Rebel Princess review — These hearts look like frogs

I’ve been in the tabletop hobby for a while now, and with thousands of games coming out each year, there is always something to be excited about. However, when my family gets together, we always return to the classic card games. Hearts has been a family favorite for decades, and we still play every holiday get-together. Imagine my delight when I saw Rebel Princess from Bezier Games. It’s Hearts, but with a few twists to bridge the gap between the classic game and newer hobby tabletop games.

If you’ve played Hearts before, you already know how to play Rebel Princess. It really is the same game at its core. In Rebel Princess, each player is a Princess who is trying to avoid unwanted marriage proposals, or points, from Princes. Rebel Princess is a trick-taking game where you either want to get as few of the Princes (hearts) or the Frog Prince (queen of spades) as possible, or else get all of them. Each Prince is worth a point, and the Frog Prince is worth 5 points. Points are bad in this game, with the lowest score winning. However, if you manage to win all of the Princes and the Frog Prince in one round, you can instead subtract 10 points from your total score, ignoring any other points you may have gained or lost from other round effects. 

At this point, it would be identical to Hearts, just with some fun artwork on the cards and a change to point counts. Rebel Princess goes a step further and adds game-changing elements in two ways. The first way is the Princess that each player chooses at the start of the game. Each Princess has a unique ability that can be activated once per round. Abilities can be things like making yourself play last, or swapping your played card with a new card at the end of the trick, or making other players play their highest card. They can be absolutely game-changing in the moment and add some wildness and unpredictability to Hearts that can otherwise be a bit statistically stuffy. The second way is that the game is played over a set number of rounds, and each round has a unique game-changing effect. Round effects could be playing two cards instead of one, certain cards becoming wild, or reserving a card facedown for the final trick.

When you combine the Princess and round effects, the game becomes a lot of fun with unpredictable swings and forces the players to react to the moment. That also means it loses a lot of the strategy and planning associated with the classic game. In classic Hearts, assessing the strength of your opening hand, reacting to what is passed to you, and making a play for the hearts or not is all decided at the beginning. You need to know right away if you are going for them all or not, and then control the round to your favor. It’s a game of skill and careful planning. Rebel Princess is a much more lighthearted game that wants you to have moments of joy brought on by clever plays and gasps of surprise as someone steals a trick you thought you had in the bag with a well-timed ability. Its randomness makes it surprising and fun, but you need to be ok with the loss of control. The game comes in an appropriately sized small box and features beautiful artwork by Alfredo Cáceres.