Hardback Review – When Your Vocabulary Has to Do All the Heavy Lifting

Hardback is the board game sequel to the 2014 word-builder, Paperback, also from designer Tim Fowers. Like its predecessor, Hardback is a genre-defining board game that combines traditional deck-building mechanics, with word-making.

What is word-making?

Well, each card in the game is a letter. Throughout the game, you’ll get money and buy additional letter cards. During your turn, you’ll use these cards to come up with words, or at least, try to come up with words. Then based on the word you come up with you’ll use abilities, and get points or money to buy more letters.

In Hardback, this cycle repeats until someone gets 60 points, and wins the game.

Word games like Hardback, Scrabble, or Word Domination feel like they occupy a different space from regular strategy games. Strategy games are all about testing your logical and strategic skills, whereas word games go hard after your vocabulary skills and pattern recognition.

So instead of providing the usual review, I thought I’d break down my thoughts into what I thought of Hardback’s word game mechanics, and then what I thought of its strategy game mechanics. Before I bring both sides together at the end.

As A Word Game…

What makes a great word game?

For me, it’s about how the game challenges you creatively to come up with new words. A successful word game makes me smarter by pushing the limit of my vocabulary. Then it encourages me to learn new words and expand my knowledge of the English language.

If that’s our gauge, then how does Hardback fare?

Unsurprisingly, very well.

However, that’s mostly due to the fantastic ink mechanic. Throughout the game, you can buy and use ink tokens.

Using one of these tokens lets you draw an extra letter card from your deck, but then you must use that letter in your word. With a lot of cards costing 8-9 money, you’ll have to tap into this excellent risk/reward mechanism if you want to do well.

Therefore, as you use more and more ink tokens throughout the game, you’ll be constantly pushed into creating words with letters you didn’t expect, and that you otherwise wouldn’t use.

To help with coming up with these longer words, Hardback is extremely lenient in word creation. You’re able to flip any card facedown to use it as any letter but you won’t get the benefit the letter provides.

While this means you never get stuck for want of a word, it also adds almost too much opportunity to what words you can create. This can make turns longer than they should be as you thumb through all the possible letter combinations.

As A Strategy Game…

Outside of the ink mechanic, the rest of the deck-building is so standard you’ll find them sightseeing at the top of the bell curve.

As a strategy game, I didn’t find Hardback compelling at all. Not when we have games like Dune: Imperium, and Dale of Merchants which have both refined and innovated the deck-building mechanic.

In Hardback, the strategy boils down to collecting cards of a specific suite (or genre). Using letters of the same suite in your word activates additional abilities. The abilities themselves are what you’d expect from a deck-building game.

So there’s not a lot of strategic thinking to be done.

But this lack of strategic thinking is also a good thing. I found the challenge of constantly coming up with words engaging enough on their own that I wouldn’t have had any additional thought for a more complex game.

Even without deep and rich strategic gameplay, what’s in place currently for Hardback compares very favourably to its predecessor. While also eliminating a lot of the extra setup found in the original.

Going back to the comparison of Hardback vs other deck-builders, it suffers greatly from being a word-based game. Turns and tempo throughout the game aren’t as snappy as you’d like, with the hunt for the right word never being a straightforward journey.

To the designer’s credit, they’ve done the best job they can to solve this issue. With rules allowing other players to help out in creating a word. However, it still takes a while to reach that point.

Bringing It All Home

To sum up, Hardback is a fantastic word game, although I don’t think it’s as strong a word game compared to the designers’ previous titles: Paperback, and Word Domination. Both these titles are stricter on the letters you can use for your word creation, and I think that makes both these games more fun in terms of creating words.

However, as a whole package, I enjoyed Hardback a lot more than Paperback and slightly more than Word Domination. The strategy delivered, while not revolutionary, was enough to elevate Hardback over these other titles.

Otherwise, it’s not too often we see games like this, with most word-heavy games being word-association party games. So while it doesn’t compete when it comes to deck-building or strategy games, if you are looking to fill the word game niche in your collection, then you can’t go wrong with Hardback.