Bullet💙

Bullet💙 is a sci-fi shoot-em-up inspired, it seems, by video games as much as movies. Somewhere in the future we are superpowered heroines, defending Earth against an unnamed threat from space. But also we’re fighting each other, because why not? Fans of shoot-em-ups like shooting. Although here your main focus is actually on defending yourself, by deflecting those bullets away – and towards your neighbour!

Each player makes up their own play area of three elements: their heroine board, sight board, and action board. Everyone deals themselves three Pattern cards from their heroine’s bespoke deck, and loads their own bag with ten random bullets from a shared bag – known as the center. Then play begins. Officially, each round lasts three minutes but we’d suggest playing with no timer until you’re into the swing of things. During a round you move the bullets from your bag onto your sight board. Each bullet has a colour – which determines the column it enters – and a number, which tells you how many empty places you count down that column before adding the bullet. Essentially, you’re playing the game in super-slo-motion, and these bullets are hurtling towards you at faster than the speed of sound, and only your amazing heroine super-powers can save you: if any bullet reaches the bottom of the column, you immediately slide it onto your heroine board, meaning you’ve lost a life.

So how do your super-powers manifest? They’re in two things: the Pattern cards, which can remove bullets; and the actions on your action board, which help you assemble the incoming bullets into the patterns you need. At any time you can cease adding bullets to utilise either. Your actions cost you action power – also tracked on your action board – but can be used as many times as you want. If you choose to play a Pattern card, it allows you to eject bullets if and when you meet the pattern requirement on it. An example: a pattern card demands a green bullet with any two bullets either side of it in the same row. When you get them into the matching pattern on your sight board, you can destroy any bullets directly beneath them. So basically the patterns are tiny, overlapping puzzles, where you’re struggling to control both them and your destiny. The crucial thing is that the bullets you manage to remove this way are added to your left-hand neighbour’s bag before the next round!

Finally, in each round every player gets a power-up for use in the next round, added to your action board. These are little one-use-only things that can be semi-helpful, or occasionally critical. You don’t have any when the game starts, but the order players finish the round in determine who chooses first.

Assuming you’ve graduated to the three-minutes-per-round timer, when the time is up you must still draw all the bullets from your bag – but you can no longer use actions or play patterns. Then everyone gets their neighbours bullets, plus some more from the center – it starts at four each, but escalates during the game – and draw back up to maximum pattern cards and maximum action power before a new round starts. The last heroine standing wins!

There is also a solo variant and a Boss Monster variant!