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Verdict: A spice-forward sapphic heist romantasy with a genuinely hostile enemies-to-lovers rivalry and 5/5 heat, undercut by a world nobody finished building and a heist that barely happens.
Best for: Readers who want an explicit, fast, funny assassin-versus-poisoner rivalry and can live with a fantasy kingdom that contains motorcycles and pizza without explaining either.
Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — explicit and plentiful)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.87 Goodreads average, a 3.63 on StoryGraph, and a 10% did-not-finish rate)
Tropes: Enemies-to-lovers, rivals-to-lovers, heist crew, found family, forced proximity, dual POV, morally grey leads, only one bed, secret royal, hate sex turning into feelings.
A Game of Hearts and Heists by Ruby Roe — the pen name of Sacha Black — is the first of four Girl Games books, a self-published sapphic fantasy romance set in New Imperium, a kingdom split in two where sentient houses grant magic and brand their chosen with a tattoo, and where Scarlett Grey, a disgraced assassin, and Quinn Adams, the poisoner who has spent years stealing her clients, are handed one job by the Magician Queen that neither can pull off alone.
It carries a 3.87 average across 10,768 Goodreads ratings, a Podium Audio edition on every major listening platform, and a review section that splits far harder than 3.87 suggests. Amazon shows 4.4 stars with zero percent at one star; StoryGraph has it at 3.63 with a 10% did-not-finish rate. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.
What Is A Game of Hearts and Heists About?
A Game of Hearts and Heists is a fantasy romance first and a fantasy second, and the order matters. New Imperium has guilds, a torn kingdom, a Magician Queen and magic distributed by sentient houses — but it also has motorcycles, pizza and pantsuits, and the book never reconciles the two registers. Readers who come for the furniture of secondary-world fantasy find it sketched rather than built; readers who come for two women trying to kill each other and failing to stop sleeping together get what they were promised.
Scarlett Grey is introduced through loss: stripped of her guild standing, weeks from eviction, watching her last clients get poached. Quinn Adams is introduced through Scarlett’s certainty about her — that she is a parasite who chose to ruin a rival who was already ruined. The book runs on alternating dual first-person POV, which lets you watch both women build the same rivalry out of entirely different materials, and which is also the structural choice several readers say does not land.
What Makes This Sapphic Heist Romantasy Work
- The hostility is real: Scarlett and Quinn were already sleeping together while actively sabotaging each other’s livelihoods, which skips the usual enemies-to-lovers throat-clearing and starts the book mid-feud.
- The heat: Rated 5/5 and labelled “explicit and plentiful” by romance.io, its top band, and readers treat the spice as the headline rather than a bonus.
- The crew: The found-family heist team is the most consistently praised element after the romance, and several reviewers say the supporting cast is why they carried on into book two.
- Pace: StoryGraph readers put it at 40% fast and 53% medium, with only 5% calling it slow. Almost nobody reports a sagging middle, which is rare for a 344-page romantasy.
- A closed couple arc: Scarlett and Quinn get their happily-ever-after inside this book. The series continues, but it continues with different women.
Book Synopsis
Scarlett Grey used to be the assassin other assassins measured themselves against. Now her guild standing is gone, her rent is overdue, and every contract she reaches for has already been taken by Quinn Adams — a trained medic who worked out that the knowledge which saves a life sells better when it ends one. Scarlett has spent years deciding Quinn is why her world collapsed. Quinn has spent them deciding Scarlett is arrogant enough to deserve it. Neither has managed to make the hatred stop being physical.
The Magician Queen breaks the stalemate with a job neither woman can refuse and neither can complete alone: a theft from a place nobody has successfully stolen from, on a deadline, for a payout large enough to reset both their lives. The terms require them to work together, and to assemble a crew — which is how a poisoner and a disgraced assassin end up sharing rooms, plans and eventually far more than either intended.
What neither declares is what she is actually carrying into it. Scarlett’s revenge has a target she has not named. Quinn’s history with the guild has a shape she is not describing. Both secrets touch people the other one loves, and both will surface before the job is done. The question the book runs on is not whether they can pull off the theft — it is which of them is holding the knife when the truth arrives, and whether what has grown between them survives it.
My Review
The rivalry is the reason to read this, and Roe makes an unusual choice that pays off immediately. Most enemies-to-lovers books spend a third of their length establishing that the leads loathe each other before permitting contact. This one opens with the loathing already load-bearing and the contact already happening — Scarlett and Quinn have been enemies who occasionally sleep together for years — and the tension comes from watching them run out of ways to call it nothing.
The heist crew is the second pleasure, and a surprising one given how little heisting the book contains. The found family around Scarlett and Quinn — her sister Stirling in particular, who goes on to lead book two — is warm, funny and doing real work, and it is what reviewers name most often after the heat.
