San Juan (2004) marked a pivot point in game design. It was the first of the super fillers, which supported serious gameplay in a short period of time. Race for the Galaxy (2007) improved upon the design with its simultaneous play, truly fulfilling the promise of playing a full, dense strategy game in an hour or less.

And then deckbuilders came along, and the whole industry shifted in a different direction. But now, a few more years have come and gone, and Love Letter (2012) is offering another opportunity to revamp the way we think about traditional “fillers”.

A Love Letter to Love Letter

The most popular name for the category of games created by Love Letter seems to be the “microgame”. This denotes a game played with an extremely small set of cards and with a very simple set of rules. In fact, most of the rules tend to appear on the cards, not in the rulebook.

In the case of Love Letter the rules are simple: you have a hand of one card, you draw one card, then you play one of those two cards. A player wins a round of play if he manages to knock all of the other players out of the game. Else, a round of play ends after the small deck of 16 cards are drawn, then the player with the highest ranked card wins.

Obviously, the gameplay arises through the interaction of the cards. Certain cards might remove other players from the game, if certain conditions are met (e.g., the “1” lets you knock out a player if you can guess their hand card); while other cards might allow a player to acquire the cards he wants (e.g., the “6” allows you to trade cards). Strategy tends to be fueled not just by the special powers on the cards, but also by the deduction of the players — who can suss out what card a player is holding based on what he’s played.

The fact that the rules (and the gameplay) are implicit in the cards means that new cards can create a new game but Love Letter hasn’t really taken advantage of this possibility. It has spawned many themed variants such as Letter to Santa (2014), Love Letter: Adventure Time (2015), Love Letter: Batman (2015), Love Letter: The Hobbit — The Battle of the Five Armies (2015), Love Letter: Legend of the Five Rings (2014), Love Letter: Star Wars (2015), and Munchkin Loot Letter (2014), but they’ve all hewed pretty close to the original. Different cards, allowing for different play, would instead require a different game …

The Love Letter Legacy

Following the publication of Love Letter, the designers produced a new game called Lost Legacy. Actually, it’s a whole series of games, all with the same core rules, but each with a different set of cards (and thus different gameplay). There are currently eight in the US: Flying Garden (2014), The Starship (2014), Vorpal Sword & Whitegold Spire (2015), Sacred Grail & Staff of Dragons (2015), and The Werewolf & Undying Heart (2016).

The core gameplay is pretty much the same as Love Letter: draw a card and play a card; try to eliminate players through the clever use of cards; and try to end up with the most valuable cards at the end. The big change comes in the end game. In Love Letter you just won through having the most valuable (high-ranked) card; now, the most valuable (low-ranked) card lets you investigate earlier, but you only win if you can guess where the “5” Lost Legacy card is — and it could either be in a player’s hand, in possibly face-down discard piles; or in the face-down “ruins” kept near the draw deck.

This change allows for a little more depth, but Lost Legacy really shines thanks to the high degree of variability between the different decks, showing how much variety is possible within a simple game structure. I’ve played five of the decks to date (Flying Garden, Sacred Grail, Staff of Dragons, Undying Heart, and The Werewolf) and it definitely felt like five different games. It was like seeing Dominion (2008) reinvented, but in little sixteen-card sets.

The Lost Legacy variants are especially interesting because each set highlights a different part of the game, demonstrating how you can create a game with several moving parts, then accentuate those parts through specific components:

Deduction. Deduction was always part of Love Letter, but its importance has been increased in Lost Legacy since the goal is now to pinpoint the location of a specific card. Individual sets of cards can increase the importance of deduction by giving players the ability to know the value of certain hidden cards. In Love Letter that usually meant asking a question about a player’s hand or looking at that hand, but with the expanded depth of Lost Legacy that can instead mean looking at a ruins card or a card that’s been discarded face-down. Some powers even can move cards around, making the deduction that much more interesting.

Masking. Here’s another way to make deduction more interesting: purposefully hide cards. The Sacred Grail embraces this the most fully through a mechanic that forces some cards to be played (discarded) face-down — but playing cards into the ruins also implicitly masks them.

