I’ve played Hearts so many hundreds of times that I actually stopped playing Hearts at one point because I took the game too seriously.
Like my love affair with Spades, I spent many of my nights in college playing cards with friends around campus. I had a Hearts group as well as a couple of Spades groups that would get together to take those tricks! I really appreciated the difficulty regarding Hearts—the goal was to score as few points as possible, but occasionally, you found yourself tempted to try and “shoot the moon” and take all the points cards (the 13 hearts-suited cards and the Queen of Spades) in order to give everyone else 26 points.
I love Hearts. When our partners at Bézier Games (the same publisher having a blowout year with other card games such as Sandbag, Xylotar, and Seers Catalog) offered a review copy of Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition—knowing that Rebel Princess is a new spin on Hearts—I was 75% sold on the idea that Rebel Princess was gonna at least be very, very good.
Good news folks…I was right. Rebel Princess is one of my favorite card games of the year. That’s because it is Hearts with player powers and new rules that change every round. Plus, you’ll find moments where you will absolutely curse your neighbor for handing you a boatload of bad cards.
In other words, it is perfect for my playstyle.
Mulan is Ridiculous
Rebel Princess is a 3-6 player “must follow” trick-taking game where players take on the role of princesses who are trying to avoid ending a three- or five-day party with too many wedding proposals. (Love a good thematic introduction.) Originally designed by four different designers and published by Zombi Paella in 2023, this new deluxe version of Rebel Princess has received a layer of development work by Bézier’s Ted Alspach and handsome-looking playing cards, tarot-sized event cards, and thick cardboard tiles that represent the princess powers each player can access once per round.
After dealing out cards, players pass a certain number of cards to their neighbors based on the rules for the current round, then play begins. Each round of Rebel Princess features a unique rule that breaks the flow of a normal round of play, creating spice while managing to stay accessible to even those who are new to Hearts-style mechanics.
The first player leads a card in one of the game’s four suits, then other players must follow if they have any hand cards of the led suit. If they don’t have cards in the led suit, players can instead get rid of their point cards (usually in the Princes suit, the suit most similar to hearts in the source material) by playing those cards into the trick instead.
For Hearts players, the Queen of Spades in Rebel Princess is the eight of the Pets suit, known as the Frog card. That sneaky card found its way into a lot of surprising moments during my plays of Rebel Princess and it was a hoot every single time, even when I personally knew where the card was because I had previously passed it to another player. Taking a trick with any of these Prince cards or the eight of Pets earns a player unwanted points which are added to that player’s tally at the end of the round.
After all players have played all their cards, the round ends. After three rounds (the short variant) or five rounds (a normal game), the player with the fewest points wins, with ties broken by the player who had the most zero point rounds. I only played Rebel Princess at five and six-player counts, and short games took about 30 minutes while normal-length games took about 45 minutes.
During setup, each game begins with players choosing one of two princess powers dealt to each player. Some player powers—all based on classic literary princesses such as Snow White, Pocahontas, and the Ice Princess—are strictly better than others, none more so than Mulan. (As we had to correct someone during one of our games, Mulan was a historical figure before she was turned into a successful Disney franchise.)
Mulan’s power felt so broken that even my 10-year-old called out how broken it felt during a game where we all lost to the Mulan player. At the end of a trick, Mulan can swap out the card they played in a trick for a different card of the same suit. Each time this power was used, Mulan swapped out their high card (that would have won a trick) for a low one, which always resulted in another player winning the trick and a few Prince cards, equating to points for the unlucky recipient. And they also used this power to win the final round of my only six-player game of Rebel Princess by handing me a six-point trick…while they took no points in the round to win the overall game by a single point.
It was dramatic…and it was a crock. If anything, the player powers in Rebel Princess are not balanced as well as I would like. On the flip side, the powers are dealt to each player randomly and everyone has to pick from two different princess powers to select just one. In the future, you can be damned sure I’m going to pick Mulan if I have the chance!
Fun, Fun, Fun
Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition has won raves with everyone who has tried it. Across my three plays (two five-player games and one six-player game), I sat with 11 different people to try it out and everyone loved it, even the kids who played during a recent trip to the beach. The kids—ages 9, 9 and 10—loved the player powers and picked up the game’s rules quickly, an encouraging sign. And in that six-player game, four of the five other players had never played a trick-taking game before and still picked up everything quickly.
I recommend the five-round (full game) Rebel Princess experience, but it is a bit long in the tooth. I also found that one player might gain the kind of advantage that will feel difficult to overcome if all players enter with an equal level of skill, and I agree with that now that I’ve done enough plays. Rebel Princess doesn’t have a runaway leader problem—the situation is never hopeless—but you sometimes will not need a full five rounds to determine who has the biggest lead.
The card art is beautiful, the tarot cards are the right size for players across a larger table to understand the rules for the current round, and the card suits and point iconography are very clear. Rebel Princess didn’t create a lot of rules questions, particularly surprising because I did my review plays with so many new-to-Hearts players. I think a table full of Hearts players will be able to knock out the short variant of Rebel Princess in about 20 minutes.
Rebel Princess—for a dedicated, lifelong Hearts player—is a dream come true. There’s even a handsome score pad included to track your progress during a game, and the princess powers are printed on tiles that are truly luxurious. If Hearts, or “trick avoidance” games in general, are your thing and Rebel Princess is available for the right price, pick this one up stat!
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