Love Letter from AEG

1.       Love Letter from AEG. was Castle Perilous Games & Books Selected Stocking Stuffer of the Season in 2015 for several reasons.  First, Love Letter is a lot of fun, plays quickly and offers quite a bit of replay value, especially with the number of variants that AEG has released.  In addition, it boasts a great price point at $9.99 for the basic game and only $10.99 for the Batman, Hobbit and Adventure Time variants. There’s even a Letters to Santa version if you want to get really thematic. Add in that the game is attractively packaged in both boxed and clamshell versions and you have a great stocking stuffer.

Love Letter Sold

AEG's popular Love Letter card game recently sold to Z-man Games, part of the Asmodee group. Here are some of Scott's thoughts on the matter in this week's Rolling for Initiative column. 

Love Letter Moving

Z Man Games announced it has acquired the rights to the Love Letter line of games, including Love Letter Premium and Lovecraft Letter, from AEG. What does this mean to you? If you are a consumer, not much as Z Man plans no changes to the game. Actually, you may see one problem. Z-man is notorious for lengthy out of stocks of its product (The On The Brink expansion for Pandemic has been out of stock since last summer and we don't expect to see it arrive before June) so I can foresee lengthy out of stocks for the game in the future.

Good Plan, Lousy Communication

AEG, publisher of Smash-up, Trains, Epic PvP and several varieties of Love Letter, announced their Pro Retailer program last March at the GAMA Trade Show. It was a pretty nice promotion, offering incentives and promotional items to retailers who agreed to purchase or pre-commit to orders of specific quantities of monthly upcoming items, such as Greedy Greedy Goblins or Archer. Like I said, great idea, one that we bought into for several of the promotions.

Unfortunately, the communication wound up lacking as AEG did not make clear how the ordering of their games was to be handled. Case in point, last June's release of Archer:  Once You Go Blackmail... The promotion was, buy 12 copies of the game and get additional promotional games and items. It sounded great and we agreed to participate. Unfortunately, the folks at AEG never discussed how the order was to be handled. I figured that either AEG would sell them to us direct and would send an invoice or would contact our distributor about the order. Instead, it turned out that the store had to take the initiative in the process and contact the distributor to put in the order. Due to this lack of clarity of communication,  we wound up not participating in 3 of AEG's Pro-Retailer promotions so far this year. Now that AEG has clarified the process, we will participate in future opportunities but 'tis a pity to have lost the previous chances due to poor communication

Castle Perilous Games & Books Stocking Stuffer of the Season

This year's Stocking Stuffer of the Season is AEG's Love Letter. There are several reasons for its selection this year:

1. Size:   Love Letter comes in either clamshell packaging or a small box, either of which wrap up nicely to fit in a stocking.

2. Price:  At $9.99 for most versions, Love Letter meets the $10 price point that many people look for in a stocking stuffer

3.  Playability:  Love Letter, in all its variants, is one of our best selling games and an award winner to boot. The reason for that is how quickly the game plays and how much fun it is.

For these reasons, Castle Perilous Games and Books happily selects Love Letter as our Stocking Stuffer of the Season.