Earlier this month, Level 99 Games launched a Gamefound campaign for Bullet Galaxy, two new expansions to their Bullet game series, and the campaign includes tiers to get the base game, the expansion content, or even an all-in with everything included. I’ve mentioned some of the earlier Bullet campaigns in my crowdfunding roundups in the past, but I’ve never done a full review, mostly because it’s a game that I backed myself but had not received a review copy. In fact, I’d pretty much bought myself every set (two base sets, three expansion kits, and the deluxe wooden tokens) prior to 2025. Last year, Level 99 ran a campaign for Bullet Cubed, a much-needed all-in-one storage box, along with two more expansions, and this time they sent me a review copy! Since the current campaign is already live and time is short, I’ll give you a brief overview of how the Bullet games work, and then dive into the fancy box.
Bullet is kind of a mix between a falling-blocks puzzle and a bullet-storm videogame, featuring manga-style heroines (and now also some cats), each with their own unique abilities and stories. It can be played competitively or cooperatively (each character also has a boss version that you can battle together), and has some real-time aspects to it.
There are a ton of characters now (each base set comes with 8 characters, and the expansions add 4 more). The character has a large portrait mat that often has special rules or abilities (Marc, seen above, is one of the simpler ones and does not have extra rules associated with her). They also have a unique action mat (placed to the right), with an energy tracker, several actions, and space for more actions. Finally, there’s a deck of pattern cards that are unique to that character.
Each player has a “sight” mat (placed in the center), a grid of circles where bullets (round tokens) are placed: each one goes into the column matching its color, and travels down a number of spaces based on the value of the bullet, skipping over occupied spaces. Everyone has a bag of bullets, and you have to play all of the bullets in your bag before you can complete the round.
If a bullet travels to the bottom row of your sight, then you’ve been hit! The bullet slides to the left, covering up one of the hearts on your character mat, and if you lose all your hearts, then you’ve been eliminated. Game over!
So how do you survive all these bullets that are flying at you?
Everyone has a set of actions that let them manipulate bullets (and some other effects). You start with full energy each round, and then you can spend energy to move bullets around, draw more pattern cards, and more. For instance, Marc can spend an energy to move a bullet to any space—a pretty powerful action! Each round, you’ll also gain additional action tiles—these don’t cost energy to use, but are discarded after use.
But just moving bullets around isn’t going to save you—eventually you’ll get overwhelmed! That’s where the patterns come in. If you can arrange your bullets to match one of your pattern cards, then you can remove bullets in the spaces with the starburst icon. In the photo above, the three bullets in a row form the required pattern, and then the three spaces marked with the starburst are cleared (whether they had bullets or not). Cleared bullets are placed in front of the next player, where they’ll be added to their bag on the next round!
Patterns have various requirements, but the other trick is that they’re discarded after you use them, so you’re constantly making different patterns. You’ll get to draw some more at the start of the next round, but otherwise you typically have to spend energy to draw more patterns if you’ve used them all up.
Between rounds, your energy resets, but any remaining bullets in your sight stay there. Then, you add all the bullets that were passed to you by your neighbor, plus you have to add a handful of bullets from the supply. The amount that you add from the supply increases every round, so the pressure builds up until eventually everyone starts getting overwhelmed. The last player standing wins.
(In the cooperative mode, bullets that you clear attack the boss instead, but the boss also has a deck of patterns that everyone has to match in order to avoid negative consequences.)
It’s a really great puzzly game, figuring out how to manipulate bullets into your patterns so you can stay alive, and it has that Tetris-like feeling where the game is just going to keep accelerating until you can’t keep up … so you just need to outlast your opponents!
With two base sets and a pile of small-box expansions, plus the wooden tokens, there hadn’t been an easy storage solution for everything. I did manage for a while to get everything into the two base game boxes, but it was a really tight fit, and that was before the two new expansions from last year.
The Bullet Cubed box is incredibly fancy: it has two wings that open up, and then a cover flap that lifts up, revealing two layers of storage. It’s definitely what the kids (used to?) call “extra”—undeniably cool, like the gull-wing doors of a DeLorean, but not necessarily the most practical. While the box is open, it’s taking up twice as much table space … and you’re going to need all the table space you can get for the game itself!
The top layer includes a token tray with a lid that will hold all of your action tiles, the energy tokens, as well as the various other bonus tokens that some of the characters use for their special abilities.
The sight mats go on top of the token tray, and the character mats (and action mats) fit into the other half of the large upper tray. Each of the characters also has a long single sheet bio that is mostly flavor text, though it does include the difficulty level and play style. These are stacked underneath the character mats. (Si Yu Xiao, seen in this photo, is a character who comes with the storage box—her name is also seen on the box front.) There’s no really easy way to flip through these, so eventually I may need to alphabetize them so that there’s some sort of order.
Below the top tray are two long narrow boxes (with magnetic flaps) that hold all of the pattern cards, and a channel in the center that holds all of the bullet tokens and the cloth bags.
Finally, here’s a look at the card storage: Bullet Cubed includes dividers for every character up through the 2025 expansions. (Presumably future expansions will include their own dividers). The dividers are actually a thick plastic, not just taller cards, so they’re very sturdy. They’re also marked with an icon based on which set the character came from, in case you want to sort them that way. (Mine are all alphabetized.)
One thing I noticed was that all of the cards fit into just one of the long boxes, which means there’s room for twice as many cards … but definitely not twice as many character mats in the upper storage, which is nearly full. My guess is that this is extra room for sleeved cards. There’s room for a few more character mats, but I don’t know how many more characters they’re planning to make before you’d need to get another storage box!
The top flap has handy storage diagrams when open, so you can figure out where everything goes, though it is actually pretty intuitive.
So, there you have it! A slick storage solution for a fantastic puzzle game.
If you’re interested in Bullet, whether you just want to try out the base game or you want to splurge on the completionist set, check out the Gamefound campaign!
Disclosure: I received a copy of the Bullet Cubed storage box, as well as the Bullet: Orange+ and Bullet: Fan expansions for review purposes.
