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One of my targets, strange as it might sound, was Love Letter: Batman from Seiji Kanai and Alderac Entertainment Group. Why Love Letter: Batman, you might ask yourself, given how well Love Letter is already known and how light the game itself is. That lightness, though, is precisely one of the reasons why I wanted to focus on this game. The number of Batman fans far outnumbers the people who know about Love Letter — or who even know about modern board games for that matter — and that fanaticism for Batman was on display at BGG.CON 2014 where several people passing by the table during our demo shouted "Yeah, Batman!" or something similar.
The low cost of Love Letter: Batman will undoubtedly encourage many of them to pick up the game, just as that cost has made comic book retailers excited to carry the game in the first place, and some percentage of those buyers will go on to discover a fine little game that they otherwise would have never encountered. That's one way that new game players are created, and since I'd love to see more people playing games, I'm excited by the prospect.
Gamers joke about Love Letter becoming like Munchkin — which, of course, it literally already has — but they say that as if it were a bad thing, as if giving people something fun to play or introducing new people to a world that you enjoy is somehow bad. Me, I'm all about hoping that people find something that they love to do, whether or not I'm doing the same thing as them. Sure, I might prefer that everyone like the same games that I do so that they sell well and ensure the designers and publishers a revenue stream that will support their future creative endeavors, but I'll be satisfied with more people gaming no matter what they play.
(Why do I care whether more people are playing games? Because I enjoy playing games and want to share that joy with others, because I want people to discover new concepts in games beyond what they've seen in toy stores for decades, and because I want the possibility of more players with whom to play games. I'm selfish that way. Also, job security.)
Anyway, I played a couple of rounds of Love Letter: Batman at BGG.CON 2014, and it does exactly what's promised: Put a twist on the original game that makes you play it just a little bit differently. You can read the game description on the BGG if you want to know details, or you watch the video below in which I talk with AEG's Todd Rowland about this version of the game, the origins of Love Letter, and other versions of the game coming down the pike, namely Love Letter: Adventure Time and Love Letter: Archer.
In the video above, Todd and I also cover the twists in Love Letter: The Hobbit – The Battle of the Five Armies, another version of the game that's also due out March 2015, but if you haven't watched that video you can catch it all in the shorter video below or read the description on the linked game page that's now live in the BGG database.
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