Review of Love Letter Premium Edition

Slightly bigger than the original Love Letter, the Premium Edition's beautifully illustrated cards are now thicker and Tarot-Sized. There are 32 playing cards (each with a number, a character, and a description of their special ability) and 8 reference cards (which list how many copies of each character there are, as well as summarizing their powers). The box had a magnetic lid and has a faux red velvet inlay, and has part of a Shakespearean sonnet on the cover (technically this makes it an Alternate History). Beautiful card sleeves are included, with one side showing an envelope with a wax seal. This actually led to my one component quibble: Since the 8 reference cards are double-sided, 8 of those card sleeves should have been transparent on both sides. For the "tokens of affection", instead of little red cubes, we have somewhat larger red hearts (there is also a yellow heart, see below for why). The rulebook contains the "fluff" I love to associate with the characters of this game, as well as clarifications of rules for old cards (as well as the rules for the new cards, of course).

Theme:

This is a very lovely game of romance in a royal court setting. After the Queen of Tempest was found guilty of treason, her daughter has secluded herself in the castle. Many suitors want to win Princess Annette's heart but cannot do so directly. Thus the suitors (the players as composer Bartolemew Knaiss and other unnamed folks) try to use court intermediaries (the cards) to get love letters to the princess and hopefully win her heart (the fact that a composer is in the running surprised me; I would have thought a princess would only be courted by nobles). I could wish that the suitors all had names and descriptions for a premium edition, but how much you care about that depends on whether or not you are the sort of person that wants specifically to be Professor Plum in Clue.

Themewise, the characters' descriptions are rich, which is something I enjoy (indeed, it makes me curious to investigate the other games in the Tempest line so that I could get more of a feel for what happens beforehand and afterwards in the city-state of Tempest). That said, a few times the "fluff" does not match the "crunch". For example, Count Guntrum is described as giving loyalty unwaveringly once he makes his decision, but there are two "Count" cards in the game, so the Count could thus give this unwavering loyalty to two competing players in the same round! Also, despite the name, the Assassin doesn't kill anybody (at least not during the time frame of the game); he can reverse a Guard's power, and thus knock that player out of the round, but the same Guard could be played again later that round (since it is the most duplicated card in the game, with 5 for one character and 3 for another) and the knocked-out player can continue to try to win the game in future rounds, without losing their previously acquired love tokens and thus presumably as the same suitor as before. Is the Assassin perhaps merely a character assassin?

As a side note, I am curious as to whether Count Guntrum is married to Countess Wilhelmina, and why the Prince or King scares the Countess away but the Dowager Queen does not, but perhaps that is demanding too much fluff from this game. And it is interesting that the Bishop has more influence over the Princess's heart than the presumably higher ranking Cardinal. Also, with enough support from the Count, either the Countess or the Dowager Queen can make the Princess doubt herself!

For those that wish for a different theme to the game, there are other versions of Love Letter (such as one rethemed for Batman), but as far as I know, there is not as of yet a Premium edition of the other versions of this game.

Mechanics:

Love Letter itself is a simple card game. You have a closed hand of one card. During your turn, you draw a second card and then choose which of those two cards to openly discard ("discard" is a bit of a confusing term, as discarding a card almost always is the way that you activate its special ability, such as to look at someone's hand, trade hands with another player, or, most often, to guess another player's card in an attempt to knock them out of the round (this is the ability of the frequently duplicated but low-numbered Guard)). The object of each round of play (covering a day in Tempest, although it will only take a few minutes of play) is to knock everyone else out of the running for the round, and, failing that, to be (after the deck is exhausted) the person not knocked out with the highest-numbered card in one's hand. The winner of a round gains a token of affection. Ties are broken by the sum of the numbers in one's discard piles. Ties there are not broken and each tied person would gain a love token in that case. The game is played over a series of rounds until a certain number of tokens of affection (varying according to the number of players) has been won by one player. Ties here would be broken by a bonus round between the tied players.

For those that are used to the 2 - 4 player version of the original Love Letter, the game for that number of players is exactly the same, played with the original 16 cards and with a few minor rules clarifications. The 16 cards cover 8 "characters" in the game (numbered 1 to 8), with some duplicated cards. The game, being physically larger, is slightly less portable but looks prettier.

The full set of 32 cards are used in the 5 - 8 player game, adding 10 new characters (although one of them is simply another Guard with the exact same special ability as the previous Guard). The new cards are numbered 0 to 9. Since some of the added cards feature new characters that share numbers with the old characters, one rule change for the 5 - 8 player game is that special abilities that used to guess someone else's card's character now guess someone else's card's number (instead of asking "Do you have a Prince?" you would ask "Do you have a 5?". Some of these new cards grant special abilities that grant a token of affection in other ways than by winning a round, such as by the Bishop guessing another player's card's number, or by the Jester guessing that another player will win the round (this is how the yellow heart mentioned above is used - it is a marker of that player's guess). Some cards have powers that only apply at the end of a round, such as that of the Count. If it is in one's discard pile, it adds to the number of the card in one's hand should one survive to the end of that round.

With 5 - 8 players the game naturally is slower in a round than the 2 - 4 player game. That said, with the additional ways of gaining tokens of affection there could be fewer rounds in total (a lucky player could win the game in 2 rounds!). While in theory, an 8 player game could take 25 rounds, not including a tie-breaker round, it is extremely unlikely to ever happen. I personally did not find the 7 player version of the game I played to drag on too long.

The game itself is easy enough to teach and follow, and while having so few cards, all openly displayed once played/discarded, lends itself to card-counting, that is explicitly part of the game (and it is slightly mitigated by there being one card set aside from the draw deck and left face down). There is a surprising amount of room for tactical and strategic play considering the simplified mechanics of the game. That said, there are times when you have no good card to play (if one has a hand with the Dowager Queen and the Princess, one is very likely to be knocked out of the round whichever card one plays). Luck is a factor here, which might say something about the nature of romantic love, I suppose.

Despite the bluffing nature of the game (one could, for example, use a Guard to ask another player if they have a 9, when you hold the only card with that number, in order to throw people off), there are some requirements for honesty: For example, if one is asked if one has a number 6 (due to a Guard or Bishop being played against one) then one should not say "No" if one has such a card. Similarly, there is one card, the Countess, that must be the card played if one's hand is either Countess and Prince, or Countess and King. I have been in games where people forgot the latter rule; it can happen due to forgetfulness rather than malice.

Sadly, with the added complication of new cards, there is one "hole" in the rules. If three players last to the end of a round, there may be a rock-paper-scissors situation where Bert's Bishop (with a huge tie-breaking score in his discard pile) might beat Cassie's Countess (backed up by two Counts in her discard pile but still with not enough in it to beat the above Bishop), but would by the rules lose to Pedro's Princess. Yet Cassie's Countess (plus two Counts) would beat Pedro's Princess. Thus Bert, Cassie and Pedro each both win against one player and lose against another. My house rule would be to declare a tie (a meta-tie?) and award each player a token of affection. In any case, this is a corner situation, unlikely to come up very often.

Summary:

I think this game is very fun to play and the cards, rulebook and components really help bring it to life. It is quite fast and still reasonably portable. The few quibbles I have do not stop me from recommending it highly.