Paper Tales

24th June 2021

It's a Thursday evening and we're round Simon's for a couple of games.

The first game of the night was Paper Tales.
As the name implies, create the tale of building a kingdom and warring with your neighbours over 4 generations or in Paper Tales' terms - 4 rounds!

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What's in a game?

• Gameboard: Used to track player victory points and turns.
• Building cards: There are 5 sets of 5 identical cards, a set is given to each player and they represent structures that can be built in a player's kingdom. Each building card is also double-sided, with the other side being an upgraded version of the building.
  Buildings can provide resources or other benefits and are also worth victory points.
• Unit cards: These represent characters that a player may recruit into their kingdom and each one has a deployment cost in gold, they may also have a combat value. Unit cards also ​frequently provide resources or possess a special ability.
• Currency tokens: These card tokens are themed to look like gold pieces.
• Age tokens: Used to track age. More on these card tokens below.

The game also has various score and turn tracking counters.
The quality of the game's components is to the usual standard as you would expect, which is fine.
The building and unit cards feature some bright, colourful and stylised artwork which I found quite charming.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player a set of 5 building cards and 3 gold.
• Shuffle the unit cards into a face-down deck.

​That's it for setup, pretty straightforward.

On to play
Paper Tales is played over 4 rounds and there are 6 stages to each round. Other than the drafting in the Recruitment stage, each stage is played simultaneously by players

• Recruitment: 5 unit cards are dealt to all players.
  Then, each player chooses 1 card to keep and passes the remainder to the next player clockwise or anti-clockwise (As determined by the turn.). Each player now chooses a card to keep from 4 cards they just received and passes on the 3 remaining cards.
  This continues until all players have chosen their 5 cards.
• Deployment: Each player now places up to 4 of their 5 cards face-down in a 2x2 grid in front of them. Where they're placed will be very important in the next stage.
  Once this is completed, all players simultaneously reveal their cards and pay their respective deployment costs. Any cards that cannot be bought must be discarded, furthermore any cards above the allowed number must also be discarded.
  Players are additionally allowed to keep 1 card 'in hand', any excess cards must be discarded.
• Wars: Now all the unit cards have been revealed, it's time to war on your neighbours! That's right, in Paper Tales there is.... only war, well sort of.
  Only the 2 cards in the top row of the 2x2 grid can participate in wars, although some cards have the ability fight from the second row. Each player adds up the combat values of all the cards that are participating in wars into a single kingdom value and compares that value to their 2 neighbouring players' kingdom values.
  Players earn 3 victory points for equalling or exceeding the kingdom value of each neighbour; thus a player can earn 0-6 victory points in the wars stage.
  There are no detrimental effects to losing a war.

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• Income: Players earn 2 gold from the supply plus income from units cards in their area and certain buildings, if they've been built.
  There are 4 types of income, food, wood, stone and gold.
• Construction: Players can now use their resources to constructed a single building or upgrade one previously built. There is one exception, if the player can meet the all the costs, they can build and upgrade a building in a single turn.
  It gets increasingly expensive to build more and more buildings.
• Aging: Time and tide wait for no man or in this case no unit card.
  Firstly, any unit cards have an age token on them are removed from play and must be discarded.
  Next, an age token is placed on all remaining unit cards.

​Play progresses to the next round, the only difference between rounds is the alternating direction in which unit cards are drafted during the recruitment stage.
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Endgame
Play continues until 4 rounds have been completed.
​Then players then tally their victory points on the score board with the victory points on their constructed buildings.
Highest score wins.

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Overall
​So, Paper Tales is something of a curious beast.
It feels like a deliberately small scale game that merges a little bit of card drafting, a little engine building and card combo mechanics with a little bit of resource management.

The game broadly presents 2 routes to scoring victory points.
Using unit cards with high combat values in war can theoretically score a player 24 victory points and in a game if this scale, that can be a sizable score.
The other way to generate victory points is from the abilities that unit cards may possess, maximising the usage of those abilities can require careful consideration.
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It's also a somewhat challenging game, not that this is a bad thing. That's because when playing Paper Tales, it never feels like there's enough gold to deploy all the cards you want or enough turns/resources to construct buildings you want. There's 5 buildings to construct and only 4 turns, and that's not including upgrades!
It's worth noting that decisions made in the 1st round may have a significant impact on options and decisions in the final round.
Players are forced to make tricky, meaningful decisions, which is always good.

The aging mechanic is unusual and represents the transitory passage of time and is something players need to watch out for, those unit cards are only around for 2 rounds! However, there are also ways for a player to exploit this mechanic to their benefit with card abilities.
For a game that only gives players 4 or possibly 5 cards to work with, there's quite often a combo that can be created.

Paper Tales has in terms of rounds a quite short playtime, yet somehow feels a little fiddly for a game of this scope and the handful of times we played it, the short playtime made the game feel a little unsatisfactory.
It's all about maximising resources and exploiting card combos, but as I said above, because it's a challenging game, it can be hard to optimise your strategies in early plays, i.e., it has a steep learning curve despite it's apparent simplicity.

That's not to say it's a bad game, because it's not, but it sits towards the heavier end of a what might be considered 'light' or 'filler' game in my opinion, which is considering what I'd consider it to be.
I'd have no reservations about playing it again.
It's worth a look, but I think it needs playing at least a couple times before passing judgement on it.