Love Letter 2019 edition

NB: Nominated for the 2014 Game of the Year award ("Spiel des Jahres").

Love Letter is a 5-10 minute light game for 2-6 players where players are courtiers of a princess of the medieval city-state of Tempest, using agents to get the. Players start with one agent card, and draw one each turn, then play one of their two cards face up and take the action to try to eliminate opponents by correctly identifying their agent cards. The game ends when all only one player is left standing, or when the deck of 16 cards runs word and the player with the highest numbered card wins.

Love Letter plays like a tv trailer for an 800 episode period melodrama, where the friends, family, and servants of the royal household of Tempest all die and miraculously come back to life repeatedly, and where even the climax of the show with the antagonist princess holding a love letter ends up with her brashly burning the letter and feigning innocence.

The highs in Love Letter tend to come from ousting opponents early in the game from pure guessing rather than from any calculated card counting which occurs as the deck thins out. Yelling Princess is always fun.

The only downside is that the game can feel completely random, especially when experiencing consecutive early player elimination.

While Citadels is closest in spirit to Love Letter, Welcome To The Dungeon is another small box game from a Japanese designer that offers the same luck-based and card-counting gameplay in a 5-10 minute window. Other excellent and portable fast-playing light games include No Thanks, Skull King, High Society, For Sale, and Hanabi.

Cards require 20 Standard card sleeves (63.5mm X 89mm)

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