Miscellany: Love Letter

I've been looking up travel friendly games for a fall road trip, and one title that keeps coming up is Love Letter, designed by Seiji Kanai. It's a light deduction card game for 2-4 players with a whole lot of random chance built in:

At the start of a turn, a player draws a card and decides whether to play that card, or the one already in their hand. The cards all have special abilities, like looking at other player's cards or eliminating players outright based on various conditions. The easiest way to victory is by being the last player standing, though you can also win simply by having the highest value card after all the cards are drawn.

Love Letter is impressive mainly because of how much strategy it mines from 16 cards, all of which have pluses and minuses. For example, the "Princess" is the highest value card for scoring purposes, but it's downright dangerous to its holder. The game is small enough to be carried in a pocket and perfect for travel. Of course, there are now a bajillion different versions of Love Letter, some of which introduce small tweaks to the rules, but I recommend trying the vanilla game first.