase, a Bouncer will also move towards a Commotion when it is created in a particular tile. When a Bouncer is hunting the players, a Commotion can actually be used as a distraction, which is both helpful and thematically brilliant.

Each of the tile types has particular effects. For example, in the ‘Buffet’ a cube is added to the tile each time a player enters it. When there are three cubes, a Commotion is caused, the cubes are removed, and the Bouncer moves three rather than the standard one space towards it. If a Bouncer enters the ‘Crow’s Nest’, he surveys the adjacent tiles and if there are players on them, they each gain one Heat. At the ‘Table Games’, a player rolls two dice and if he rolls either seven or eleven, he loses one Heat, but causes a Commotion on any other roll. Both the ‘Lounge’ and ‘Pool’ tiles have their own decks of cards for even more random events.

Locating and opening the safe is a multi-stage action. First, the players need to locate both the ‘Owner’s Office’ tile on the first floor and the ‘Safe’ tile on the second floor. They also need to reveal all of the tiles in the same row and column as the ‘Safe’ tile. Second, they need to locate the ‘Moles’ they already planted in the casino ahead of time. There are four of them in the casino and when a player finds one, he can be exchanged for a single die at a cost of two actions. This die is stored on the ‘Owner’s Office’ tile. Third, when a player is on the ‘Owner’s Office’ tile, he can transfer it to the ‘Safe’ tile. A player on ‘Safe’ tile can expend an action to roll the dice. If any of the numbers match those tiles in the same row and column as the ‘Safe’ tile, they are covered up, including multiple numbers. One die is returned to the ‘Owner’s Office’ tile, but a player can continue expending actions to roll the dice as long as one remains on the ‘Safe’ tile. Completely covering all six numbers in the same row and column as the ‘Safe’ tile means that the players have cracked the safe’s combination and triggered the effects of the Finale Card. If the players fulfil the victory conditions on the Finale Card, they have won the game.

At the end of the game, it can all be put away, or alternatively, the players can fill out the Heist Log if Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is being played as a campaign. Successfully pulling off a heist increases their Suspicion value, ranging between one and ten, but failing decreases it. If they were successful they get a sticker to add to the Trophy Case in the bottom of the game’s box, and whether or not they win or lose, they do get an alternative piece of Gear which can be used in future heists. The rulebook also include a variant rules for ‘Dead Drops’, representing randomly distributed pieces of ‘Gear’ that the players must find rather than being assigned everything at game’s start. This makes the game more challenging, whilst the separate ‘Casing the Joint’ makes it less so by reducing the element of randomness in terms both set-up and game play.

Physically, Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is very well produced and it is a great looking game. The rulebook is simple and straightforward to understand, though a lot of the game’s nuances are expected to come out in play rather than be explained in the rules. Some of the Gear cards could have done with clearer explanations though.

Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is a fantastic combination of both theme and random events. The theme is instantly recognisable and playable, the casino heist a la the film Ocean’s 11, only the sixties version rather than the noughties update. It is very much get into the casino, case the joint, avoid the bouncers, dodge the guests, luck out on the Craps table, and slip into the safe room to crack the combination, but it is also another theme present too. One which Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers constantly threatens to tip over into—farce! The possibility of running into the wrong guest or Bouncer one too many times or entering the wrong room, and more, all threaten to endanger the heist attempt, and perhaps tip the attempt over into farce and then failure. Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers is an easy game to teach and play, but difficult to beat because of random events, and whilst that can be both great and frustrating—it can be a little too random in places, where the game really scores is theme and story. Theme because everyone loves a heist and story because all that randomness can set up great stories as the players run into that drunk one too many times or find a spot to pause whilst the Bouncer moves past or an item of Gear gets a player a out of a tight spot. Plus the Finale Cards simply add more theme, not just with the narrative at the start of the game, but also with the extra rules for the getaway at the end of a heist.

Ultimately, you do need to be lucky to pull of a heist in Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers. However, the theme is sheer brilliance, the game is fun to play, and together, everything in the game helps build a great stories.

Sixties Style Stealthy Steal

Burgle Bros. is a co-operative board game in which between one and four players perform a heist! As an elite crew they will break into the target bank, locate and crack open three safes, avoid the patrolling guards, and then escape up through the roof with the loot. It comes with three building floors that are different each time the game is played; guards that are constantly on patrol; and nine different roles—each with a basic and an advanced variant. The base game is called ‘The Bank Job’ and involves all three floors, but introductory and expert games are also included. The former is ‘The Office Job’ and involves just two floors, whilst the latter, ‘Fort Knox’, also involves two floors, but they are larger, which means the safes are much harder to crack. A game should last no more than an hour-and-a-half, but familiarity should reduce that time down drastically.

