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A Gaming Life
Kickstarter – The Pursuit of Happiness: Community
This is the story of how I recently backed, and am greatly looking forward to, the new expansion for the game The Pursuit of Happiness. Called Community, it has a pledge level that allows you to get the base game as well.
I’m not normally a backer of Kickstarter board games. Hell, I think I’ve backed two video games and that’s it.
However, I’ve been recently rethinking that stance. I started playing some games that had originally been funded on Kickstarter and found that they were actually pretty cool games.
Then two things happened within hours of each other. First, I kept reading about how good this game was. I then was browsing the board game section of Kickstarter and found the Community expansion’s page there. I started thinking about it.
Then my friend and co-blogger wrote the great post about deciding what to crowdfund. The combination of those two things, plus a bit of heavy thinking, and suddenly I’m backing my first Kickstarter board game.
And I’m happy to do it.
This game sounds very cool. Since I haven’t played it, I can’t give you a game rundown, but I can tell you that you are basically trying to live as good a life as you can, getting long-term happiness points (i.e. victory points) and being the happiest player around the table.
(The base game all set up)
You start as a teenager and over a series of turns as an adult, and then heading into old age, you can do things like undertake projects that will give you happiness or resources that you can use for other things to make you happy.
You can buy possessions that will add to your happiness, get a job (which doesn’t make you happy but does make sure you have money and resources to help you do other things to make you happy), form a relationship and things like that.
It sounds like a resource management game with a bit of worker placement as well.
I like the sound of how stress works in the game, giving you fewer actions as you age, until ultimately your life ends. Since most players will die within a turn or (at most) two of each other (unless you live a really hard life), player elimination shouldn’t be an issue.
This is all going by what I’ve read about the game. As I said, I haven’t played it. I could have a little bit of that wrong.
But this understanding is what made me want to back the expansion. I went looking for the base game at various outlets and couldn’t find it. When I saw that you could back Community for $75 and get the base game as well, I jumped on it.
(I’ve since seen that CoolStuff Inc.has a lot of copies, but as a Canadian, that’s not a great option unless I buy a lot of games to put me over their free shipping threshold).
I’m really looking forward to October or November when this will be sent out.
(Note: While Stronghold Games will be the distributor and co-publisher in North America for this expansion, and is the co-publisher/distributor for the base game, it has nothing to do with the Kickstarter)
(Permission to use the pictures in this post graciously provided by Artipia Games)
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