Base price: $40.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of Bullet
was provided by Asmodee US.
Just going to start off by saving that game title to the clipboard; very excited to not have to type that again. There are a few games that I just have … little to no idea how I’m actually supposed to type the actual title. It’s an ongoing issue since, as a US American, I have absolutely no idea where the accent marks are on my keyboard, for instance, and as someone who uses Chrome OS / Linux / Windows / Mac on the regular, I have no consistent understanding of how to open the emoji keyboard, either. I assume I just right-click something, but it’s an example of that XKCD automation comic where learning how to do it would take longer than the amount of time I’d save over just finding it every time. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a system that works. I digress; let’s just talk about the game.
In Bullet, the heroines are back for some high-intensity puzzle chaos! The Bullet series is largely defined by this, as players are tasked with choosing from eight heroines and then sending, receiving, and clearing bullet tokens from their Sight (their player board). As they do, they pass the bullets on to the next person, like a little gift. Unfortunately, it’s a gift that nobody wants, as each round also adds more bullets that need to be cleared to your bag. The more bullets, the more chaos, and the more chaos, the greater chance that you’ll go out in a blaze of glory! The only way to clear bullets is to get them into specific patterns, noted on the Pattern cards in your hand. Each heroine has different abilities, different Patterns, and different strengths and weaknesses. For players looking for different challenges, there are also team-based modes and a Score Attack solo mode! Will you be able to weather this storm?
Contents
Player Count Differences
The nice thing about Bullet is that, like its predecessor, there’s no real major increase in complexity as you add more players. The only major thing that changes is that more Power-Up tokens are in play for you to choose from if you finish first, and even that’s not a huge difference. You’re pretty much only ever interacting with the player to your left (giving them your Cleared bullets) and the player to your right (receiving their Cleared bullets). You can, at four players, at least heckle the player across from you, but that’s not really any major strategic difference; you can do that to anyone. Two has a nice rhythm since you’re giving and taking from the same player, but at higher player counts you lose a bit of the ability to track what bullets are popping up the most for players. Could you use that to optimize at lower player counts? Sure, but that’s a pretty advanced move. I’d respect it. No major preference, though! There’s just slightly more general chaos with more players. For other player count options, you can team up against a boss character, or you can tackle the game solo if you’re one of those solo game fans.
Strategy
- Three bullets in one column is the danger zone! Three bullets in a column means that if you draw a 4 bullet, you’re taking damage. Again, you know your risk tolerance, but I generally start to look for ways to clear parts of my Sight when I hit that point. Now, if you know there aren’t any 4s in your Current, that’s a different story, but good luck with that.
- Use as much of your AP as you can each round. Notably, I’m phrasing it this way because one character loses if their AP ever hits 0, so there’s some differences in the strategy there, but otherwise you should be clearing your AP each round because it resets to maximum at the end! That means you can just kind of keep looping on using as much of it as you want. Go crazy.
- Optimizing is key. You should be using your Pattern Card to the fullest to clear out bullets from your Sight; if you absolutely can’t make it work, clear what you can, but you shouldn’t be making a habit of only partially clearing with your Patterns (meaning clearing fewer than the maximum allowed by your card). The more you clear, the cleaner your board gets and the more you dump on your opponent.
- If you’re playing with a timer, you need to optimize even faster. Remember that if time runs out your remaining bullets just get dumped onto your board with no ability to modify or control that (or even clear any). If that’s the case, you don’t really have time to perfectly optimize (unless you’re really quick); focus on doing the best you can with what you have.
- Your character’s power should inform your strategy. This is, again, almost always generally true, but I try to mention it specifically when character powers are a big enough deal that it matters. For instance, one character doesn’t pass cleared bullets; instead, they draw bullets from the center bag equal to the highest-numbered bullet they cleared and pass those instead. This means you should be focusing on making sure you clear one high-numbered bullet per Pattern, if you can, saving other ones for other Patterns. Another character doesn’t have life, only AP, so as I implied earlier, you can’t clear your AP with her; you need to kind of constantly stay around 3 so that you can weather one hit (every time you’d lose life you lose 2 AP, instead). It’s not just knowing your character; it’s making sure you can filter a general strategy through their specific power set.
- Try to clear high-numbered bullets, if you can; that usually puts the hurt on your opponents. High-numbered bullets get placed farther down your Sight (player board), but they skip already-placed bullets. This means that if you’ve already got some stuff there, you’re taking hits. Passing over high-numbered bullets is a good way to catch your opponent off guard.
