by Skye Larsen
Knowing there are thousands of games releasing each year, I still say with some level of confidence: We just released the first analog roguelike deck-building word game, Paperback Adventures. Yes, that’s a barrage of buzzwords, a deluge of descriptors, but I think this particular mix of mechanisms created some interesting challenges that other designers and prospective game-makers could learn from.
Plus it’s a story about a game brought back from the dead: spooky!
Keep reading to learn more about how we took the popular word game Paperback and turned it into a roguelike, dungeon-crawling board game.
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The term “roguelike” has become increasingly popular, and — to the chagrin of some purists — the definition has also become looser and looser. In the most general terms, a roguelike is a game that features permadeath and some amount of procedural content: two features of the 1980s video game Rogue from which the term gets its name.
The twin design pillars of a roguelike can be applied to a variety of games, but ever since indie video game hit Slay the Spire entered the scene we’ve seen a wave of roguelike deck-building games. All of these games have their own unique twists, but the secret sauce of this pairing is how well the constant deck upgrades and turn-based, strategic card play of a deck-builder match the core goals of a roguelike system.
For me, the key word of any roguelike, whether deck-building or otherwise, is “adapt”. You don’t know what rewards or challenges the game will throw at you, so you need to be ready to pivot your strategy — or else it’s all the way back to the start for you.
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In 2019, I started doing some freelance work with a local company, Fowers Games. One day, Tim Fowers had me take a look at a digital game they were working on. It took Tim’s popular Paperback formula — deck-building with letter cards — and attempted to add a roguelike layer to it, in which you would battle monsters with your words and choose letter upgrades as you progressed.
Overall, I had fun with the early prototype, but when I shared my feedback with Tim, I told him any of my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt because it was a game made precisely for me. The restrictive word-building aspect was tricky to incorporate into a game that wanted to feed the player those same satisfying combos a là Slay the Spire.
The project was eventually laid to rest by Tim and his programming partner Jeff Krause, and they moved on to other projects — but the promise of a game that combined my personal favorite mechanisms wouldn’t stop bouncing around in my mind. Was there a way to make the marriage work?
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Not long after I’d tried that prototype digital game, my normal routines (and all of our normal routines) were disrupted by the Covid pandemic. A stalwart homebody, I soon realized that even I needed to get out from time to time, so I started taking daily walks in the local park.
On those walks, I kept puzzling over how to make the roguelike word game work. I tried to find a theme that might unlock the perfect recipe, and the idea of “Sword and Sorcery” novels kept popping into my mind. Eventually, after a game of Carl Chudyk‘s Innovation with my wife, and on one of those walks in the park, I found my eureka moment: splaying cards left or right to simulate using either your sword or your shield.
The idea came together quickly after that. It was the perfect way to make word building important while reigning in some of the complexity. Icons on either side of the letter card would get covered up when splayed, and so would the ability written on the card. Now there was an easy way to add up your damage or your blocking power for the turn, while having only one card ability to execute each turn.
I put together a rough paper prototype and pitched the idea to Tim. Frankly, I was a bit shocked when he said I should keep running with it, but Tim and I slowly started to piece together a more complete game, adding content and ironing out the mechanisms.
But even though the design seemed doable, there’d still be several development obstacles to overcome before the game was ready to print.
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We ran into three major issues as we tried to translate the fun of roguelike deckbuilding video games into a tabletop setting:
1. How do you preserve the fun of roguelikes while simplifying upkeep?
This is a question every videogame-turned-boardgame must answer due to the loss of a computer to keep track of rules and data — but the problem can be especially thorny with this style of game, where some of the fun is in the wide variety of power-ups and enemies you encounter.
Our solution was context-based hex and boon counters. Every character and every enemy could add positive (boon) counters to themselves or negative (hex) counters to their opponent. Then, what those counters did depended on the character who placed them, e.g., the Sludge Alien uses hex counters to slowly build up poison-like damage, while the Baroness uses hex counters to subtract from the player’s damage output.
This kept down component costs for tabletop, and it also made it easier to have systems interact with each other. Players can get a card that removes enemy hexes and that will help against both the Sludge Alien’s poison damage as well as the Baroness’ damage drain effect.
2. How long can a roguelike “run” be in tabletop?
Paperback Adventures, like Monster Train or Slay the Spire, relies on a string of increasingly difficult back-to-back battles to create a sense of progression and growth. Each defeated enemy is an accomplishment, but the true prize is winning enough battles to power up and defeat a final boss.
Heading into the Kickstarter, we had balanced the game around a series of nine battles. This was much, much shorter than our video game comparisons, but each battle took a while to puzzle out, especially with the word game element of finding a suitable word to spell. At the time, nine seemed a good compromise to still allow the player to ramp up and add synergistic items and upgrades.
But the game was still too long, and trying to pitch it as a three-part campaign (three sets of three battles) didn’t quite work either, so we rebalanced the game around six battles instead.
We knew that this would throw off the balance of the game, with players not getting enough opportunities to power up from their rewards. More than once, we’d received feedback from playtesters that they would really like some type of shop where they could choose specific upgrades that fit with their strategy. Well, this change was now the perfect opportunity to build in a shop, which allowed us to keep rewards roughly the same in a six-battle game while giving the players new opportunities to power up for that final boss.
3. How do you playtest a game based on compounding synergies?
One of our greatest accomplishments was the sheer amount of playtesting we brought to the game. There are a lot of moving parts in Paperback Adventures: sixty unique letter cards for each of our three characters, tons of item and McGuffin abilities, and thirty different enemies. We knew we wanted plenty of variety baked into the game, but how do you playtest with so many possible scenarios and match-ups? And how do you push out frequent updates to playtesters without wearing out your home printer and scissors?
In a poetic way, our answer was to return Paperback Adventures to a digital form. We knew we’d like to eventually do a digital app modeled closely after the tabletop game, but Jeff Krause’s app progressed so quickly that we saw an opportunity in front of us: We could leverage the relatively quick update cadence of a digital app for all of the analog game’s playtesting.
And so with the help of some amazing playtesters on the Fowers Games Discord and the digital app, we were able to explore all sorts of balance changes, find the most problematic items and enemies (backed by app data!), and end up with a much more balanced game when it came time to print. (Related note: Paperback Adventurers is coming to Steam in Q1 2023.)
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Now a game that was once dead in the water can be shipped across the ocean to your doorstep. Paperback Adventures’ release has been exciting and tiring and gratifying and terrifying — but mostly it’s been fun. We’ve been doing our best to answer rules questions and explain edge cases here on BGG, and while I don’t want players to be frustrated, I’m not too mad — ultimately it was the type of game we wanted to make.
I believe that you need some of those rough edges to make a roguelike system robust and highly replayable. Otherwise your decisions on how to adapt to the choices in front of you might become a simple numbers game. We pushed boundaries wherever we could to create interesting situations and decisions for the player, while using the techniques in the section above to create the best product possible for a tabletop game.
Back from the grave!
