<aside> 🛠️ Designed by Seiji Kanai
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<aside> 📊 My Number of Plays at Time of Review: 5
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<aside> 👥 2-8 Players
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<aside> ⏱️ 20 Minutes
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Love Letter Premium is an enhanced version of the popular deduction “microgame” Love Letter, designed by Seiji Kanai and released in 2012. The new 2016 version includes two major changes from the original game: upgraded components, and new cards and rules for playing with 5-8 players. These updates come at a price though, with the Premium version costing roughly five times as much as the original version. Are the enhancements worth it? In this review I will only discuss the new additions to the Premium version, if you would like a gameplay summary and my thoughts on the original version, you can see my review here.
The original Love Letter came in a small velvet pouch (though some later versions came in a small box) with just the sixteen game cards, four reference cards, and a small bag of red cubes for scoring. The new premium version comes with several upgrades to the components:
One of the perks of Love Letter is its extreme portability, so a larger box doesn’t seem like a necessary “upgrade,” but the necessity simply comes out the other new components requiring more space to store. The box is still small (2 x 6.3 x 8.7 inches), and is definitely high-quality material with a nice hinged, magnetic lid. Overall, I am a fan of the box as it is a little more natural to store on a game shelf.
The cards in this edition are now a larger “tarot” size, and also made of a thicker (almost cardboard-like) card stock. The increased size is nice for being able to see cards on the table more easily, and they also just feel nicer to hold throughout the game (which you constantly do in Love Letter). As if that wasn’t enough, they also include a full set of custom card sleeves with nice envelope artwork on the back for all the cards. This is a huge boon for a game in which the same few cards handled frequently, especially a deduction game where marks on the cards could have a negative effect on gameplay. The sleeves should allow the game to endure tons of plays without showing any signs of wear, and it was a really nice touch to include them. I do wish the sleeves were just a touch larger as they fit extremely snug with the cards almost protruding out the top a bit, but it is really a small complaint.
When playing the original Love Letter, it was common for a player to ask, “why are they cubes instead of little hearts or something?” Well they did just that, the Premium version now has nice large wooden hearts to use for scoring (the golden heart comes in to play with a new card, the Jester).
Expanding Love Letter to play with more than four players really makes it a game that can work in almost any situation. But with one of Love Letter’s biggest strengths being how quickly it plays, does playing with more players provide a worthwhile experience? To play with 5-8 players, you now mix a set of completely new cards into the deck. The new cards are as follows: