Board Game Arena

From the creators of the bestselling game, Paperback, comes the next chapter in deckbuilding/ word games. Play as Penelope Quill, an aspiring, 19th-century author working to write your next novel, earning money and prestige along the way. Spend your coins on cards to specialize your deck in certain genres and exploit card combinations, and press your luck to draw extra cards — but make sure you can still string a word together! Be the first to acquire enough prestige to complete your masterpiece and be recognized as the finest novelist of the age!

Wordsmiths can score big by discovering the perfect word from their hand of randomly drawn cards.
Strategic players can maximize the benefit of their cards by carefully crafting the perfect deck.
Multiple strategies to explore:
Competitive, cooperative, and single-player gameplay options.


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

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 Endorsement cards.
New Persistent cards stay in play until someone uses them!

You can play it here:
https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=hardback

In addition to the competitive race mode for 2-5 players, the base game includes several variant rules including Literary Awards, Adverts, Player Powers, and Events; and a co-op mode for 1-4 players, in which players join forces against one of four simulated opponents, each of which is proficient in a different deck genre.

The team would like to thank the Fowers Games team, as well as the designers Jeff Beck & Tim Fowers.
Of course, nothing would have been possible without the help of Quietmint, our developer, who made the game available for all to enjoy.
Exciting, isn't it?

Words are hard, but this game isn't. It's simply clever and I must admit that it is one of our favorites from this publisher.
So don't wait: start a game right now. Or two.

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Keen to try this!

Hi, is the italian dictionary available? Thanks

That got kicked off the home page quickly

How about a little love for artist Ryan Goldsberry?

Love this game!

Played a few games of this - this is an amazing implementation of a board game on BGA. You can shuffle cards, put stuff back into your hands, the state of your stuff is remembered... it's a fantastic version! Thank you so much for the time and effort! Great job.

The implementation is really nice indeed but the German dictionary is pretty bad in that it doesn't recognize quite many words.

Ooh, I've been wanting to learn this one. Any chance we also get Paperback?

Awesome! I own "Paperback" and never can find anyone to play. I'm so excited there is a word game on BGA!