Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Easier to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
More strategic control
How it plays
How does it play?
Spell words from a personal letter deck, buy stronger cards by genre, and push your luck with ink while racing to complete a literary masterpiece.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Open Drafting
Select cards or items from a shared face-up display.
Push Your Luck
Choose whether to secure current gains or risk them for a larger reward.
Cooperative Game
Players coordinate their actions toward a shared objective and win or lose together.
Delayed Purchase
Commit to a purchase before receiving the item or paying its full cost.
Read the full game description
Hardback is a word-building deck-builder set in a playful nineteenth-century literary world. Each turn, a player arranges letter cards from hand into a word. Letters generate coins, prestige, or genre abilities, and adjacent cards of the same genre can activate increasingly useful combinations. Coins buy new letters from the shared offer, gradually replacing a plain starting vocabulary with wild letters, powerful effects, and a focused strategy. Any card can be played face down as a wild, so the game never depends on possessing an enormous vocabulary, but doing so forfeits that card’s rewards. Ink cubes let a writer draw extra cards and keep pushing, with the danger that an unusable draw can spoil the whole draft. Prestige cards provide valuable one-time purchases and a route to the finish. Players may cooperate against an automated opponent, use individual powers, or compete until one writer reaches sixty prestige. The pleasure is equal parts clever spelling and engine construction: a modest word can be brilliant when every letter earns money, chains a genre power, and sets up the next purchase.
