Love Letter Premium Review – The Five-Star Game That Explicitly Did Not Need a Fancy Deluxe Upgrade

It’s official, Love Letter is a smash hit. This sixteen-card game has stolen the hearts and minds of board gamers everywhere. And why shouldn’t it? It’s an excellent little card game whose tight design makes for a quick game of interesting deductions.

However, someone at AEG has been drinking too much of the Love Letter Kool-Aid. As of now, you can find a version of Love Letter for everything! There’s Love Letter: Adventure Time, Love Letter: Batman, and even Lovecraft Letter.

And they’re still not done!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This review goes back to the very beginning and looks at the original Love Letter. Well, maybe not the original Love Letter, but the premium edition. This edition added fancy new tokens and larger cards, but the gameplay remains unchanged if playing with four or fewer players.

However, this edition also includes a second set of sixteen cards with new art and abilities. In case you ever wanted to play Love Letter with more than four.

Overview

Love Letter is played over several rounds, wherein each round you’re attempting to get your letter to the Princess. If you deliver your letter to her four times, you successfully complete the courting ritual and get the key to her chastity belt.

But before all that, you start each round by shuffling the sixteen-card deck, dealing one card to each player, and placing one aside. These cards have both a number, signifying their strength, and an ability.

On your turn, you draw one card from the deck and decide to either keep or discard it. If you keep it, you must discard the other card you were holding onto. So by the end of your turn, you’re back down to one card.

When a card is discarded, its special power activates. This can range from giving you a guess to eliminate another player, trading cards with another player, or straight up losing the game.

Players keep taking turns like this until only one player is remaining – and they get to deliver their letter to the princess. Or, there are no cards left to draw. In that case, players reveal their cards, and the player with the highest number wins the round and has their letter delivered.

Short, sharp, and addictive

Love Letter is one of the most accessible board games of all time. No matter your age, or experience with board games, it makes for a fun time. Primarily because of how addictive it is. The rounds are short and snappy, and like a can of Pringles – once you start it’s hard to stop.

The snappiness begins with the player’s information card showing each card’s strength, ability, and how many are in the deck. This takes memory out of the game, and something I wish Seiji’s other game The Lost Legacy had also incorporated.

However, it’s the way the cards are balanced in Love Letter that creates such a fun board game. As you’d expect the low-numbered cards, have strong abilities, while high-numbered cards have weak abilities.

The real genius here is combining this balance with the end-game comparison of strength. You’ll want to hold onto your high-powered cards until the end, but in doing so, you make it easier for people to eliminate you from the round.

You see, whenever a card is discarded it’s placed face-up. Slimming down the number of available cards for people to be holding onto.

Also, smarter players, will wonder – why did someone discard that card in particular?

Was it for the activatable power?

Or do they have a better card already?

Suddenly, the gameplay isn’t so straightforward, and people begin to bluff with their cards. Set others up for elimination, and get better at deducing who has what. How people’s strategies evolve over several plays is fascinating, and makes Love Letter a board game you want to continue to play and see these adaptations.

But don’t play two-player

As good as Love Letter is, don’t play it two-player. Part of what makes Love Letter so exciting is seeing other players being quickly eliminated until it’s just you and one other player. It’s the journey that allows Love Letter to reach a thrilling climax.

Playing two-player misses this. Instead, it goes straight to the final showdown without all of the drama beforehand. In doing so it loses a lot of the stakes built within the game, and with those stakes, goes the excitement you find in higher player counts.

Meanwhile, playing with more than four people is equally turbulent.

While this only applies to extra cards found in the premium edition, it drastically slows down the game. So that if you’re eliminated early, it’s not a couple of minutes before you’re back in, it might be five minutes or more. Meaning, if you’re unlucky, you could end up sitting on the sidelines more than playing – and that’s never fun.

This slowness also takes away most of the excitement of the Love Letter. Which works best as this quick, agile game of luck and deduction.

30 Seconds of fun

There’s a famous quote by Jaime Griesemer which goes:

“In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.”

Love Letter epitomizes this quote. A round may only last 30 seconds, but it is incredibly fun. It grabs you with its simplicity but then keeps you engaged with its deduction, bluffing, and take that. Yet, unlike Munchkin, it knows how to shut down and reset the game once the fun is over.

When it comes to the premium edition, the components are fantastic. It is a well-crafted edition, where everything is bigger and better. The cards are thicker and tarot-sized, the sleeves are great, and the heart-shaped tokens give the game an extra bit of thematic campiness. It’s only the new mechanics, and price, stopping this edition from being an instant buy.

Love Letter is undoubtedly an awesome game that every board gamer should own. The real question is whether or not to buy the premium edition. But either way, it’s still Love Letter, so there are no wrong answers.