Love Letter: The Hobbit – The Battle of the Five Armies is a game of risk, deduction, and luck for 2–4 players based on the original Love Letter game by Seiji Kanai. The deck consists of 17 cards, with the Arkenstone being valued #8, Bilbo Baggins #7, and so on down to The One Ring at #0.
In each round, each player starts with only one card in hand; one card is removed from play. On a turn, you draw one card, and play one card, using the power on that card to expose others and (possibly) knock them out of the round. If you're the final player active in the round or the player with the highest card when the deck runs out, then you score a point. In LL: The Hobbit, The One Ring does nothing during play, but it counts as a #7 when the game ends, possibly leading to a tie should someone else hold Bilbo.
In addition to the one extra card, LL: The Hobbit differs from the original game in that the Baron (#3) is represented by two separate cards: Tauriel and Legolas. When you use an elf's power to compare cards, Tauriel knocks out the player with the higher valued card while Legolas targets the lower valued card. (This change isn't in the German edition, where Legolas and Tauriel have the same text.)
Whoever first wins 4-7 rounds, with the number dependent on the number of players, wins the game!
- Favorite version of Love Letter.
- Thematic integration of the One Ring card.
- Great game that is generally accessible.
- Deduction and elimination
- The Hobbit
- Love Letter
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Card Drafting — You were trying to either each round collect these tokens by being the last person standing with the highest number or be the last person standing or out of the people who are the last people standing have the highest number.
- Deduction — Playing cards to deduce opponent's hands and eliminate them.
- Set Collection — Collecting tokens by being the last person standing with the highest number.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- you are drafting um vegetables in order to score or you are drafting um scoring cards and that's that's the entire game
- it's another chill two-player game
- this is a push your luck game where you are trying to go down into the water and get the best treasure
- this is one of those kinds of games kind of like uh Puerto Rico where you when you enact uh on your turn you enact one of the phases of a game um and then everyone gets to do that same phase but you get a better version of it
- the Pips the numbers aren't good or bad they just are different things that you're able to do
- this is this is a monster Euro but it is oh so satisfying
- this is a reimplementation of Brugge the previous fail game is kind of perfected in Hamburg
- I absolutely love a this kind of this particular kind of Uno with a particular group of friends with a particular group of set of house rules at a certain time of year
- we play with a lot of house rules we let the twos stack the plus twos stack and guess what we love it we don't care it's really fun sorry Uno purists