Love Lingual is an entirely conversational game meant specifically for couples, so my boyfriend (David) and I played it for our anniversary. There were no formal rules in the packaging, so we came up with our own system. Taking turns, we would each draw a card and ask the other person the associated question. We just kept going back and forth like that for about an hour and a half while dinner was in the oven.
I honestly feel like this game borders on not being a game, as it’s just cards with prompts for conversations. That said, it was still fun to just sit there and chat with David. Specifically, Love Lingual creates two kinds of fun: fellowship and discovery. Getting to Know You games inherently build fellowship fun because they force you to interact with other players. In Love Lingual, chatting with your significant other leads to fellowship fun because you already like to spend time with them (ideally). At the same time, it also created discovery fun because I got to learn things about David that I didn’t know before. It prompts couples to be vulnerable with each other.
However, we ended up with a few criticisms of the game. The questions in Love Lingual Level 1 aren’t super vulnerable if you already know your significant other really well. For example, we found that we frequently knew each other’s answers upon flipping over a card. Later on, I discovered that there are more versions of Love Lingual with more personal questions, so the game designers already solved that problem.
Another interesting thing we discovered about the game is that multiple cards ask the same question but with emphasis on different words. I think this is meant to prompt different kinds of conversations. However, for David and I, when we saw repeat questions, we skipped them because we’d already answered them just through casual chatting from the previous version. In fact, another thing we found was that the questions often just prompted random tangents and conversations about our day to day lives, which were often more interesting than the original prompt.
All in all, I feel like this game is perfect for couples who just like to sit and talk to each other. It can be played super conveniently because you can go for as long, or as short, as you want. It’s a fun way to prompt random discussions.
