A love letter to Love Letter.....

I'm starting to believe there is a bit of a renaissance occurring in board game circles, a rejection of the new and shiny and complex.  The complexity of modern games has left a lot of us with a sour taste in our mouths.  What happened to the simple, elegant brilliance of Modern Art or Ticket To Ride or even Power Grid?  Or even short games like the excellent Coloretto or For Sale?

Okay, maybe it's just me.  But still, I gotta think people are looking for more simplicity when gamers keep mentioning Love Letter in every second post and article I read.  If you haven't heard of Love Letter, then you probably don't read too many board game blogs.  So why is a game that costs $7, plays in about 5 minutes, and uses 16 cards and a few red cubes suddenly the darling of the game world?  Well, maybe that's just it.  Simpilcity.  10 seconds of rules explanation which yields, I daresay, a great half hour of fun, albeit very light fun.

So how does Love Letter work and how can it play so well with only 16 cards? (The cubes are really extraneous and serve only as scoring markers.)  The rules are dead simple.  You hold one card and on your turn you pick up a second card.  Then you have to play one of your cards face up and do what it says.  That's pretty much it.  The goal?  Be the last player left in the round or be the player holding the highest card when the draw pile empties.

It's overly simple but what makes the game interesting are the card powers.  Cards are numbered 1-8 and the different values all have different actions.  One lets you look at another player's card, some let you guess an opponent's card and eliminate that player if you're right, one makes you discard your other card of a certain type, and so on.  Each option is simple but the interplay of the actions is what creates such an enjoyable little round.  It's entirely possible to be eliminated on the first turn but when rounds can run under 2 minutes this doesn't really bother anyone.  Shuffle 'em up, deal another one! 

Yes, Love Letter has a hefty dose of luck but I've never seen so much fun packed into such a short, simple package.  Do yourself a favour and pick this lovely little filler up - anyone can learn it and anyone can play it and everyone will love it.  And for 7 bucks, that's a pretty awesome deal.

Better learn quick...

I realized last night that I've signed up for a Euchre tournament that runs tonight but I have yet to ever play the game.  Been playing madly all lunch on my Ipod, trying to burn into my brain the stupid right Bauer rule (yes, that jack of clubs to the left is NOW a spade). 

I swear I'm gonna renege ten times in this tourney before I get it right....

First play: Parade

Managed to finally get a hold of this little card game which I heard some pretty good things about.  The game itself took very little time to explain (despite the horrendously overcomplicated rules page - thanks, Z-man!) and we got right into it.  It's pretty darn simple.  Each turn one plays a numbered card to the end of the "parade" which may cause them to take  cards already in the parade.  The number on the card played determines exactly what subset of cards in the parade one might have to take and, in an Uno-like way, which of those must be taken.  Any cards taken score their face-value against you at the end of the game.  Low score wins.

Sounds pretty simple and this would be a tedious game of luck if not for the scoring rules.  Having a majority in any colour at the end of the game let's you flip those cards so they only count one against you.  So now suddenly you WANT to take certain cards and things get a bit more complicated.  The decisions aren't heavy but they're definitely quite interesting.  All 6 of us liked the first game and definitely want to try it again.  Cool little filler, methinks...

The story of the Bottle Imp...

We have been playing Flaschenteufel: The Bottle Imp as many times as possible the past month. It is a ridiculously clever and devious trick-taking game that works best with three.  I am happy to say that this great little game is being reprinted in the upcoming year.

When Gunter Cornett invented the game, he had based it on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson.  Thanks to Wikipedia, here is the story:

The story is about a working class native of Hawaiʻi, Keawe, who buys a strange bottle from a sad, elderly gentleman who credits the bottle with his wealth and fortune, and promises the imp in the bottle will also grant Keawe his every wish and desire.

Of course, there is a catch — the bottle must be sold at a loss, i.e. for less than its owner originally paid, or else it will simply return to him. The currency used in the transaction must also be in coin (not paper currency or check). The bottle may not be thrown or given away. If an owner of the bottle dies without having sold it in the prescribed manner, that person's soul will burn for eternity in Hell.

The bottle was said to have been brought to Earth by the Devil and first purchased by Prester John for millions of dollars; it was owned by Napoleon and Captain James Cook and accounted for both's great successes, but each sold it - leading both to a nasty end. At the time of the story the price has diminished to eighty dollars, and declines rapidly to a matter of pennies.

Keawe buys the bottle and instantly wishes his money to be refunded, to convince himself he hadn't been suckered. When his pockets fill with coins, he realizes the bottle does indeed have unholy power. He finds he cannot abandon it or sell it for a profit, so he wishes for his heart's desire: a big, fancy mansion. He then sells the bottle to a friend (after explaining the risks) and returns to Hawaiʻi.

Upon his return, Keawe's wish has been granted, but at a price: his beloved uncle and cousins have been killed in a boating accident, leaving Keawe sole heir to his uncle's fortune. Keawe is horrified, but uses the money to build his house.

Keawe lives a happy life, but there is something missing. Walking along the beach one night, he meets a beautiful woman. They soon fall in love and become engaged. Keawe's happiness is shattered on the night of his betrothal, when he discovers that he has contracted "the Chinese Evil" (leprosy) in his travels. He must give up his house and wife, and live in the caves with the other lepers. Unless...

Keawe tries to track down the friend to whom he sold the bottle, but the friend has become suddenly wealthy and left Hawaiʻi. Keawe eventually finds the bottle, but the owner has bad news: he only paid two cents for it. If Keawe buys it for one, he won't be able to resell it.

Keawe decides to buy the bottle, and wishes himself clean. But now he is despondent: how can he possibly enjoy life, knowing his doom? His wife mistakes his depression for regret at their marriage, and asks for a divorce. Keawe confesses to her his secret.

His wife suggests they sail to Tahiti, where the colonists of French Polynesia use centimes, a coin worth one-fifth of an American cent. When they arrive, however, the suspicious natives won't touch the cursed bottle. Keawe's wife decides to bribe an old sailor to buy the bottle for four centimes, and she will secretly buy it back for three. But now she carries the curse.

Keawe discovers what his wife has done, so he asks a brutish boatswain to buy the bottle for two centimes, and he will buy it back for one, thus sealing his doom. However, when Keawe goes to retrieve the bottle, the sailor threatens to bash in his head. There's no way he's giving up the magic wishing bottle. (Its most attractive feature, from the boatswain's point of view, is being filled with a never-ending supply of whisky.)Keawe warns the sailor that he'll go to hell if he keeps the bottle, but the sailor never expected to go anywhere else. Keawe returns to his wife, finally free from the curse. In effect Satan is confounded - having taken considerable trouble in sending this bottle into the world, and finally gotten for it only the boatswain's soul, which was his anyway. 

Hoyle, eat your heart out...

You know, with all this talk of board games shipped from Germany and the US, it probably seems like I don't like a good old-fashioned game of cards. Not true. I was raised playing cards and spent years playing duplicate Bridge with my parents. And I still enjoy the simplicity of a game of Hearts...

Just found a great site for card games at www.pagat.com. It contains rules for what looks like thousands of games and it even has info for commercial card games requiring special decks of cards. Nice.