First Impressions is where I’ve played a game but haven’t played it enough to give a full review, and also won’t have the opportunity to play it more any time soon. Love Letter is an extremely popular game that has a lot of hype around it. It only consists of a deck of cards, so on first appearances there doesn’t seem much to it. The general theme of the game is that you’re trying to get your letter to the princess. Each type of card has a different numerical value, for example the Princess is 8 while the Guards are 1, and you win by either having the highest card, ridding your opponent of all their cards, or guessing the card they hold.
The theme is pretty loose, as evidenced by the fact that there are a number of versions of the game, and a Batman version is coming soon, but the gameplay itself is actually really fun. Now, I’ve only played it with two players and I’ve only played it once, but I enjoyed it a lot. I like how the different cards work together and how you want to get the high-value cards but at the same time guards can be handy. There’s some meta-gaming that goes on as well, like in the game I played with my friend I had the Countess about four rounds in a row so there were times when he just blindly guessed that I had her, and I did! But there is deduction as well, there were points when I thought, ‘okay, he played that card, so he’s probably trying to figure out what I have so on his next turn he can do that, so if I do this then I can pull off a victory just before he does’.
I imagine it would be more fun with more players, so I’m eager to try it again but even with two players it was still a lot of fun and it’s good to pull out for a quick game. I’m definitely going to add this to my collection at some point, although I think I might wait for the Batman version.