Published by burglebros.com following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Burgle Bros. comes a sturdy, tightly-packed box that looks like tower block. Inside can be found over one hundred cards, forty-eight cardboard tiles, nine character and three guard meeples, nine dice, over seventy tokens, twenty-four wall pieces, and the rulebook, all in full colour. The cards include Player Turn (or reference) cards for each player; a set of Patrol Cards for each floor that determine where the guards move; Character cards for each of the game’s nine characters; Loot Cards to be taken from each safe and carried to the roof; Tool Cards that can help a character out; and Event Cards that can also help a character out—or hinder him! The Characters include the Juicer, an Electronics Expert capable of triggering alarms remotely; the Hacker, a Computer Expert who can hack into any system from anywhere on a floor via Wi-Fi; and the Acrobat, a Retired Performer who can move through the guards. The Loot Cards tend to hinder or slow a Character down, such as the Chihuahua (the chance that it sets off an alarm each turn with its barking) or the Painting (too large to be carried through Secret Doors or Service Ducts). Tool Cards are one-use devices, like the Doughnuts left out to distract the Guard from moving or the Crowbar that can be used to disable an adjacent tile. Lastly the Event Cards provide a one-off event that can help or hinder the Characters, such as ‘Throw Voice’ which is used to distract the Guard or ‘Squeak!’, which attracts his attention.

At the start of the game, the cardboard tiles, each representing a room, are divided into three piles of sixteen, with each sixteen laid out randomly as a four-by-four grid. These Room Tiles include the Camera Room, from a Guard can see into all other Camera Rooms on a floor, the Lavatory which has plenty of stalls to hide in for the Characters, the Scanner which sets of an Alarm if a Character is holding a Tool or an item of Loot, and of course, the Safes that need to be cracked. All of these are laid face down so that at game start, the Characters do not know where anything is! The Wooden Wall pieces are placed between some rooms. These block direct movement between rooms, but Secret Rooms and the ‘Dynamite’ Tool Card are ways to get around—or through—the walls. All of the card decks are shuffled, but the particularly the Patrol Decks, there being one deck per floor. Each Patrol Card shows a four-by-four grid of squares, representing that floor and its rooms. One square will be marked in red, such as ‘A4’ or ‘D2’, this being the next destination for that floor’s Guard. When the Guard moves, it will be to that square, and as soon as he does, a new Patrol Card will be drawn. The destination will be marked on the grid of rooms by an orange die, set to show the number of movement points the Guard currently has per turn. So on the first floor, this is just two, but then three on the second floor, and four on the third floor. When the Patrol Deck is exhausted, it is reshuffled, but the die is moved to the next highest number. Thus from two to three on the first floor, three to four on the second floor, and so on. This the primary way in which Burgle Bros. increases in difficulty the longer that the game takes to play.

Once the game is set up, Burgle Bros. proceeds in straightforward fashion. On his turn each Character has four Action Points. These can be spent to Peek into an adjacent Room, thus revealing it; Move into an adjacent tile; Hack the Computer Room to turn off Alarms elsewhere on the floor; adding a (green) die to a Safe Tile; rolling the dice on a Safe Tile to crack the Safe; or to move the Guard. Lastly, a Character can spend two Action Points to draw an Event Card. To crack a Safe, a character rolls the dice on the Safe Tile, the aim being to match the numbers in the combination. This combination is formed from the numbers on all of the tiles in the same row and the same column as the Safe Tile. So these tiles have to be revealed before they can rolled and the Safe cracked—thus forcing the Characters to explore each floor. Any Character who cracks a Safe receives a Tool Card and a Loot Card, but also sets off a silent Alarm and adding one to the Guard’s movement on both the floor he is on and the floor below. This the second way in which Burgle Bros. increases in difficulty—with success and the increased attention of the Guard!

Once a Character has moved, then the Guard on the same floor also moves (a Guard on a floor where there are no Characters does not move). The Guard can move freely around the floor, whereas the Characters have to overcome rooms with Keypads, Laser Grids, and so on. Should a Guard pass through the same room as a Character, then he is spotted and loses one of three Stealth Tokens. Should a Character lose all of Stealth Tokens and be spotted again, then he is captured, is interrogated and reveals the identities of his fellow burglars. Everyone loses the game. Winning requires the Characters to crack each Safe, take the Loot in each, and then get to the roof from where they can escape via a helicopter. 

Playing Burgle Bros. is all about knowing which rooms do what and knowing where the Guards are and where they are going so that each Character can keep out of their clutches. Having easy access to the rulebook helps with the rooms, whilst to some extent the players can manipulate the movement of the Guards. Moving from one floor to another so that there are no Characters on that floor will stop a Guard’s movement and sometimes an Alarm can be set off to distract a Guard from his current patrol route. The players also need to be aware of the special abilities that each character has and when to use them to the team’s best advantage. They also need to know what each room does, so having the rulebook will be more than useful, at least initially.

Physically, from the cover box design to the Character images, Burgle Bros. is delightfully thematic—that theme being that of a sixties heist movie. The components themselves are of a decent quality, though perhaps the rulebook feels slightly truncated in places. The high number of components does make the game slightly fiddly to set up at least and also means that the game is not quite as elegant as other co-operative designs to play. Getting the components back into the game’s box also takes careful packing.

As a co-operative game, it is not difficult to see the same mechanical architecture that underlies Pandemic and Forbidden Island present in the design of Burgle Bros. That said, it is less obvious than in a design like Flash Point: Fire Rescue. Like those designs, Burgle Bros. gets all the more challenging to play as the number of players increase, here because the more Characters there are, the more often that the Guards move and the more Characters there, the harder they will have to work to keep out of sight of the Guards. The game also provides for plenty of replay with the game’s random set-up—primarily of the floor layouts, the section of Characters, and the Patrol card order—and difficulty settings. Like the best of co-operative game designs, Burge Bros. is a solid combination of theme and rules that pleasingly emulates the classic heist or caper movie.