Hardback

Fowers Games

About this game

Hardback is a deck-building word game, a prequel to Paperback. As an aspiring 19th-century novelist, you work to pen your next masterpiece, earning prestige along the way. Specialize your deck in certain genres to exploit card combinations, and press your luck to draw extra cards — but make sure you can still string a word together!

Players build a deck of letters with various powers and race to 60 fame points to win.

Features:
1-5 player hotseat and online async
3 levels of computer opponents to challenge you.

Gameplay
No wilds in your deck - any card can be wild.
Push your luck for more cards with the Ink system.
Match genre colors to gain bonus abilities on your cards.
Fight over the coveted award cards.
Timeless Classic cards stay in play, until someone uses them.
New hardcore mode - can't repeat a word!

Ratings and reviews

I love deckbuilder games and own this game in the physical card format. The game is great. It is scrabble mixed with star realms in a novel theme. There are some issues with the digital version gameplay. I would rather see the hands flow out in real time. The summary screens are annoying AF cuz you have to tap them away after each turn. Music is super awful. The best deck builder game so far in digital format is the ascension app. The game in this app should flow like it does in ascension.

Like 2 years after my original review and there are still large periods of time when no online games will appear and if I log out and try to log in, I get a "generic error" and can't log back in. I'm annoyed that I've paid for this and can't play with actual people. When it's not your turn, you can't open that game to see what you most recently did. When people stop playing there's no way to continue with AI or push a notification to them. So it just sits there.

Great version of a great game, with only one small caveat keeping it from a perfect score in digital form. Both Paperback and Hardback A.I. use words that are not allowed by the human players. Proper nouns are the biggest problems. It accepts it for them, but not the player. My wife and I have even tried using words that we saw the computer use and get scored, and we are not allowed. Other than that, both of these games are absolutely fantastic, especially for multiplayer with other humans!

What's new

Small Changes.