These Cards Have Hearts

I finally got around to playing this with my friends today and we had a lot of fun! Glad we tried it out!

These Cards Have Hearts is a PbtA game about participating in a card game tournament in a world where card games are serious business.

Basically, it'll let you play Yu-Gi-Oh without having to play Yu-Gi-Oh---or it'll let you play Yu-Gi-Oh *while* playing Yu-Gi-Oh, if you have a couple decks handy and want to play while you play.

The PDF is 8 pages, with a bare but easy to read layout, and the game's got a pretty customizable setting. The only thing Cards Have Hearts' setting requires is that there's card games and a tournament. You can define the rest---even making your game about high-stakes anime Uno, if you want to lean all the way into the meme.

Having played at least one other PbtA game is recommended before you pick this up, since by its own admission Hearts doesn't go into a lot of the philosophy for why the engine works the way it does. That said, it *does* explain all its rules clearly, so having played another PbtA isn't by any stretch required.

I think the only possible problem-spot in the system is a design one, and it's that the structure of an anime tournament arc doesn't translate easily into a traditional multiplayer rpg. Duels are 1 v 1, which means at most you have two players in the direct spotlight for a decent amount of time. The game encourages you not to have duels with NPCs,  and it wants you to cheer and commentate if you're on the sidelines---and there are even specific Sideline Moves which help with that---but it's not quite the same as being a direct part of the action. Furthermore, if your tournament is single-elimination and two PCs ever duel, short of serious shenanigans happening, one of them is going to get stuck on the sideline for the rest of the game.

My recommendation for running Hearts would be to set up a way to work around this issue before you begin. Possibly you may want to have the players on one team, with the activate duelist rotating between matches. Alternately, you may want some kind of stakes where the PCs can take a loss without elimination. And either way, you might also want to prep some stuff that the PCs on the sidelines can do; such as fighting security guards backstage, breaking into a duelist's card vault, or summoning an ancient mummified referee to punish an opponent's cheating. You can still use the Sidelines Moves for this, and it helps more evenly distribute the spotlight.

Overall, I think Hearts is a fun, quick, and pulpy homage to settings that take card games way too seriously. It's easy to learn, and if you've got a group that likes to go all-in on straight-faced goofiness, you should buy a copy and play this.