How to play Paper Novel

Ten cards, and none of them any good

You start with five soft vowels worth a penny each and five blanks worth nothing at all that can be any letter you like. On chapter one you can write almost anything and it earns almost nothing, which is the point: the whole novel is spent trading that flexibility for money.

Five cards a chapter. A line is a word spelled out of them, three letters or more, and the word list has to have heard of it — the same list every word game on this shelf uses. What it earns is the pennies printed on the type you used, plus a penny a letter past the first three.

The best line shops first

Everybody writes at once, and then the queue at the case is ordered by what each line earned. There is one of each card face up in three drawers, so a chapter is never about whether you can afford the Z — it is about whether it is still there when the queue reaches you.

That single rule is what makes the writing matter to somebody who has already counted their money, and it is why this game has no turn order anywhere else in it.

What you buy is for a chapter you have not reached

A card you take goes into your discard, not your hand, so every purchase is a bet on a chapter three or four away. Nothing carries over between chapters: a purse is spent or it is gone, and walking away from the case holding eleven pennies is a real and sometimes correct thing to do.

The two- and three-letter cards are worth more than they look. A TH is paid twice — once for its own value and once for the extra letter it puts in the line — and they are the only way a hand of five cards ever reaches nine letters.

Points come off the type in your deck at the last page: one for common, two for good, four for rare. A point on top for each chapter whose best line was yours, and everybody tied for it takes one.

Questions people ask

Do I need a big vocabulary to be any good at this?

Less than you would think, and that is deliberate. A three-letter line is legal and earns; the blanks in your starting deck mean you are never stuck; and most of the money is in the type rather than in the word, so a player who reliably finds ordinary five-letter words and buys well will beat a player with a wide vocabulary who buys badly. The stand-in that knows the whole word list only just beats the one that stops at common words and shops properly.

What happens if I cannot make a word at all?

You write nothing, earn nothing, and the chapter carries on without you. It is printed on the table as a silence rather than skipped over, and your whole hand goes to the discard and comes back later — so a bad hand is a chapter rather than a disaster. With five blanks in the starting deck it is rare, and it gets rarer if you buy vowels.

Can I save my money for the good drawer?

No, and that is the tension. A purse is one chapter's earnings and it is gone at the end of it, so the only way to reach the bottom drawer is to write a line worth fourteen — which means owning the type that makes one possible, which means having spent earlier chapters on cards that felt too cheap at the time.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Paper Novel?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Paper Novel?

1 to 6 — best with three or four. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Paper Novel take?

About 15 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.