by Jorge Zhang

Hi there! I led the design of Stitch! The Fix for 626, which is a Love Letter system game, and I am here to share a few stories about its development.

Setting the Stage
Every game designer will tell you that complexity is a constant battle, and this project was no exception. It was important to me that a bright kid could follow along and still have a good time, even if they were not strategizing.

It was also important to have mechanical differentiation from other Love Letter games, that is, I should tailor the mechanisms to better fit the theme and offer novelty to Love Letter fans.

Lilo as the Princess
Lilo felt natural to me as the Princess — the most powerful card to hold at the end of the round.

In Love Letter, this strength is counterbalanced by the fact that the Princess loses you the game when played or discarded, but that's not the case in this design as our licensing partners rightfully pointed out that it would feel bad for an iconic character to not have a cool effect.

I had to find a creative solution here, which is where Cobra Bubbles comes in. In the movie, Cobra Bubbles often catches Lilo and Nani causing trouble, so he made the perfect sense for this role. Cobra Bubbles' power is to look at another player's hand, and if he finds Lilo or Nani, then the player holding Lilo or Nani is out of the round!


Representing Stitch
If Lilo is the Princess, then what about Stitch? I considered making Stitch a second princess, but I felt that this made Lilo — that is, the Princess — less special...and yet it was important for Stitch to have a main role, so I didn't like the idea of putting him on a different card.

At the same time, I was thinking about how to represent Stitch's chaotic nature as a character who is equally capable of destruction and of good. That's when I landed on the idea of Stitch being a token. Since tokens have two sides, Stitch could flip back and forth between his "good" side and "destructive" (Experiment 626) side, making him as chaotic and unpredictable as he is in the movies.

Cut from Development
A large part of managing complexity is having discipline, and this meant that I had to sacrifice some of my favorite mechanisms for the greater good of the game.

I won't go too deeply into these as they could still show up in a future Love Letter product, but I'll share one of my favorites. We had a version of Jumba that let you laugh like an evil genius and instantly win the round if you had the Stitch token on the Experiment 626 side. This was a fun card, but something interesting emerged in testing — suddenly, you wanted to have Stitch on his not-good side! This created a weird meta and needed to be axed.

Player Count
When recording data during playtests, I started noticing that the ratio of games ending with only one player standing (compared to the deck running out) was a lot higher at low player counts. This ratio also occurs in other Love Letter games, but for this particular version of the game, it was undermining the core mechanism of Stitch: a token whose effect kicks in when hands are compared at deck out.

I started looking at all the ways that players could be knocked out of the round. Sparky, numbered 3, stood out as an issue. Sparky makes you compare hands with another player, and the player holding a lower number is out of the round. With two copies in the deck, a game with two or three players is nearly guaranteed to end the round with the last person standing.

I looked at several possible solutions, one being to allow you to lose Good Stitch to avoid being eliminated by Sparky. While this played well, it was also complex. The Gordian Knot solution worked best: a rule that you remove the 3s from the deck at lower player counts.

Another player count decision I made was limiting the game to 2-5 players. This version of the game doesn't have enough cards to support a six-player version well, and I felt that it was more important to nail down the 2-5 player experience than it was to make compromises to fit in an additional player.

What's Next?
This game is particularly special to me as it was the last Z-Man Games project I fully completed before starting a new role as a developer for Star Wars: Unlimited.

I am grateful that I got the chance to work on a game line as iconic as Love Letter, and I can't wait to see players get their hands on the game! If you have any questions or want to let me know about your game experience, feel free to send me a message or leave something in the comments. Thank you for reading!

Jorge Zhang