A long time ago, I backed the Kickstarter for Zombiecide, a massive box crammed to the gills with hundreds of zombie miniatures. I played it twice, and sold it nearly immediately. It was a good lesson for my early board game education: flashy components and lots of toys don’t make a game enjoyable. A few years after that, some friends showed me Love Letter, a simple, tiny game that promptly melted my brain.
Love Letter is contained in a small red velvet bag with sixteen cards and sixteen wooden cubes. That’s it. And with those sixteen cards, players will bluff their way to winning, have epiphanies about how to use the single card in their hand to knock out the other players, and find themselves staring at the princess card in their hand, willing their face not to collapse into a rictus of fear and despair. And once again, it does this with fewer components than come in Candyland box.
Love Letter isn’t perfect. It doesn’t play as well with less than four players, its theme is utterly meaningless (spawning, at last count, fifty bazillion reskinned editions), and there are other games that have tweaked some of Love Letter’s weaker elements. But it’s on this list because it’s simple, elegant, and proof that a smart person with a few cards can make something incredible.
- Dietrich Stogner
Love Letter is contained in a small red velvet bag with sixteen cards and sixteen wooden cubes. That’s it. And with those sixteen cards, players will bluff their way to winning, have epiphanies about how to use the single card in their hand to knock out the other players, and find themselves staring at the princess card in their hand, willing their face not to collapse into a rictus of fear and despair. And once again, it does this with fewer components than come in Candyland box.
Love Letter isn’t perfect. It doesn’t play as well with less than four players, its theme is utterly meaningless (spawning, at last count, fifty bazillion reskinned editions), and there are other games that have tweaked some of Love Letter’s weaker elements. But it’s on this list because it’s simple, elegant, and proof that a smart person with a few cards can make something incredible.
- Dietrich Stogner
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