What do you get when a word game and a deck builder fall in love? You get Paperback, a strangely irresistible little engine where the letters themselves are the cards.

Here’s the clever conceit: you’re a struggling pulp novelist, and your “deck” is a hand of letter cards. Each turn you spell a word from your hand, and the better the word, the more fame you earn, which you immediately spend to buy snazzier letters from a shared offer. And those premium letters aren’t just rarer consonants; they come loaded with special powers, like wilds and bonuses that fire off when you use them. Spell, earn, buy a better alphabet, repeat, your vocabulary and your deck level up together.

What I love is how it scratches two completely different itches at once. The word game half rewards the part of your brain that loves a clever play, while the deck building half rewards the part that loves a humming engine. And because you’re literally upgrading your letters, that classic deck builder headache, drowning in starter junk, becomes its own little puzzle: do you chase the flashy power card, or just buy more wilds so your hand stops betraying you with five vowels?

It’s accessible, it’s a touch brainy, and it makes you feel clever in two directions at the same time. For anyone who loves words and loves watching a deck slowly become a machine, it’s a genuine delight.

Are you a spell the fancy word purist or a buy all the wilds pragmatist? Tell me below, my hand is, as ever, somehow entirely vowels.