Game Synopsis

Love Conquers All is a game that explores the challenges we face when building and balancing relationships. These challenges - sickness, career, intolerance, fear, religion, obligation, children, travel, contempt - take on different shapes in our lives and place limitations and expectations on us all. Our collective goal in the game is to play cards and place irregularly shaped tiles representing these challenges so they all fit within the framework of the board. Each challenge comes with a rule or restriction making it increasingly difficult to find room to accommodate them all. Love can make all the difference here. A love tile that connects to a challenge nullifies its rules, opening the board and your life to make room for more. If you can place all the challenges, you’ll prove how love truly can conquer all.

Why We Love Love Conquers All

This game accomplishes something incredible. It engages our rational, logical self AND the emotional, intutive one. The game demands strategic thinking and planning in order to have a shred of hope for success. The board will seem plenty large enough to contain any and all challenges, but after two or three tiles are placed and their rules activated, players will quickly realize how many tricky problems they will have to puzzle out. Placement rules for each challenge will interact and overlap to create an increasingly smaller window of safe places for anyone to play. The game asks you to pay attention and think about the consequences of your actions and others.  

And that’s where the intuitive and emotional spark begins. Communication is the core principle and lesson of the game. You must share your knowledge and thoughts and fears in order to do well. BUT communication is restricted in an agonizingly appropriate way. You can never discuss the specific challenge cards you have in your hand before you select one to play. Each card is keyed to a specific shape challenge tile and describes the rules that will come into play once it is part of the board. You can discuss your needs and how others’ plans could help or hurt you, but you can’t reveal details. Once you make your choice, everyone can pitch in to find the best placement.

This is a beautiful metaphor for the concept behind the game. We are all stumbling through life next to each other with partial knowledge. We can never really know the exact shape of someone else’s hopes and fears. All we can do is do our best to give people a sense of our needs and wants and how they might affect everyone else. Only after we make choices in life can we see their consequences. We live in hope that those around us can help us navigate those choices to everyone’s benefit. 

The title and concept of the Love Conquers All will meet with resistance from some who may write it off as too “touchy feely”, because it deals with topics we dont associate with games - our feelings, fears, and how we relate to others. Others may dismiss it simply because the game requires constant communication and cooperation. What a failure of imagination, I say.

Every game is in conversation with its players. But each player has to have the courage to listen to what the game might be trying to say. Players who are open to this conversation will discover a puzzle that evolves with each new challenge - a puzzle that can only be solved with constant communication - a puzzle whose ultimate answer relies on how and where you place your love. Sometimes, maybe even many times, it won’t work out the way we all hope. That’s ok. The stakes are low here. This game says, “Dust yourselves off and play again.” When the stars finally do align and you meet all the challenges this cardboard life throws at you, it will feel like you’ve accomplished something both meaningful and meaningless. That’s the beautiful (and fun!) paradox of the game.

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Congratulations to designer Jeff Siadek

More information on Love Conquers All at: Gorilla Games

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