- Don’t just draw all your bullets at once! Be strategic about when you start maneuvering. This is the real temptation for some players and it’s almost always a bad idea. You don’t have to draw all your bullets at once; you can place a few, clear or move around a few, and then draw some more from your Current. If you place them all, you run the risk of taking a lot of damage that you can’t tank, and even though more bullets gives you a better chance of clearing Patterns, you don’t necessarily know what’s in the bag before you draw it! How you balance that risk and reward, though, is going to come down to your preferences.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Honestly, this reminds me of Tetris Attack (Panel de Pon for all y’all) in some of the best ways, and I love that. It’s specifically that clearing from your board dumps on other players; it’s got a bit of the same energy as Tetris 99, though you can’t target specific people in this one beyond the player next to you. I always like puzzles with a bit of a mean streak to them, and this one’s got it!
- The color choices and the general aesthetic of the game really gives “neon space catastrophe” and that’s also very fun. It’s very vibrant, and the artist really understood what they were going for. The game looks great and the world feels like it has something going on outside of the game. That’s generally what Level 99 goes for (Millennium Blades, Professor Treasure’s Secret Sky Castle, … things like that), but it’s nice every time you get to experience it in a game.
- I appreciate that you can play without the timer if you want a strategic puzzle experience, though with the timer is frenetic and terrifying. It’s nice to offer both options, though if you play with folks who take longer to make spatial decisions, they’re going to vastly prefer the timerless version. Three minutes is not a lot of time, you’ll find!
- Lots of different ways to play! The character powers really offer different experiences within the mold of the core game, but with fun differentiation. It’s a wildly different game depending on who you play with. Granted, we’re not talking like, flipping the basic premise on its head, but given the changes in Patterns and abilities and even AP-level stuff, you’re going to have to play a little differently every time. I’d love to see some serious Millennium Blades-tier gamebreakers, though.
- Having the intensity increase not just each round but also with player elimination is very fun. It works with one of the best rules of board gaming I’ve ever read, which is that a game should speed up as players are eliminated so that they don’t have to sit out long. I don’t like player elimination, but I think them getting to watch as their loss causes other players to get catastrophied is at least a fun consolation prize.
- I like the additional modes as ways to learn a new character. It’s nice to not have to always learn a new character in a competitive environment, though I can imagine it’s a bit of a bummer if you pick up a new character, don’t understand how to use them, and then immediately lose in the team-up mode. Maybe just use Score Attack for learning.
Mehs
- A number of the art pieces are … pretty flimsy. It’s mostly stuff that gives some strategy advice and information about the characters. While, granted, anime-style isn’t my absolute favorite aesthetic, I still think the art is fun and thematic and I don’t want something bad to happen to it! It just barely doesn’t fit in the insert on the bottom, so it kind of has to go on top of everything and I’m worried it’ll get bent. It’s a bit of a bummer.
Cons
- I think calling the player bag “the Current” is more trouble than it’s worth. It helps with the game’s immersion, granted, but I’ve played a few games of this where a player thought their “Current” was actually their “Sight” (bag / player board) and that led to some confusion and some rules errors. There’s generally a tradeoff of immersion vs. clarity for “using words that are in-universe rather than commonly-accepted board game words” (you see this most commonly with points being named Honor or Merit or … whatever) and I think here it’s a bit of a miss in terms of overall comprehensibility. Not a huge deal, just make sure to clarify to players that their bag is the Current, not their player board.
Overall: 9 / 10
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed the Bullet series, and Bullet is no exception! While it can definitely be a challenging game to master, the core mechanics of setting up tokens so that you can make patterns to clear is already fun, made even more so when you get to dump your cleared tokens onto your opponent for an additional bit of chaos. There’s a lot of fun opportunities for cross-chatter and a bit of heckling, and once you add in the timer the game goes up a tier in intensity! Maybe less chatter since everyone’s frantically trying to clear their boards so that they don’t get wiped out, but what can you do? I particularly like how well Level 99, as a brand, has been able to create not just games but worlds in which their games exist, and that’s evident across their line, especially in the Bullet series. I’m sometimes surprised they haven’t made a YouTube series or a show or something about their games, yet; they’d certainly lend themselves well to that kind of expansive storytelling. But anyways. I’m a spatial puzzle fan by nature, so having more of those is never bad, but I think you’re unlikely to find a game that plays quite like the Bullet series somewhere else. It’s got interactivity, chaos, and its own identity, and it’s fast. (It also has its own soundtrack, but I haven’t gotten a chance to break that out just yet.) If that sounds up your alley, I think you’ll like Bullet a lot! I certainly enjoyed it.
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