Today, I am thrilled to welcome my friend, Mary-Helen Giles, and her 9-year-old son, Alden to the site. I first “met” Mary-Helen through this site and the Raising Poppies community. I have no doubt that if we were in the same state we’d be homeschool buddies. We have the same taste in books and games. I am so happy to have Mary-Helen and Alden on the site. Today, Mary-Helen and Alden are sharing their thoughts on the game Paperback by Tim Fowers. This is a game that has been on my wishlist forever!
Review of the Game Paperback by Tim Fowers
A review of the game Paperback
Today we played the game Paperback for the first time as a family. Paperback is a card game that has you pretend to be a paperback book writer, spelling words with the cards you are dealt. The cards are a mixture of one letter cards, two letter combo cards, wild cards and shared common vowels. The different cards are worth different point values. The point values of words created translate to money used to build your deck.
The goal of Paperback is to earn the most author fame points by the end of the game, and you do that by building your deck and spelling longer and longer words. Fame points are earned by purchasing wild cards and fame cards. The fame cards represent your successful paperback novels.
The game ends once someone spells a 10 letter word. Deck building is done thoughtfully during each hand, using the points you earned with your word to purchase new letters, combinations of letters or fame cards.
Understanding the rules took about 5 minutes and set up took slightly longer. The longest part of set-up was sorting the cards to get them in the specified order. It plays quickly, taking less than 45 minutes to finish the game. It’s a clever way to get in some spelling practice and ended up being a lot of fun. I highly recommend it to anyone that enjoys word building games.
Here are some thoughts from my 9-year-old son:
I like the earning points part. And I like the spelling part because it helps you learn to spell. You have wild cards and it is basically like a free word. Less wild cards make it harder, so the bigger the deck gets the harder it gets to spell words. My strategy for winning is to get the two letter cards as much as you can because then you can instantly win the game by making a ten letter word. Also, spelling words with a lot of letters gives you a lot of money so you can buy more fame point cards. There is NOTHING that I don’t like about Paperback!
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