Love Conquers All is a cooperative tile-laying board game with a cosy vibe and a positive theme, currently seeking funds on Kickstarter. There are just two different reward tiers, one that will get you the game itself, and another that will see game designer Jeff Siadek travel to your house and teach you the game in person – for just $100.
Though Siadek doesn’t have a smash-hit game that’s earned a spot on our guide to the best board games, he’s a well established designer who has been making board games for over 30 years. We’ve tested his social deduction game Lifeboat – it’s a good’un!
The game costs $25 (£25) on Kickstarter, plus shipping and sales tax for your home nation. Then there are a limited number of $100 (£80) ‘In your home!’ pledges to have Siadek pay you a personal visit, teach you the game, and introduce you to some of his older titles too. This in-person experience is only on offer if you live within 50 miles of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, New York City, Arnhem, or Frankfurt.
Love Conquers All is a tile-laying cooperative board game for one to five players. Your goal is to get rid of all the ‘challenge’ cards in the deck, each of which represents one of the things that can make a relationship hard, be they concrete problems like ‘poverty’ or abstract things like ‘derision’.
When you put the card into play you add the matching tile to the board, and also add a rule to the game that will restrict how all players can act on future turns.
Those rules will get more and more onerous, but there is a way to deal with the problem – love! When you place a pink love tile adjacent to one or more challenge tiles, you flip the challenge tiles face down and remove the matching rule cards, making your future actions freer. Love conquers all, after all.
The co-operative gameplay, cosy theme, and charming art by Nick Leivers suggest that this could be a great board game for couples to relax with. According to Siadek it’s a lightweight game that will take half an hour to play. We haven’t tested it, so we can’t rule out the possibility that this is actually an argument engine on par with Monopoly, but we doubt it.
If you’d like to play something with a little more weight to it, we have a guide to great strategy board games to check out. To learn about our go-to cosy comfort game, check out our Wingspan review.