Hardback app.

The game Hardback, now available as an app for iOS and Android, is a quirky combination of Scrabble (or perhaps Boggle) and deckbuilders like Dominion, where players draw hands of five letter cards, play them to form the most valuable word they can, and use the coin values on their cards to buy more powerful letter cards from the table. It’s probably much better as an in-person experience, because playing the AI means you’re going up against a dictionary, but I will say even thinking of it as a solo game, since there’s little interaction between players, makes for a fun puzzle to try to maximize your score by building the best deck possible. (Hardback is a prequel to another game, Paperback, that I haven’t played or seen.)

The game is almost as simple as what I described above. Basic cards grant you either one point or one coin. You use coins to buy better cards from the scrolling market; such cards cost 2 to 9 coins, and grant you more coins and/or points as well as all kind of special abilities, some of which are only triggered if you have two cards of the same “theme” (color) in your word. These can include more coin/point bonuses, doubling the value of an adjacent card, “jailing” a card from the market for you to buy later, trashing a card from your hand for an immediate payment of one or two coins, and more. Thus building a deck requires some planning so that you concentrate your purchases in maybe two colors.

You can also flip any card over to its other side and use it as a wild card, representing any letter you want. You get no return for the card (unless you have an adjacent special card that lets you gain a card’s bonus even when it’s wild), but you’re going to do this often so you can complete words, and often make longer ones. You can use coins to buy ink, which lets you draw one card per ink unit – but the catch is that you have to use drawn cards in your word without flipping them unless you happen to gain ink remover from green special cards. So there’s some risk to drawing cards, although the app lets you peek at what’s in your deck, just not the order. Since your deck will tend to be small, you can play the odds a little.

The app is good with a few issues. One is that the hard AI player is just too good, because it’s using obsolete, archaic, and sometimes questionable words (I’ve seen a proper noun or two slip by). There are also many things in the game that should have an undo option – for example, if you buy one ink, then realize you’d rather buy a card, there’s no way to back up in that phase – but I can’t see an undo option for anything. Some actions shouldn’t have it, but some clearly can because revoking them doesn’t affect the game state or subsequent options. Also, once you hit Submit, if the word is invalid the app won’t accept it, but if it is valid, you’re stuck with it, so there is no testing to see if a word is valid or not, even against the AI.

I have beaten the hard AI players a few times, but generally lose while they play words I’ve never seen before. I don’t mind as much, however, since you barely know the other players are there until the final scoring – there is just one quirky ability, called Timeless cards, that lets you interfere a little with other players’ strategies, and it’s very small – so I’ve found it’s easier to think of it as a solo challenge where I’m just trying to build the best deck I can by anagramming the best words and making good buys. I’m at least intrigued enough by the app to check out the physical game at some point now.