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Almost six years ago, towards the end of 2010, I started work on a deck-building spelling game that would eventually be called Dexikon. The goal was to create a game that helped usher my Scrabble-playing in-laws into the fold of wonderful modern games, and early in development it was clear that there was definitely something to the idea. After a lot of iteration, Dexikon was published in 2015 by Eagle-Gryphon Games.
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The game is a bit like Ascension, but all the cards are letters and you have to use your cards to spell words. You start with a deck of low-value letter cards that are easy to use, and using them to spell words generates points that you use to buy higher-value (and harder-to-use) letter cards and/or victory points. At the end of the game, you get to use all your cards to spell one massive "last word".
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Yep. Unfortunately for me, I was not the only person to have this idea, and my slow-and-not-particularly-steady development cycle meant that Dexikon would not be the first deck-building word game to hit the market. That honor would be taken in mid-2013 by Tim Fowers' Paperback, which has achieved widespread recognition as a well-designed and wonderful game.
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With apologies to Paige Turner because you never did anything to deserve getting an "art" treatment from me.
I put Dexikon on the back burner when Paperback was announced on Kickstarter, but after I'd had a chance to buy and play a copy of Paperback post-launch, I decided that there was enough to set the two games apart that it was worth pushing on with Dexikon. The most critical differences boil down to two things...
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In Paperback, you get a handful of vowels in your starting deck, then any vowel cards gained through play are either short-lived (trash upon use) or hotly contested (claiming the common vowels). You also have access to the common vowel card, a card that you can add to your word even though it's not part of your hand.
[2] In both Paperback and Dexikon, players spell a word each turn to earn currency, which can then be used on that turn. In Dexikon, players must choose to either spend their currency on buying new cards or bank their word and get just half the currency to spend on new cards. The game ends once any player has banked seven words, at which point final victory points are scored from several sources:
• The values of their best five banked words.
• -2 points for each penalty (wild) card in their deck.
• Each N or P card in their deck (1 and 2 points respectively).
• The value of one final word, using as many cards from the player's deck as they like.
Paperback uses four tiers of Dominion-style (and beautifully illustrated!) victory point cards, which are also wild when used in words. At the end of the game, players' final scores are the total value of the victory point cards in their decks.
The different approaches to vowels and wild cards mean that the sort of words you can spell changes over the course of the game in different ways. Both games have an initial period of moving toward more valuable hands that make it harder to form words, but then Dexikon's late-game is characterized by a push to get rid of penalty cards, whereas Paperback's late game is all about acquiring lots of VP cards. The trick in Dexikon is navigating the late-game while making sure your deck doesn't run so low on core cards that you lose the ability to spell words, and in Paperback the trick is making sure that the influx of VP cards doesn't leave you in a position of being easily able to use all your cards but unable to score enough to buy new VP cards.
There are other, less fundamental differences, such as the way the pool of available cards works, the spread of abilities, and the treatment of attack cards. These all contribute to a generally different feel and flow of the game, but the two key differences are what really set the two games apart in terms of mechanical strategy.
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Dexikon was Kickstarted by Eagle-Gryphon Games in early 2015 and delivered a few months later. Reviews were generally positive and very naturally focused on comparisons with Paperback. GeekDad (review) and Tom Vasel (review) both preferred Paperback.
Jonathan Liu on GeekDad felt that Paperback has the advantage on ease of play and teaching, and that Dexikon's decision between banking and spending has the potential to be tough and less intuitive than Paperback's decision between regular letters and VP cards.
Tom preferred the look of Paperback, agrees that it's an easier game to teach to new players, and felt that where Dexikon gives an advantage to players with larger vocabularies, Paperback gave the advantage to the player best at deck-building. He also felt that Paperback plays faster.
Craig from Botch Games preferred Dexikon (review). He really liked the choice between banking and spending, and the dilemma of when/if to purge penalty cards. He was surprised by how much he enjoyed the game and described it as one of the most cut-throat deck-builders he'd played. He felt that the use of the score pad for banking (and blocking other players from spelling words) was "the bee's knees" and found it hilarious that you're guaranteed to be able to spell "outset" on your first turn. He thought that Paperback was closer to Dominion, and Dexikon was closer to Ascension.
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The "last word" mechanism was a selling point for Eagle-Gryphon when I pitched the game to them, and I've found it's been generally popular with players. The idea that a solid last word strategy can compensate for weaker turn-by-turn banking is appealing, and I've enjoyed seeing games swung by last words.
In Dexikon (without the alternate attack expansion cards), the hand you draw at the end of your turn cannot be interfered with by other players, so you can start planning your next word immediately. This helps keep the AP down somewhat.
Once you've got the hang of using the multi-letter cards, you can usually find a way to use all your cards each turn, which feels epic (but more on this in the next section).
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In Dexikon, you can always use all your cards on your first turn. Being put at a disadvantage before you've made a single decision in a game is one of my pet peeves, so I wanted to make sure that every opening hand could be completely used, even if you happen to draw all of your non-penalty cards (two each of AT, ES and IOU). By sheer, glorious coincidence, one of two words that you're guaranteed to be able to spell at the outset of the game is, in fact, "outset".
