First Impression: Suitors

By W. Eric Martin
September 25, 2007

Publisher: Firestorm-Ink
Designer: Jonathan Lavallee
Artwork: Jenny Romanchuk
Players: 2-5
Ages: 13+
Playing Time: 15-20 minutes
Price: $13
Release Date: Released

Version Played: Published copy
Number of Plays: Twice, once each with 2 & 3 players

Finding a trick-taking game that not only bears a gloss of theme, but actually takes that theme into the game play is uncommon, but Suitors does the job. Players are lovers fighting over the same person, and whoever ends up with the highest point total—with love typically contributing the most to that total—wins the game and gets hitched.

The card deck in Suitors consists of three suits of cards and nine arcana cards that have special abilities; each suit has 17 cards, with 9 included once and 1-8 included twice. The suits are crowns (representing power), coins (money), and hearts (love).

Each player has a hand of three cards, and a trick—or “Tryst” as it’s called here, to keep in theme—consists of each person playing a single card to the table, starting with the Lover (first player) and continuing clockwise, drawing a card to refill your hand to three. You don’t have to follow suit, and the player who plays the highest number wins. If players tie, then you look at the suit of the cards, with power beating money beating love. Poor love. If players lay down identical cards, then the second card played wins. The winner takes all the cards played, puts them is his “love pool,” becomes the Lover, and starts the next trick.

Each of the nine arcana cards has a unique ability, such as the Magician, which lets you grab all power cards in the current trick, and the Priest, which automatically wins the trick if it’s the first card played. Only the first arcana card played in a trick takes effect; any played later are effectively blank.

When the game ends, you tally your score with love cards worth 5 points, money worth 3, power worth 1, and arcana cards worth nothing.

Suitors sounds fine in theory, but I had a few issues with the game, both in how it played and how it’s designed. In general, I felt that I didn’t have enough choices when playing a card. For approximately ten turns in a two-player game, my opponent played something, then I played a low-valued card, lost, and drew another low-valued card. Rinse and repeat. Yes, card games can slam you with bad luck, but I wanted more cards to choose from so that I could possibly manage the luck. If you played Suitors with people who prefer light card games, then the luck might not be as much of an issue. You’d chat and eat chips and listen to music and play. Night would fall. The Earth would keep on turning, as it always does, oblivious to your efforts to win love.

As for the game design, the art on the arcana cards is spectacular. Jenny Romanchuk has put a lot of personality into them, using a pseudo-manga style loaded with flowing hair and swirly clothing. Playing the arcana cards, on the other hand, can be a bit tricky. The tiny rulebook explains only two of the arcana cards, so when you draw “Nothing beats true love,” you’re at a loss as to what it does. My guess is that it automatically wins the trick, but theme has obscured meaning in this case. Death is also baffling, but thankfully the rulebook goes into death’s details.

Suitors is self-produced, and while the cards themselves are of decent quality, the self-production is evident in a few ways. The Heirophant arcana card, for example, has a glaring typo on it—reading “Win all love cards in this Tryst. They become love in your love pool.” instead of “Win all money cards....” The cards are indexed only in the upper-right corners, and the index consists of only the number and not the suit. With only three cards in your hand, this isn’t a major issue, but it does make the game harder to play.

The worst flaw of this type is that the rulebook doesn’t explain when the game ends: When the last card is drawn? When one player runs out of cards? When all players run out of cards? (The answer is, surprisingly, the last one. Players can have uneven numbers of cards in the final turn as one arcana card—Wheel—has you flip over a card from the deck for your play that trick.)

All in all, Suitors isn’t a bad game, but I prefer to play trick-taking games that provide players more control and more challenging play through greater hand management.

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Hope she can free that scarf before turning the wheel...
	A graceful bunny

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