A Love Letter to Saboteur

Games night this week saw a return to boardgamearena.com, which has quickly become our home base on Monday nights.

We started out with what I had assumed would be a quick game of Love Letter while we were gathering players, but I hadn't counted on either my player's unfamiliarity with the game slowing it down far too much, or on BGA using the 'premium' 5-8 player rules, which I'd never met until I was suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into teaching them to new players;na frustrating experience for everyone involved.

Love Letter wasn't necessarily a completely intuitive game in the first place, indeed a lot of the attraction comes in puzzling out the competing relationships and strengths and weaknesses of the different combination various cards for yourself as you play, but a few things about this implementation haven't helped the learning process. The original rule book, as well as being insanely cute, has extremely clear detailed descriptions of each of the card interactions, as well as having well-written descriptions on the cards themselves. In this version, a shorthand iconographic notation which might work as a reminder but does nothing to help a new player has been used on the cards instead (possibly this is included in some international versions of the game, so it might not be BGA's fault). On top of that, the rules written on the board have been shortened so far as to lose their meaning, so they don't make the situation any better.

The extra cards themselves, though? They are very cool, speeding up the game overall and creating more of the supremely satisfying what-just-happened-there moments which are where Love Letter shines. Definitely an improvement over the double-base-deck version that I was expecting we would be playing when I suggested the game, even if they do make for a considerably more complex game to teach.

Next up we played a couple of palate-cleansing games of 7 Wonders, which I wouldn't normally mention further since I've talked at length about this always excellent in the past, but one of the games was a little notable. I was playing as Giza, and realised early on in the second age that since I'd missed out of the marketplace cards and neither of my neighbours had built any stone at all, I was going to have to shell out for the two-stone quarry if I wanted to finish building my wonder, bringing my stone production to an excessive 5. A little later on, with none of the other players having realised their predicament just yet, I was able to tuck the second quarry under my wonder. The outcome of this was that a number of players had access to either only one piece or even no access at all to stone for love or money. A similar situation has also arisen with the cloth supply, which all resulted in a wildly uneven game where those who had free builds or gotten lucky in the resource lottery did very well, and some other players, even those with otherwise fine resource bases and stacks of cash, had a terrible final round (one player had two turns in which they could do nothing and another two where they only had one option.). I have played more than 100 games of 7 Wonders, and I don't remember ever seeing one like this.

Finally, the remaining six of us played Saboteur. Personally I think six players is one fewer than the ideal number of players for this hidden traitor card game, but we made it work. BGA actually has a handy option to force there to be the maximum number of saboteurs, which I would say is a must for a six-player game to give the bad guys a chance, but unfortunately I missed it when setting up the game, as I was dazzled by the number of variant rules on offer. One house rule that isn't enforceable, but that I think greatly improves the game, is to force players to play cards if they can and to only discard if they have literally no other option, but we enforced this via a gentleman's agreement, and it worked well. The highlight was the moment when the miners, having uncovered and neutered the saboteurs early on, debated the wisdom of potentially deliberately fixing their opponent's equipment in order to force them to play useful cards where we needed them, which wouldn't have ultimately worked but made for an interesting thought experiment that wouldn't have otherwise been possible in a game that I generally feel like I've played out.

All in all, it was another enjoyable, well executed Monday night games night. The games are just the oil for the wheel of conversation, of course, but it helps when they add to the fun rather than just stressing everybody out as they wrestle with technology and mechanics.

This was my seventeenth post in Blapril 2020, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. Do check out some of the posts that others have been creating over the month. I'm looking forward to seeing what Stargrace does with their new socking knitting machine!