Green Room Gaming #1: Love Letter
One of the unfortunate truths I’ve discovered about being a grown-up is that there is a constant struggle to find the time to meaningfully develop your hobbies. To this end, I’ve recently started to try and optimize my free time by seeking out ways to combine the things that I love. While some of these attempts have been met with more success than others, I’ve had a fair degree of success introducing my taiko-playing colleagues to the wondrous world of hobby board gaming.
Shoji Kameda of On Ensemble had a few blog entries last year that discussed his efforts to introduce his groupmates to geeky board games - an endeavor I can wholeheartedly empathize with. While I certainly have never gone on tour and needed to figure out how to kill time in a hotel between shows, I can think of numerous occasions where my groupmates and I had to wait around for several hours backstage before actually getting to perform. When I came to this realization, I started stashing a few small games away in my bachi bag to help pass the time (because let’s face it - you can only air-bachi the set so many times backstage).
This column explores "green room games" for the taiko player with some extra pre-performance free time. I realize the audience for a column on “games to play before a performance” is a rather niche one. However, I think you’ll find that a quick game during downtime can bring your group closer together and foster the sense of camaraderie that is so important to an ensemble performance.
So what makes a good board game for these situations?
Low Time Commitment
When your group is booked for a large event with many moving parts, things can change at a moment’s notice. One minute, everyone is running late so your performance time is delayed by over an hour. The next minute, you and your team are scrambling to hustle your drums onto the stage because of some creative schedule maneuvering on the part of the organizer. To this end, it helps to have a game that can be completed in a relatively short amount of time, so you can maintain the agility and flexibility necessary to adapt to the needs of your client.
Simple Setup
When a game requires you to allocate and track a myriad of decks, tokens, pieces, and other accoutrements, chances are you’ll spend all your time setting up for a game and very little time actually playing it. Even when you don’t have one of the aforementioned sudden schedule shifts, some of your groupmates might find their interest waning when they watch a particularly involved setup.
Small Footprint
While it is always nice when a client provides you with a green room, I’ve more often than not found myself shuffled away into an unobtrusive corner with our equipment to wait until showtime. As such, it is likely that your play area will be limited, meaning that a good travel game requires minimal space to play.
Simple Rules
Unless your group consistently plays the same game on a regular basis, chances are that you’ll be doing a lot of explaining. The rules of an ideal game can be quickly presented and do not have many exceptions or corner-cases that require additional explanation. Practicing your two-minute explanation can greatly streamline the process.
So what’s in the bag today?
Love Letter
The first game I’m going to talk about is Love Letter, designed by Seiji Kanai and released by Alderac Entertainment Group in 2012. Love Letter is a light bluffing and deduction game for 2-4 players. The game is played with a deck of sixteen cards and several small cubes, and comes in a small velvet pouch that easily slips into the pocket of a bachi bag or backpack.
Players are each dealt a single card from the deck. Players then take turns drawing a card and discarding a card. The cards are numbered from 1 through 8, and each numbered card has a different effect when discarded. For example, the “2” card (the Priest), allows the player to look at another player’s hand when it is discarded. These effects can be positive or negative, and some allow for the elimination of players. For example, if a player is forced to discard the “8” card (the Princess), then that player is eliminated. After a card is discarded, it is placed face-up in the discard pile, so players can deduce what cards the others are holding. Play continues until either (1) all players except one are eliminated, in which case the remaining player wins the round, or (2) until the last card is drawn, at which point, the player with the highest numbered card in their hand wins the round.
Individual rounds of Love Letter go very quickly, generally taking no more than 5 minutes. If you have additional time to kill, you can play the first to 4 rounds, using the cubes to track victories.
Love Letter is a prime example of a “microgame,” a relatively new movement in hobby game design aimed at condensing as much gameplay as possible into a small set of components. For our purposes, this makes Love Letter an ideal game for on-the-go taiko players. The rounds proceed quickly and can be completed in a matter of minutes. Additionally, because the game consists entirely of cards and cubes, Love Letter has a minimal footprint and can be played in even the smallest backstage corner without difficulty. At the same time, there is enough tactical depth to the game to keep things interesting and interactive.
Finally, for those concerned with the somewhat sexist theme (players are competing to woo a princess through their love letters), AEG offers a variety of rethemes for Love Letter, including Adventure Time, the Hobbit, and Batman.
While this isn’t a “desert island” game that I would want to play every day, it is a very straightforward, yet surprisingly deep game that can work for gamers of all ages and experience levels. There is more than a little bit of luck involved, but the games go so quickly that the added variance doesn’t really bother me.
You can find Love Letter at most local game stores or online retailers for under $10, making it an inexpensive addition to any taiko player’s loadout.
