Love Letter: Batman - 23

19th September 2021

Sunday afternoon gaming at The Sovereigns continued with Love Letter: Batman.

Love Letter: Batman is of course a licensed reskin of the most excellent Love Letter, a game that we've played a lot of in the past.
I'm not going to talk about Love Letter: Batman too much because it differs from the original in only 2 ways - more on that later.
Love Letter: Batman cleverly maps characters from the Batman milieu into the game.
​Batman becomes the guard, which when you think about it makes sense, since he's able to immediately take out enemies if he's smart enough.
The Joker becomes the princess, power in some situations, but liability in others and he's one everyone's looking.
Robin becomes the handmaiden, protecting the player by drawing enemy attacks away with his brightly coloured garb!

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The cards in Love Letter: Batman pretty standard quality and are all illustrated with suitably comic book styled artwork which all looks the part.
The game also utilises bat-symbol themed scoring tokens - pretty cool.

The rule changes
Love Letter: batman changes 2 rules from the original.

• 7 points to win: Winning Love Letter: Batman requires players to score 7 points, whereas the original required 7-4 points for 2-4 player games. This ties in with the other change, which is...
• Batman can score extra points: This makes Batman overpowered and well, I suppose this is at least thematically accurate!
  This occurs whenever the active player uses a Batman card to successfully guess an opponent's card and that card was a villain - which it most likely will be as Batman cards can't be targeted this way and the only other hero is Robin. If this condition is met, the active player immediately scores a point.

Those are the rule changes and once again a rule has been introduced which allows players to score points mid-round, it's a concept I really don't like. It ruins the game's tension by allowing players to reach the victory threshold and essentially win the game before the round is over. It's so anti-climatic.
I've heard it said that it this rule makes the game play quicker, but the higher victory threshold for 3-4 player kind of negates that.

Conversely; in classic Love Letter, even if one player is 1 point away from winning and all the other players are at 0 points, until that player has won that final hand to win that final point, it's not over. Yes, it'd be a hard turnaround and a longshot, but it doesn't change the fact that nothing is over 'til everything is over.

Want my opinion? Just play Love Letter: Batman as classic Love Letter. Yes, it does make having this version sort of of pointless, but the classic version is the best version and there's nothing stopping you yelling dinner, dinner, dinner dinner, BATMAN when you play a card.