Comparison Game: Love Letter
Designer: Seiji Kanai
Target Audience: Family/friends game, 2-6 players
Platform: Tabletop Card Game
Card Reference:
Guard – Guess a player’s card. They are eliminated if you’re right.
Priest – Look at someone’s hand.
Baron – Secretly compare hands with someone. The player with the lower number is eliminated.
Princess – Highest value. You are eliminated if you play or discard.
Our game concept is a card game where players have unique objectives and try to satisfy those objectives through drawing and reading cards. One player is the “witch”, who has the additional objective of surviving the round and not being found out. At the end of a round, there is a trial where players discuss who the witch might be based on how people played their cards. Love Letter relates to our concept through its card draw mechanics and the deduction dynamics they induce without the additional social deduction aspect.
Love Letter has straightforward mechanics: the player has a card, on their turn they draw another card, and play one of their two cards. The objective is to survive the round with the highest value card possible. These mechanics give rise to dynamics including deduction and group conventions—strategies that players adopt over multiple rounds. For an example, if someone plays the “Baron” card and survives, I can deduce both that they have a higher card number than the other person had and that they were confident they would before they played the card. For an example of group convention, when I played Love Letter it became a running joke that people would play “Guard” and guess “Princess” absurdly early in the round just to see if they could catch someone by chance. Knowing this, I often got rid of the “Princess” early if there was any way I could even though it is the highest value card. Importantly, group conventions such as this can only emerge because of clever game design: the simple card mechanics allow people to quickly get a feel for the deduction, and multiple quick rounds allow the conventions time to develop. Finally, the deduction and group convention dynamics give rise to challenge fun and fellowship fun respectively.
For our game, we want to include similar challenge fun arising from deduction, and additionally capture fellowship fun and expression fun by allowing players to state their case, lie, etc. during the final trial phase. Supporting fellowship fun and expression fun in this way will require new dynamics not present in Love Letter. For example, unlike our witch concept, Love Letter has no formal point in the rules where the players discuss and make a decision. However, players often make arguments in favor of targeting other players. For example, Player A might say: “Everyone should target Player B because they have two favor tokens, and so if they win this round they’ll win the game.” For our game, we want to formalize this by allowing players to make these arguments with semi-public or private information in order to facilitate the social deduction aspect. Our goal is for players to build up incomplete information by looking at other players cards/secret objectives, then share anything they know (or can convincingly bluff) during the trial. For this reason, our mechanics maintain the simplicity that allows for deduction/group conventions while also making it easier to get information about people’s cards and harder to eliminate people.
Love Letter is a good comparison game because the mechanics are simple and it’s competitive rather than cooperative. A game without these qualities that still has dynamical similarities to our concept is The Crew. In The Crew, players cooperate to achieve an objective without communicating. They must deduce what another player is planning based on the cards they play. Love Letter and our concept have this deduction element in a competitive setting, which gives rise to dynamics like intentional sabotage, which The Crew doesn’t have. Further, rather than having simple draw-and-play mechanics, The Crew adds complexity through trick taking mechanics, like following suit and trump cards, which is where most of the fun is. For example, in The Crew I often play cards thinking “no matter what other people play this will work for us”. This puts the primary focus of the challenge fun on figuring out the game mechanics rather than the strategies of other players. Both Love Letter and our concept invert this emphasis, which is why I chose it.