Where it struggles is the world, and this is not a scattered gripe — it is the dominant complaint in the reviews by a wide margin. The magic system is never given rules, so nothing carries real jeopardy, and the setting mixes medieval-fantasy trappings with motorcycles, pizza and modern idiom without any character registering it as strange. Around that sit the structural problems: the third-act conflict does not arrive until roughly 85% and then resolves almost immediately, and several readers found the two first-person voices indistinguishable.
Two expectations to reset. The heist occupies far less of the book than the title implies — this is a romance with a job in it, not a crime novel. And the marketing calls it romantasy while Amazon files it under Lesbian Fiction, the more honest shelf. If intricate secondary-world construction drew you here, calibrate hard; if two morally grey women and a high volume of explicit sex drew you here, it delivers.
My honest note: A five-star rivalry inside a two-star world, sold under a title it does not earn. If you read romantasy for the fantasy, this will frustrate you from the first chapter; if you read it for the two women, it is a fast, filthy, genuinely fun time.
| Element | In A Game of Hearts and Heists |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Scarlett Grey & Quinn Adams — disgraced assassin and poisoner-for-hire, enemies who were already lovers |
| Core tropes | Enemies-to-lovers, heist crew, found family, forced proximity, dual POV, only one bed, morally grey leads |
| Setting | New Imperium — a kingdom split in two, where sentient houses grant magic and mark their chosen with a tattoo |
| Heat level | 5/5 — explicit and plentiful |
| Series | Girl Games book 1 of 4 — complete couple arc and an HEA; later books follow different couples |
| Content notes | Graphic sexual content, violence, murder, blood and gore, death of a parent, toxic relationship dynamics, child abuse, and one use of an ableist slur around the halfway mark |
How Spicy Is A Game of Hearts and Heists?
A full 5/5. romance.io puts it in its top steam band and labels it “explicit and plentiful,” and readers back that up without qualification — the heat is the most consistently praised thing about this book, it is open-door throughout, and it starts early because the leads were sleeping together before the plot began. StoryGraph’s users have flagged graphic sexual content 37 times, more than double any other warning on the book.
The element worth naming in advance is kink range rather than intensity: one detailed reader account lists light Dom/sub, impact play, bondage and strap use, all consensual and all on the page. No reviewer I found flags a consent problem or anything beyond that list. If this is the band you want, Her Spell That Binds Me and Roe’s own House of Crimson Kisses sit at the same 5/5.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you read enemies-to-lovers for the hostility rather than the resolution, you want explicit heat with real kink range, you like a found-family crew with room to grow, and you would rather a book move fast than explain itself.
You may want to skip it if: an undefined magic system ruins a fantasy for you, you were sold on the heist and expect the heist, you need two first-person narrators to sound like different people, or an unflagged ableist slur mid-book would end your read.
In short: a superb rivalry and a very good time, wrapped in a world that was never actually finished.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
Three and a half years on, this is still Ruby Roe’s most-read book by a distance — 10,768 Goodreads ratings against 8,425 for her next — and by the same numbers her lowest-rated. Every other book she has written scores higher. There are no trade reviews: I checked Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal and Booklist and found nothing, and no coverage from The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks or Lambda Literary either. Amazon’s editorial block carries a single endorsement, from fantasy author Helen Scheuerer. What it has instead is peer praise — A.K. Mulford’s Goodreads review calls it “a heist adventure story DOUSED in sapphic hot sauce” — a steady presence in r/LesbianBookClub recommendation threads, though no dedicated discussion thread I could find, organic TikTok activity including character fanart and reading-order videos alongside the author’s own promotion, and professional audio. Podium Audio released it on 2 January 2024, narrated by Islay Jacobs and Kyo Sija across 12 hours 38 minutes.
Prefer audio? Listen to A Game of Hearts and Heists on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The heat, first and by a distance, and specifically that the leads were enemies who were already lovers — readers treat that as the book’s best idea. Then the crew: the found-family heist team draws consistent affection and is why many lukewarm readers continued the series. Then pace — people describe reading it in one sitting. A minority praise the worldbuilding as intricate, which is notable because it is the exact opposite of the loudest complaint.
What readers argue about and complain about: Worldbuilding, above everything. The magic system has no stated rules, so nothing carries jeopardy, and the torn medieval kingdom contains motorcycles, pizza and modern idiom that nobody in the book acknowledges — reviewers reach for “vague,” “hurried” and “half-assed.” Second, the prose: flat and emotionless, stilted dialogue, narration slipping between British and American usage. Third, the heist is barely in the book, which several reviewers raise as a plain mis-sell of the title. Fourth, structure — the conflict arrives past 85% and resolves almost at once, and a recurring objection holds Quinn is forgiven far more easily than Scarlett for a comparable betrayal. Fifth: several readers say the two POVs are indistinguishable. Separately, the book uses a variation of the r-word around the halfway mark; StoryGraph carries three user-submitted ableism warnings and at least two Goodreads reviewers name it, one stopping there. Where readers genuinely split is the modern-in-fantasy mix itself — one blog reviewer calls it original rather than sloppy, and that argument never resolves.
