Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6314116/bullet

Designer: Joshua Van Laningham
Publisher: Level 99 Games
Artists: Collateral Damage Studios, Sebastian Koziner, Usanekorin, Davy Wagnarok

I’m not going to lie, I was a little disappointed in this game. In the early weeks of my solo gaming research, I came across this game and many people raved about it, especially for solo plays. The idea of “shoot-em-up puzzle action” seems awesome, and I knew at the time (and honestly still), we didn’t have any games like it. So, seeing it for a decent price, I went for it.

Essentially, in Bullet Star, you are pulling tokens that represent bullets out of a bag and placing them on your board. Each bullet has a color and a number, so you just place it in the respective location. While placing the bullets (even though there’s no strategy in placement), you are working to complete patterns on cards you have in front of you. Each round you get three pattern cards to complete (sometimes more but that’s usually a specific ability). To complete the patterns, you can use “action points” to move bullets around in different ways, switch the locations of bullets, etc. Once you have achieved a pattern, there are symbols on the pattern that indicate which of the bullets in that pattern you can eliminate and remove from your board (they basically explode). If one of the bullets you remove is a star bullet (ha ha), you get to also remove one adjacent bullet.

The reason why removing bullets is so important: if you draw a bullet from your bag and there isn’t space on your board to place it, you get damaged. Each character has their own HP and/or specific rules for damage, but obviously it’s bad and eventually leads to losing the game.

I do also appreciate the different heroines you can play as. They’re asymmetric and they all have unique abilities, character-driven pattern cards, and varying degrees of complexity. Also, there are multiple different bosses you can battle, again all unique, so you can tell a lot of work went into developing the characters, their story, and their associated strengths and weaknesses and how those are expressed in the game.

A couple of high points for me in this game: there is high replayability with the different heroines (assuming you like the game), there are different modes of game play which also add variety, and I have to say, the boss mode was much more enjoyable for me. In a multiplayer game, when you remove bullets from your board, you actually place them in front of your neighbor, so they have to add them to their bag the next round, which I think is a clever mechanic. In the solo mode, that doesn’t shine through because you end up placing them back in your own bag at the start of the next round. Thankfully, the bosses help some with this because they act as the other player, but in the standard game, you cycle through the same bullets.

A couple of low points for me in this game: the rulebook is terrible (personally, I was so lost the first game, it took forever), much of the game is very luck dependent in terms of which bullets you have in your bag and which get drawn at what time, and the game itself is very abstract. I love bag builders, but unfortunately, there’s no strategy to the bag building on this one except maybe trying to be clever with which bullets you pass to your neighbor, but what’s in your bag is 100% based on luck.

This one could be a positive or negative, so I’ll put it as its own entity: there’s also a real-time aspect to the game that I never played with. Truthfully, that sounds exceptionally stressful to me, and it’s not like the rounds take very long anyways, but I suppose it adds a little to the thematic integration and excitement.

Overall, this game has some high points (I certainly didn’t hate it), but it’s not for me. I thought that maybe I didn’t enjoy it as much the first time I played since I was learning, but I had the same feelings on subsequent plays. It just didn’t resonate with me, but I can see why people would enjoy it. Maybe if I tried it multiplayer I’d feel differently, but it’s hard to convince myself to teach it to someone when there are other games I’d rather play. This one relies too heavily on luck and has too little strategy to keep me engaged and wanting more, but I appreciate its uniqueness nonetheless!