If you’ve been a Board Gamer™ for any length of time you’ve undoubtedly had the awkward conversation where you tell someone about your love for board games and they say something to the effect of, “Like The Game of Life? I love that game!”
And, let’s be honest, Life is pretty great. A little car with pegs for children to put in the backseat and you move your way through college, build a mansion, and eventually retire? Unlike the silly roll-and-moves games of the time, Life had a spinner. Spin and move is way better.
But now, Adulthood is here to help you pivot those folks into an honest-to-goodness hobby game. Despite a tragic lack of spinners, you might find this much closer to modern board game design while still really nailing the theme of, well, being an adult.
Gameplay Overview:
In Adulthood, much like actual adulthood, you’ll have to divvy up your time between going to work, helping around your community, and hopefully enjoying yourself every now and then. You have 8 “time” workers that you can allocate each round. There are two tracks, one tracking your happiness and the other your impact. These trackers start on opposite sides of the board and you trigger the game end when those two trackers meet, allowing you to have success focusing on either metric.
Unlike traditional worker placement games, there are no shared spaces between players. Instead, your time is only spent on your own player board. At the beginning of the game, you have some default work and leisure actions but they don’t produce as much money or happiness as you’d probably like. There is an interview action that will allow you to draw new career cards to potentially upgrade your action in the future. You can also go on a date and potentially find a partner that provides additional happiness.
Also, at the end of every turn you can acquire an adulthood card from a market and then play as many cards as you would like. Most cards have a cost of energy or happiness to play. They may also require that you have a certain number of icons from previously acquired cards. This is especially true for getting promoted at work or marrying your partner. The star icon, for instance, relates to fame you’ve acquired throughout your life. To pursue a career as a world-famous actor you are going to have to have reached at least some level of fame first.
These cards may be one-time actions or additional experiences that create new ways for you to spend your time in subsequent rounds. You can upgrade your default leisure action with something much cooler, like board gaming for instance. As you progress there are also random life events that will happen. These are largely negative but sometimes can work out to your advantage. They also have life icons on them that may help you play other cards in the future.
You also begin the game with three values, only one of which is known to you. You can spend energy throughout the game to meditate to learn more about your values (or even replace them). These give you end game scoring goals. You get an additional bonus if you’ve managed to marry a partner whose icon matches one of your values at the end of the game. Players will total up both their happiness and impact and the highest total amount wins.
Game Experience:
First and foremost, Adulthood really nails the theme. You start as a minimum wage worker and work your way up. You may switch careers after a random event causes you to get laid off. Maybe you are a serial dater or maybe you marry your first love. Perhaps you’ll impact your community by working for a non-profit. Or maybe you’ll just be a filthy rich investor but donate as much as possible to give back.
These aren’t entirely random and give you some choices to make. Getting promoted at work as a game designer may require getting some more creativity-focused life experiences but your model girlfriend won’t marry you unless you can really show her a life of luxury. So do you just manage to focus on your career and start dating again? Or keep limping along as an entry-level worker while trying to live your best life, at least as far as her Instagram page would show?
The card market will provide you a lot of the direction here. You can’t just materialize creative experiences out of nowhere and if none are available in the market you may have to focus elsewhere. I do wish there was a way to refresh the cards here more directly as they often stagnated, especially in a two-player game. You are incentivized to take the left-most card in the market even if you don’t want it, as it will give you extra energy.
But the biggest detractor from recommending Adulthood to everyone is that it is a bit heavier than it probably should be. And that heaviness isn’t from depth of strategy or some kind of emergent tactics… but just in sheer number of rules. I want this to be a game that I can introduce to someone who I had that conversation with about the Game of Life who has never played a hobby game before. But with the number of random events, cards that can have both a cost and a requirement to play, end game goals you don’t get to see, and that impact which partner you want to end up with, it’s a lot to take in.
And that’s hampered even further by the rulebook and quality issues… The rulebook says it costs two time tokens to take the interview action, but it’s only one on the player board. There’s a number of typos. There is a card that refers to the life deck, which isn’t referenced anywhere else. The master’s degree card will let you interview at a cost of one time… but that’s what it is anyway. Unless the rulebook is to be believed over the player board? Can you go on a date after you are married and replace your partner? Rules don’t say. What happens to my promotion token if I play a new career after I’ve been promoted? Impossible to know. None of these are dramatically important issues and you can common sense your way into the answers. But it adds to the concern that a family of non-experienced gamers could grab this at their local game store and have a good time with it.
Final Thoughts:
Adulthood works very well as a hobby-gamer version of the Game of Life. While we lose the spinner, we also lose the capitalist trapping of most money wins and instead get to focus on our happiness and our impact to others.
It’s fun to build the tableau of your life and deal with the experiences as they come. There isn’t a lot of strategy and you are largely just making the best out of the cards available to you in the market. But the theme really shines. Even the often punishing life events that happen throughout the game can be taken in stride when you embrace the theme. Sometimes natural disasters just happen, ya know?
I wish it was a little simpler to be more of a gateway type of experience for folks who don’t have shelves full of games. For those of us who do, I’m not sure there are enough interesting decisions to make this something I’ll grab a lot. That said, people love the Game of Life and there aren’t really any decisions at all. So this is a significantly better implementation of the theme.
Final Score: 3 Stars – Great theme and it’s fun to play and see your “life” experiences. Some quality issues and a little heavy on rules to hit the gateway crowd that might otherwise eat this up.
Hits:
• Overlapping tracks of happiness and impact as a winning condition
• Fun interactions between values, career, and relationships
• Theme is well integrated and makes for a story from each play
Misses:
• Lots of rules overhead without a lot of depth
• Rulebook and card text typos and inaccuracies
