1227: Cards of Love

One of the games I had the chance to try out during my recent trip to Canada was a charming little card game called Love Letter, the brainchild of Seiji Kanai and the fourth entry in AEG’s Tempest series of games that share the same setting. Today, my own copy of it finally arrived, so I thought I’d talk about it a bit. I know I already mentioned it a number of posts ago, but I thought I’d dedicate a whole post to it.

In Love Letter, players take on the role of potential suitors to the princess of Tempest. Unfortunately, grieving for her arrested mother — presumably an event which occurred in one of the previous games — the aforementioned princess has locked herself in the castle and is not receiving visitors, let alone missives declaring various eligible bachelors’ undying love for her.

Or is she? Fortunately, there is a selection of people around the castle who are able to get your sweet words of love to the princess, and it’s entirely possible that you might be able to get her to come out of her room, if only you can just get that message to her.

These people — including the princess herself — are represented by the 16 cards that make up the complete Love Letter deck. Each is marked with a number, which denotes how “close” that person is to the princess, and each number also corresponds to a particular type of character. All the “1” cards are guards, for example, while number “8” is the princess herself. Certain cards, such as the princess, her best friend the Countess, the prince and the king, only have one card each; others have several duplicates, with the most numerous being the guards.

A round of Love Letter runs thus: first a single card is removed from the deck, without anyone seeing what it is. Following this, each player is dealt a single card, which becomes their hand. On each player’s turn, they draw a card from the communal stack of remaining cards and either discard it or the other card in their hand. When a card is discarded, its special ability must be resolved. If a player discards the princess, they are out of the round as the princess has thrown their letter into the fire. Other cards are laid face-up in a stack in front of the player, allowing the others to see which cards have been discarded already, and thus deduce which ones are probably in the other players’ hands.

Knowledge of the other players’ hands is extremely important, as several of Love Letter’s cards have special abilities that can knock out players if you correctly identify their cards. Guards, for example, allow you to ask another player if they have a specific card in their hand, and if they do, they are caught by the guards and are out of the round. The Baron, meanwhile, sees you compare your other card’s rank with that of another player, and the highest rank wins. This has the unfortunate side-effect of also revealing your hand to the player you’re comparing against, so you’d better be sure you’ll win before pulling out the Baron.

It quickly becomes apparent after a short session that Love Letter is a game about bluffing. Certain cards are clearly designed with this in mind — for example, the Countess card, which is second only to the princess in terms of rank, must be discarded if the player has the prince or king as their other card, since they don’t approve of her. However, there’s nothing stopping you from discarding the Countess when you don’t have either of these cards in hand — purely to make people believe that you do.

The round ends either when all players except one have been eliminated, or if the draw deck is exhausted, at which point all surviving players reveal their hands, and the highest-ranked card wins a token of the princess’ affection. The cycle then repeats until someone gains the required number of tokens, determined by how many people are playing.

Love Letter is a simple production, but it’s, if you’ll pardon the phrase, lovely. It doesn’t come in a standard game box — rather, it comes in a charming little red velvet bag with the game’s name embroidered on it. The cards themselves are of decent quality and sport some lovely artwork, and the tokens of the princess’ affection are that kind of little coloured transparent plastic cube that look like they’d be delicious but will actually probably cause you to choke.

The game itself is ideal filler material, as it’s over and done with within about 15-20 minutes, which makes it a great pre-dinner game, or a great game to play while you’re waiting for one of the rest of your group to finish having a long poo or something. It’s also quite ridiculously cheap, though it is a tad hard to find at present due to its sudden explosion in popularity.

In the meantime, find out a bit more about it over at BoardGameGeek, the best resource for board game information on the whole Internet.