Players generally seem to enjoy the choice to spend or bank. Learning when to switch from deck-building to scoring is not immediately intuitive because of the way that your deck continues to grow (albeit with lower-cost cards) even on turns when you bank. In the end, it comes down to a combination of reading what other players are doing, being aware of what your deck already contains, and (ideally) having a vague idea of which letters you still need to collect to maximize your last word.
There are a couple of minor cosmetic things that give Dexikon a bit of an edge over Paperback: the corner letters on both left and right makes it friendlier for left-handed players, its single deck of pool cards makes it marginally quicker to set up, and the smaller box makes it a bit more portable. That said, it's important to note that few if any people were calling these things out as aspects of Paperback that needed fixing, and Paperback's larger box is stuffed full of extra content and game modes!
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The name should have a C, not a K — what was I thinking?! The choice to go with K was a stylistic conceit that has not resonated with players. I think I've seen more reviews/comments about "Dexicon" than "Dexikon"! In contrast, Paperback has a catchy name that is nigh-impossible to misspell!
Dexikon is themeless. The art brief I wrote was to create something with the same theme-neutrality of Scrabble while also evoking a feeling of expensive, leather-bound Victorian tomes. As far as I'm concerned, Simon Brewer (Dexikon's artist) absolutely nailed the brief. Paperback has a light theme that mostly comes through in the pulp novel art on the VP cards, and for all that people might argue that the theme is not intrinsic or necessary, Ryan Goldsberry's art is often called out as one of the satisfying parts of the Paperback experience. I think that the theme makes Paperback feel friendlier, whereas Dexikon comes across as more calculating and potentially cold. Just to be clear, that's on me as the author of the brief; I have nothing but gratitude and awe for how well Simon delivered what I asked for.
Dexikon's multi-letter cards may offer flexibility, but they do so at the cost of familiarity. Wild letters are a concept with which any Scrabble player will be familiar, so there's no real cognitive cost to learning a game that includes them. Scrabble also features the core gameplay of "arrange these letters to form a word", but it's initially difficult to learn to do that with multi-letter cards. In my experience, most people pick it up within a few games, but until they've done so, it can be a stressful experience. In contrast, Paperback builds upon the Scrabble experience without forcing any fundamental changes in thinking, so it's much quicker to get players up and running, and enjoying the card effects and deck-building.
Dexikon gives a bonus point to a player who manages to empty their hand when spelling a word, which helps players feel like they've "solved" a hand and makes them feel good — but it also creates an expectation of using the whole hand, leading to stress, AP, and disappointment when a player winds up with a hand that is hard (or impossible) to fully use. Paperback doesn't offer this bonus point, and since the starting decks are not guaranteed to spell a word with every card in your initial hand, it never fosters the impression that using anything less than your full hand is a failure.
Dexikon's scoresheet mechanism and spend/bank choice are compelling, but they're a big departure from the Dominion style of buying point cards, and that's another cognitive cost to learning the game. It means that the game can potentially go on too long if none of the players have a good read on when to start banking. Paperback uses a scoring system that builds on the Dominion experience in the same way that its spelling builds on the Scrabble experience, and Tim Fowers really nailed the balance between Scrabble, Dominion and SomethingNewAndExciting.
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Honestly? Not much except that accursed K in the name. Getting my A into G a little earlier and being first to market would have been great, but the time on the back burner after Paperback's announcement actually resulted in a lot of positive changes, so I would have been first to market with a much weaker game. As it is, I really like the way that Dexikon works differently from Paperback. I like the way that both games gently recalibrate the way that you think about language as you learn to play better, and I think it's neat that the recalibrations are subtly different. (Dexikon works best if you weigh the short-word potential of new letters against their possible inclusion in your eventual "last word", whereas Paperback rewards you for balancing powerful letters with an occasional influx of wild VP cards to make those letters easier to use.)
Early on, I wanted to call the game "Animalexikon" and make each card a picture of an animal that started with that letter (AT would be "American Toad", ES "Elephant Seal", and IOU an ambiguous silhouette called "Ibex Or Unicorn"), but thought it would feel too childish for a hard-ish core spelling game. From the comments on the Kickstarter, a lot of people would have preferred that, but I still think such an approach is better saved for a follow-up title — with no K in the name. My eldest son is five and keen to work with me to make a spelling game for kids, so watch this space…
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Unsurprisingly, I like Dexikon, and I think it does a good job of doing what it was supposed to: Provide an iterative word puzzle that evolves based on what you and your opponents do. Though it's fair to say that it's harder than Paperback to grok the way the game plays, I've had very good feedback from the people who have resonated with Dexikon.
Interestingly enough, since Dexikon was released, I've met a couple of other designers working on deck-building word games, and when I played one of them, I was struck by how slightly different mechanisms can completely change the way the game flows. I think there's still a lot of untapped potential in the world of deck-building word games, and I do hope to see those other designers press on with their versions.
Also, and this is really cool, Tim Fowers invited me to help out with the design for an upcoming Paperback expansion. It's very exciting to get to play in another designer's sandbox and to finally have a potential outlet for all the letter combinatorial gubbins that my brain trained itself to do while working on Dexikon. Turns out that stuff is of limited use in regular life! I can't give any details, except that I am very confident it will be awesome...
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