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Topic	another year of tabletop rankings and writeups
SeabassDebeste 01/16/20 5:58:22 PM #287:	79. Love Letter (2012) Category: Player vs Player Genres: Separate hands, deduction, player elimination Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1 Game length: 15-20 minutes (full game) Experience: 20+ hands over 5+ sessions (2015-2018) with 3-4 players Previous ranks: 25/100 (2016), 44/80 (2018) Summary - Each player has a hand of one card. During their turn, they draw a card and play a card. The played card will generally give them a way to interact with others, including eliminating others (or the guesser). If people are not eliminated by the end of the 16 cards, the player with the highest remaining card is the winner. Experience - As you can see by its high ranking in 2016, Love Letter felt like a godsend early in the hobby: a game with no rules overhead, an inference component, and a playtime/game structure that allowed for iterative play. Since then I've gotten more of an appetite for games that hit high highs rather than guarantee painilessness, but I still respect LL's style. Design - Love Letter is a true microgame, and among hobby gamers, it has a Coup-esque quality of "everyone knows it and reasonably likes it." Any card game might be better if everyone knew the deck through and through, that that's an impossibility for many more complex games. Love Letter is a deduction game - the most common card lets you eliminate a player by guessing their card - and like Coup, it is a pure card game that has few enough cards that everyone can name each card by the end of a few hands. Like God's Gambit (and perhaps Welcome to the Dungeon), Love Letter also has entirely independent hands. There is no arc to Love Letter, simply the knowledge that one round, which can last as little as a minute, provides insufficient dopamine hit and will make you want to play more. Given how short it is, I'm entirely fine with that. Components can be huge in a game this simple. Love Letter comes in a beautiful bag, has beautiful art, and has these cute little cubes to denote you won a hand. Quality-of-life wins. Future - While it's not the fault of the game itself, I think one issue preventing Love Letter from breaking out into my world big time is that it's not really a two-player game. It feels like the perfect type of game to have on hand during a non-game-night, but most of the time that would be a two-player scenario for me. It would be easy to characterize Love Letter as repetitive, which could hurt its long-term value. That may be true, but given its insanely quick playtime per hand and setup time and the fact it can be played brainlessly, I wouldn't necessarily call that a bad thing. Its iterative play tends to feel like a "card game" instead of a "hobby game," and those have long, long histories. --- yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness <cite>SeabassDebeste posted [p:933042790] in another ye... [t:78284791]...</cite> <quote>79. Love Letter (2012) Category: Player vs Player Genres: Separate hands, deduction, player elimination Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1 Game length: 15-20 minutes (full game) Experience: 20+ hands over 5+ sessions (2015-2018) with 3-4 players Previous ranks: 25/100 (2016), 44/80 (2018) Summary - Each player has a hand of one card. During their turn, they draw a card and play a card. The played card will generally give them a way to interact with others, including eliminating others (or the guesser). If people are not eliminated by the end of the 16 cards, the player with the highest remaining card is the winner. Experience - As you can see by its high ranking in 2016, Love Letter felt like a godsend early in the hobby: a game with no rules overhead, an inference component, and a playtime/game structure that allowed for iterative play. Since then I've gotten more of an appetite for games that hit high highs rather than guarantee painilessness, but I still respect LL's style. Design - Love Letter is a true microgame, and among hobby gamers, it has a Coup-esque quality of "everyone knows it and reasonably likes it." Any card game might be better if everyone knew the deck through and through, that that's an impossibility for many more complex games. Love Letter is a deduction game - the most common card lets you eliminate a player by guessing their card - and like Coup, it is a pure card game that has few enough cards that everyone can name each card by the end of a few hands. Like God's Gambit (and perhaps Welcome to the Dungeon), Love Letter also has entirely independent hands. There is no arc to Love Letter, simply the knowledge that one round, which can last as little as a minute, provides insufficient dopamine hit and will make you want to play more. Given how short it is, I'm entirely fine with that. Components can be huge in a game this simple. Love Letter comes in a beautiful bag, has beautiful art, and has these cute little cubes to denote you won a hand. Quality-of-life wins. Future - While it's not the fault of the game itself, I think one issue preventing Love Letter from breaking out into my world big time is that it's not really a two-player game. It feels like the perfect type of game to have on hand during a non-game-night, but most of the time that would be a two-player scenario for me. It would be easy to characterize Love Letter as repetitive, which could hurt its long-term value. That may be true, but given its insanely quick playtime per hand and setup time and the fact it can be played brainlessly, I wouldn't necessarily call that a bad thing. Its iterative play tends to feel like a "card game" instead of a "hobby game," and those have long, long histories. --- yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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