Experience two fantastical centuries of expansions and combat in Paper Tales. Remodel your assorted assembly of characters, units, and buildings in each period based on your developments and the age of your heroes. Write a new legend of the rightful ruler who brought unity to the rival kingdoms.
In more detail, Paper Tales is a simultaneous drafting card game. Each turn, players draft five units that they then recruit into their kingdom — assuming that they can pay. These choices determine the players ability to shine in battle, generate great income, construct dominant buildings, and earn legend points. There are only four hiring positions available during the four rounds of the play, but your units grow older with each turn until time takes them away.
Build a comprehensive strategy and adapt the shape of your realm according to opportunities and restrictions and you will make history!
- Elegant design with intuitive flow
- Beautiful components and artwork
- Tight 30-minute gameplay with depth
- Excellent drafting mechanic and engine-building feel
- Fits well as a filler game with high replayability
- Might be a touch short; would like a couple more turns
- Fully simultaneous gameplay might reduce turn-based sense for some players
- Kingdom building with legend points; aging and death of characters
- A mythical medieval kingdom with historical figures and creatures; evolving history as you play
- engine-driven with evolving history
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Aging and death — Characters age and may be discarded when they have age tokens, reducing your engine over time.
- card drafting — Draft a hand of five cards by selecting one and passing to the neighbor; repeat until five cards drafted.
- Resource management and building — Spend resources produced to construct or upgrade buildings; some cards provide monetary income or ongoing abilities.
- Simultaneous play / resolution phases — All players participate in each phase concurrently; six phases total with resolution after drafting.
- War scoring — Compare the top-row strength with neighbors; gain three points per equal or greater total.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- I love this game I think it's a really good game it's really elegantly designed
- the whole package I mean the artwork and graphic design are great I love that stuff
- it's very intuitive gameplay and the iconography is not hard to figure out
- this is essentially a filler game
- my definition for a filler game there's two things to criteria and has to be under 30 minutes and it has to be super easy to teach
- this is one of my go-to filler games right now