Today, I will be reviewing another card game, known as Love Letter, which was introduced to me by my father-in-law (he actually introduces us to a lot of new games).
To begin with, this game actually has a little bit of a backstory, which I will try to briefly sum up for you:
The princess' mother has been accused of high treason and sentenced to death. In an attempt to ease the sorrow of the mourning princess, various suitors are coming forward to profess their love. One in particular, a composer by the name of Bartolemew Kaiss, has passed along a love letter, disguised as rolled-up music sheets, to a trusted handmaid of the princess. Will she be able to get the letter to the princess, or will she be stopped by the guards, the princes, the priest, or even the king himself? Find out next time in - Love Letter.
The game comes in a small box, as shown below. However, I have also seen it packaged in a small velvet bag. Either way, there is no difference regarding the contents of the game.
Within the box, you will find 16 cards, 1 rule book, and a small plastic bag containing 13 red cubes, as seen below:
Now you may be asking, "How in the world does this even constitute a game?!"
Oh wait, you aren't asking that? Ok, fine, maybe that was just me, but still, it seems like a pretty wimpy amount of materials for a full-fledged game. This was one of the first elements that intrigued me about Love Letter. However, after briefly going through the rules, we played a couple of rounds, thoroughly sating curiosity and replacing it with fun and amusement.
The goal of the game is to either be the person to hold the Princess card at the end of the game, or to knock all of the other players out. Either one of these will result in winning the round and obtaining one of those little red cubes, or tokens. Depending on how many people are playing, the number of tokens required to win will vary:
To play the game, the cards are first shuffled and 1 card is set off to the side, face down (if you are playing with 2 people, then take an additional 3 cards off the top of the deck and place them off to the side face up. They will not be used in this round). Each player is then dealt 1 card face down. The rest of the cards are then placed in a face-down stack in the middle of the table/seat/floor/whatever you are playing on, and used as a draw pile.
Each player is allowed to look at their hand at any point in time.
Once it is decided who will go first (according to the instructions, it is supposed to be the person who most recently went on a date), all the players take turns drawing a card and playing a card.
From here, the rules of the game are extraordinarily simple:
Just follow the text on the cards themselves!
All the different varieties of cards can be seen below:
On the left side of each card, you can see between 1 and 5 stars. These represent how many of each card there are in the deck. For example, the Guard has 5 stars, meaning there are 5 Guard cards in the deck. The Princess on the other hand only has 1 star, meaning there is only 1 Princess in the deck.
The game also comes with some handy reminder cards for every player to hold onto. These give a brief review of the game rules, as well as a brief explanation of what each card does.
As mentioned before, to play, each player takes turns drawing a card and playing a card. One should always have exactly 1 card in their hand at the end of each turn.
If a player is knocked out due to a card's effect, they are out for that round and have to wait until the next one (don't worry, the rounds are short).
If a player discards the Princess for any reason whatsoever, they are out of the round.
If the round makes it to the end where there are no cards left, then the person holding the Princess card wins. If no one has the Princess card (for example, it is the face down card dealt off to the side at the beginning), then the person holding the card with the highest point value wins.
The point value can be seen in the upper left of each card.
Assuming a card such as the Prince (makes another player discard their hand and draw a card) is played on the last turn when there are no more cards in the deck, then the person who had the card played against them will draw the face-down card set aside at the beginning.
You keep playing until someone has the required number of tokens to win.
While this game largely deals with luck, it still requires a good bit of strategy.
Discarding the Countess when you have something other than the Prince, Princess, or King in your hand can often throw off your opponents.
When using a guard, try to pick cards there are more than one of. Keeping track of which cards have been played certainly comes in handy.
If you are going first, and you have a guard, it is always fun to pick someone and say they have a Handmaid. They likely will not have one, but if they do, it is kind of like adding insult to injury since you knocked them out before they could even protect themselves with their card.
Be careful if you get 2 Baron cards. You will be forced to compare hands with someone else, but since the Baron is relatively weak, you will often lose.
Genre: Card Game
Number of Players: 2-4
Difficulty: Easy
Score: 8 / 10