The standalone question worth asking first: Scarlett and Quinn’s arc closes inside this book with a happily-ever-after, and you are not required to continue. Girl Games runs to four numbered books plus two novellas and appears complete, but each numbered book takes a new couple — book two, A Game of Romance and Ruin, belongs to Scarlett’s sister Stirling. The useful thing to know is the shape of the ratings: book one is the weakest entry in its own series. Book two sits at 4.16, book three at 4.28, book four at 4.37. If the writing puts you off here, thousands of readers who felt the same rated the next three considerably higher.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does A Game of Hearts and Heists end on a cliffhanger?
No. Scarlett and Quinn’s romance resolves inside this book with a happily-ever-after, and readers consistently describe it as working on its own. The series continues with a different couple.
How spicy is A Game of Hearts and Heists?
A 5/5. romance.io rates it “explicit and plentiful,” its top band, and the spice is open-door and frequent from early on. Reader accounts describe light Dom/sub, impact play, bondage and strap use, all consensual.
Do you have to read the Girl Games books in order?
Not strictly, but it helps. Each numbered book centres a new couple with plot threads running underneath, so reading in order preserves them. There are four numbered books plus two novellas.
Is there actually a heist in it?
Less than the title suggests, and this is one of the most repeated criticisms in the reviews. The theft is the engine that forces Scarlett and Quinn together, but the romance takes far more page count than the caper.
Is there an audiobook?
Yes — Podium Audio, narrated by Islay Jacobs and Kyo Sija, running 12 hours 38 minutes and released on 2 January 2024. It bundles in the prequel novella, and the dual narration is widely praised.
If You Loved A Game of Hearts and Heists, Read These Next
The obvious next step is A Game of Romance and Ruin, which hands the same world to Scarlett’s sister and is rated nearly three tenths of a star higher by the readers who continued. If the author is the draw rather than the series, House of Crimson Hearts runs the same 5/5 heat with vampires instead of assassins. And for the same hostile-rivalry engine at the same explicitness, but with atmosphere doing the work the magic system does not do here, Her Spell That Binds Me is the closest match on the site. For more in this register, browse our enemies-to-lovers lesbian romance reading list or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
A Game of Hearts and Heists wants to be a sapphic Six of Crows with the door left open, and it half succeeds. The rivalry is structurally clever and genuinely charged, the heat delivers what the top steam band promises, and the crew earns the sequels it sets up. It is also built on a magic system with no rules, written in prose a large minority find flat, and named after a heist it mostly does not contain. If you want a fast, explicit, morally grey rivalry and can forgive a world that never gets finished, this is a very good time — and if you cannot, the 10% did-not-finish rate suggests you already know that about yourself. Check A Game of Hearts and Heists on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, A Game of Hearts and Heists ranks as a spice-first indie sapphic romantasy — propulsive and genuinely charged, held back by a world that was never built, and best approached for the rivalry and the crew rather than the fantasy or the heist.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ 3.87 average across 10,768 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Rivalry and heat carry the book
- ✓ Podium Audio put it on every platform
- ✓ 10% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph
Romance ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Enemies who were already lovers
- ✓ Hostility stays live, not decorative
- ✓ Most-praised element in the reviews
- ✓ Late conflict widely called contrived
Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ 71% of StoryGraph readers call them loveable
- ✓ Found-family crew is a real strength
- ✓ Stirling strong enough to lead book two
- ✓ Both POV voices often called identical
Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Fast, propulsive, only 5% call it slow
- ✓ Banter lands for most readers
- ✓ A minority defend the worldbuilding
- ✓ “Flat” and “emotionless” recur in low stars
Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ Scarlett’s loss of standing genuinely stings
- ✓ Sister and crew bonds land
- ✓ 41% of StoryGraph readers mark it emotional
- ✓ Rulesless magic drains the stakes
Heat Level ★★★★★ 5/5
- ✓ romance.io top band, explicit and plentiful
- ✓ Open door and frequent throughout
- ✓ Real kink range, all consensual
- ✓ Several readers say lust outweighs intimacy
Ending ★★★★☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ Complete couple arc and an HEA
- ✓ No cliffhanger, works as an entry point
- ✓ Sets up the crew for book two
- ✓ Conflict lands past 85% and resolves fast
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ Audiobook is a strong second pass
- ✓ Series pulls readers back to the world
- ✓ Fast enough to revisit in a weekend
- ✓ Weakest entry in its own series
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