I’m about to step in it but have a confession to make: I have a deep, unwavering intolerance for anime. There. I said it. But if anything can break down even the strongest of barriers, it’s a hyped-up board game. Bullet Star has simply blasted its way into my heart. Maybe it’s the clever mechanics. Maybe it’s the sheer dopamine rush of dodging a million bullets. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve played so much that I’m one One Piece episode away from a full-blown anime redemption arc. I need help. Or more expansions.
At its core, Bullet Star is an efficiency puzzle wrapped in a bullet-hell fever dream. You pull bullets from a bag, drop them onto your board in a specific way, and scramble to arrange them (using super powers) into patterns before getting overwhelmed. It’s like Tetris meets… speed chess, maybe? Except with more anime poses and significantly more panic.
Each heroine has a unique power set, and this is largely the charm of the game. They force you to take significantly different approaches in your puzzle solving. These powers are tied to their themes, and they’re cleverly designed.
For example, one of the less complex characters is a photographer, and her patterns revolve around capturing the perfect shot, requiring precise bullet and empty space placement. Naturally, her special ability lets her rotate patterns however she wants unlike other characters who have to match them exactly. Simple, thematic, and fun.
The characters all lean into various tropes- there’s the motivated news anchor, the bookish intellectual, even the content creator (which, frankly, hits a little too close to home). They’re all *cutesy* but, importantly, not built like physics-defying anime fan service models. No improbable anatomy lessons…just solid character design that makes sense. Normally, I find tropes uninspired (groundbreaking opinion, I know), but here, they work. Each character’s abilities tie meaningfully into their theme, adding both depth (in the way their powers riff on the base rules) and replayability.
So is it balanced? Well…kind of? Balance in Bullet Star is a weird question. Some heroines are definitely stronger than others, but their effectiveness varies based on player count and game mode (and skill of course…). There’s a really interesting spreadsheet with stats from almost 100K Tabletop Sim games played.
As an example, Nawa has a 32% win rate at two players but a 14% win rate at four players. This held up as generally true for us in our comparatively miniscule sample size. LXVI-Memory, on the other hand, has the highest win rate at 2P, and this held up for us as well. LXVI-Memory seems to be the strongest from Bullet Star, and one of the strongest characters in general. In fact, the only win rate to beat hers in all of the Bullet universe is Zuri Kasango from Bullet Palette.
But honestly, it never felt unbalanced. The game constantly mixes things up, and the luck factor- like which bullets you pull and some of those passed to you- keeps any character from feeling completely overpowered. Unlike asymmetric games like Root, Bullet Star doesn’t need tight balance to stay fun.
Bullet requires strategy but not at a particularly high level. This makes it extremely approachable, and easy to get a number of fast games in without melting your brain. The teach is less than 5 minutes and the game itself is challenging but not overwhelming. Some may opt out of the “real-time” 3 minute timer option, but I personally loved this. I felt it added to the theme and kept the game closer to the “bullet-hell” feel as opposed to an efficiency puzzle.
At its best, this game is a high-speed dance of precision and adaptation and a reminder that, as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “You can’t dodge the same bullet twice.” Or maybe that was Neo…?
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: the anime aesthetic. I didn’t think Bullet Star had a chance with me. Big sparkly-eyed protagonists? Over-the-top battle sequences? Hard pass.
But the hype made me look and they were right: none of that matters. The gameplay is so exciting, so clever, and so addictive that I’d play this game if it were about competitive tax filing. The fact that it’s wrapped in a bullet-dodging, pattern-matching package is just icing on the cake.
I’m fully certain that if Level 99 wanted to turn this into a TV series, they would be successful. The world is fun, the characters are distinct, and it lands a little better for me than something like the Kemushi Saga with Devir.
So, I guess the best way to describe my experience is that I grinned like an idiot the entire time- barely scraping through rounds, desperately clearing bullets, and just managing to dump enough bullets onto my opponent’s board to ruin their day. There’s something intoxicating about how Bullet Star forces you to think at high speed, turning disaster into victory through sheer pattern recognition and split-second decisions. You’re puzzle-solving on a shot clock, and it always gives me the drive to clear “just one more pattern”.
More importantly, it proves that a game doesn’t need to match your aesthetic preferences to be downright brilliant. The mechanics are smooth and the gameplay is thrilling, so I’ll happily ignore the fact that I’m essentially playing out an anime battle sequence.
So, no…I haven’t suddenly become an anime fan. But have I played Bullet Star an embarrassing number of times, embraced its madness, and started wondering how many expansions my shelf can handle? Absolutely.
Because when a game is this good, even my deepest biases don’t stand a chance.
Andy