Bluffing. Bluffing mechanics are another fun addendum to deduction. This can link closely to masking. For example, Werewolf has a Woodsman (7) card that lets you take a card from someone’s discard (that was probably face-up) and then place a card in the ruins. Players will usually assume that they know which card is getting placed in the ruins, but you can mess them up with a good bluff. There’s an even more explicit bluff in Sacred Grail: the Royal Court (X) card lets you ask certain questions, but also lets players holding certain cards lie.

Elimination. At least two of the sets, Staff of Dragons and Undying Heart focus on Elimination. I don’t find them as interesting as the deduction-focused games … but with that said, they’re sometimes focused on deduction too. In many sets, if you can figure out what cards players are holding, then you can play certain cards to eliminate them. (Staff of Dragons, which is my least favorite of the five sets I played, instead eliminates players based on what’s in their discard piles, which just isn’t as interesting of a mechanic, but is cool as a variation.)

Special Power. Some cards just give special powers that are somewhat outside the range of the standard mechanics.

Overall, it’s impressive how much Lost Legacy manages to do with a small number of mechanics. But it’s also insightful to see how tightly the mechanics are connected (such as the deductive basis of most elimination) and how much those mechanics can vary.

The Garden Legacy

The Flying Garden is one of the two standalone Lost Legacy sets; it offers a nice basis for looking at how the game works.

Here’s a quick run through of all the cards:

• 1 — The Saint. An anti-elimination card. Stops you from being eliminated once it’s played.
• 2 — Necromancer. An anti-deduction, anti-masking, or anti-special-power card. Shuffles discards back into the deck. (The exact result of that depends on what other cards are in the game.)
• 3 — Adventurer. A deduction card. Lets you look at cards in the ruins.
• 4 — Guardian. An anti-deduction card. Shuffles the players’ hands.
• 5 — Lost Legacy. A victory card. No other power.
• 6 — False Rumors. A deduction card. A pretty interesting variation on deduction: instead of looking at cards, you draw two cards and place one in the ruins. Also, an elimination card. You get to place the other card in a player’s discard, which can eliminate them in some cases.
• 7 — Storyteller. A deduction card. Lets you make an additional investigation at the end of the game.
• 8 — Curse. An elimination card. Eliminate a player if you guess the card in their hand.
• X — Wounds. An elimination card. Eliminate a player once they have a second wound in their discard.

What’s particularly insightful about these cards is how they manage to approach the core mechanics I listed in some many different ways. So, a deduction card can look at a card (“3”, the most obvious sort of deduction), place a card (“6”, a sort of intrinsic deduction), or provide an extra investigation (“7”, allowing correct deduction based on less information). Similarly an elimination card can either be based on deduction (“8”) or based on handing a player a card that’s bad for their current situation (“X”).

Loving a True Legacy

A new category of games becomes something truly interesting when it attracts descendants that are more than just imitators. I can’t say that Battlecruisers (2016) or Coup (2012) were definitively influenced by Love Letter … but they sure feel like it.

Coup (2012) is a 15-card game based around just five characters. Each player is given two of the characters, which they keep face down. The catch is that a player can use any character power that she wants — basically bluffing as to what her cards are. If you’re caught, you lose a character. Two strikes and you’re out!

Battlecruisers (2016) comes with 165 cards (33 per player), but it’s nonetheless a microgame because you only use 6-8 cards per game. Unlike the other microgames, you have a pretty large hand, but there are still limitations to playing them: you effectively can’t use the same card two turns in a row. Your number of cards will also be whittled down over the course of the game. Though this is the most far-flung of the microgames, it still meets the core criteria, including simple and quick play, with the rules being almost entirely encoded in the cards.

Conclusion

It could be that this is as far as the microgames will go. Like the equally innovative role civilization games, we might see these several variants and not much more. However, it’s also possible that Love Letter, Lost Legacy, Coup, and Battlecruisers are just the start, in which case I look forward to what the microgame category brings us next!

Liked it? Take a second to support Shannon Appelcline on Patreon!