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Love letter was a surprise hit in my group. Everybody enjoys the fast pace and player interaction. It's just a shame that it only allows up to 4 players, because it seems like it would be better for say six players. I would have no problem buying a second copy of the game to shuffle the two decks of cards together, but I'm wondering if it would work in theory.
Has anybody got any suggestions as to how to try and increase the player limit?
If you're really up to it, you might want to buy the Love Letter Premium Edition which lets you play with up to eight players. It might be a bit different from the Love Letter you're used to though as it comes with new characters like the Assassin (which eliminates an opponent if that opponent forces you to reveal it).
It's an official game though so I you can rest assured that it's been playtested and was intended to be played with more players. I hope that helps :)
One way that I use lets you accommodate up to eight players. You will need two decks of Love Letter cards, and two tokens distinctly different from the tokens of affection. Remove one Princess, and give each player two tokens. Play normally, but when someone would be out, have them discard their card and draw a new one. Then they get rid of one of the tokens. When they have no more tokens left, they are out.
If you read the design diary of Lost Legacy (a game designed to be in the same system, from a games mechanics perspective, as Love Letter) you'll note it's pretty similar. It also has explicit rules on how to incorporate more players (because it's a series of games and there are more)
The Lost Legacy "MegaMix Set"
This variant allows up to six players to play the game. Use the following guidelines to create a set of 31 cards:
- Use all the cards in this set (16 cards) and one expansion set (16 cards again. Expansions for Lost Legacy are essentialy stand alone games. Each it's own variation on the Love Letter formula)
- Remove one of the Lost Legacy cards (Princess would be the closest analogy)
If players with, it's perfectly possible to play with a Megamix Set even with only 2-4 players.
For Love Letter you could simply combine two decks and remove the extra princess and you should be able to fit six players comfortably. If you enjoy Love Letter might I suggest the only SLIGHTLY more advanced Love Legacy series. It takes the same mechanics of Love Letter and makes the game a little less repetitive plus it also also expansions that add even more spice to the game beyond mere cosmetic changes as we see so often in Love Letter sets.
Love Letter is at the end of the day a micro game that probably shouldn't expand the player count because a lot of what makes the game works is the 4 player cap. With more players the tension in target selection is changed. The despiration to knock out a player can get replaced with the hopelessnes of knowing there are too many players to knock them out. It's a very tight and very well designed microgame.
We've recently been playing with 5 and 6 players, first to 3 favours.
For a 5 player game, add a Guard, a Priest and a Baron just to pad the deck a bit. This seemed to work seamlessly.
For a 6 player game, on top of the above, also add another Guard, a King and a Countess. This worked well, but we found that the strategies started to change. The Countess is more confusing because you discard it if you have one of 2 Princes, 2 Kings, the other Countess or the Princess.
We found that 7 and 8 players games became simultaneously more random and more deadly. Strategies started to break down and the Baron became a liability.
Look in the Variant subforum on BGG, there are quite a few ideas.
For example: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1094976/2-8-players-queen-jester
Having played quite a bit of Love Letter in all sorts of places, I can say it isn't too rough to play the game as written with up to seven people. It can be a little more chaotic and random, yes. The trick to playing with larger groups is just to manage your expectations. It's not going to be quite as tactical and tricky, but it can still be plenty of fun.
Having more than four players seems like it would be a lot more chaotic, cause they probably play tested the game and chose that number for that reason, I played a game called 7 wonders with a group of friends, and we had 7 people and the game is a 2 to 7 player game, and I will never have 7 people play it again, was supposed to be half an hour at most, it took us 1 to 2 hours, so, adding more players to Love letter might be more chaotic than you want, but give it a try, it doesn't hurt.
