Love Is War Postmortem

Project Description

Love is War is a card game where you and your non-fellow rivals capture as many love interests on the field as possible - the ultimate capturable target being Keanu Reeves. Each of the targets are labeled from 1-5 stars and whoever wins 15+ star points first will win the game. The other win condition is if all targets are used up, the player with the most points will win the game. For each round, there will be a “Mediator of Love”, a judge who will determine the winning trait card of the current round after listening to the players argue for their card. During that round, they will not participate in claiming any targets themselves with one single exception. The position will go around clockwise to the next Judge when they place down the next two targets. At the start of the round, each of the players receives five cards in the hand. These cards consist of “trait cards”, “action cards” and a “special action card”. Trait cards will be played to fill in the blanks of targets. If the category of the trait card matches the blank requirement, the player will keep the trait card to count a bonus star point. Some action cards can be used to benefit you or used against players. The special action card can only be used by the Mediator of Love to join the battle for target claiming, but they can only go for one. In this situation where this is no judge, it is an all-out-war where all rivals argue for their card.

What went right

• The core mechanic of people arguing/debating worked and it was fun to play in playtests
• The aesthetic is unique and contributes to the overall feeling of the game
• The humor is successfully delivered 
• The current distribution of cards work
• The pacing & length of the game is pretty good 

What went wrong

As much as there were things that we did correctly in the game, there were a few aspects of the game that left a lot to be desired.  The first big thing that didn’t go properly was with the first set of mechanics that we implemented. Namely, the “charm points” mechanic we had proposed.  This mechanic slowed our game’s pace to a crawl because in addition to meeting “trait card” requirements, there was also an additional requirement that players needed to meet and a lot of the time, it meant players couldn’t do anything for a few turns.  This leads into our next flaw with the game, which was that some targets were nearly impossible to get because of their requirements. An example of this was our 5-star Keanu Reeves target. While we were able to get him in our personal playtests, no one got him when we played the game with others in the class.  This would also be a problem later in the game since it would mean that he was just lying out in the field and no one would be able to claim him, leading people needing to go for lower ranking targets and getting frustrated over the fact that Keanu Reeves couldn’t get taken.  

Another issue we had with our game was that there was a difficulty in engaging in too many arguments in the game.  This is mainly true in our game since a lot of us do not know how other people play games that require discussion and this would lead to people not wanting to argue too much.  In addition, as we got others to playtest the game, we soon realized that there wasn’t much incentive to argue and debate since there wasn’t much of a story for people to get invested in when they played the game.  The players felt no reason to get one target over another.  

One of the issues that plagued the game from the very first playtest was that shuffling of the cards could be very advantageous to some players and extremely disadvantageous to others.  This might not only be due to the shuffling but due to some imbalance in the amount of each type of card that was there. This is also part of the reason the game’s pace was incredibly slow and why some players could claim targets but others could not.

A final issue of the game was with the rulebook, the rules weren’t clearly stated a few times and therefore, some players didn’t look incredibly thoroughly at the rulebook.  Because they didn’t look too thoroughly at the book, it led to an issue where people would not know what to do because they didn’t read. Although there were some conditions and rules that were not included in the rulebook which made it somewhat confusing for other players. 

Future Goals

• Fix the distribution of cards (perhaps decrease action cards?)
• Create a better rulebook with more clarity and illustrations (something more digestible)
• Make the blank requirements more open, so more players can place cards
• Create different targets for different expansions

What we’ve learned

Playtesting is a really important thing that helped us change our rules & mechanics. Every playtest we had, we discovered flaws in our game’s mechanics and looking back we made a lot of significant changes from our original prototype.

We also learned that the wording of the rulebook is essential to the understanding of the rules & mechanics. During the last playtest, players still have questions when playing the game even though they’ve already read through the rulebook.