That's Life!

25th July 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena continued with our next game.

If Esther Rantzen ever made board games, it probably wouldn't be this one, for starters, there's no dog that says 'sausages'!

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Caveat: We have only ever played That's Life! digitally online.

What's in a game?
That's Life! is all about travelling along a route consisting of a series of randomly placed hexagonal tiles, where the bad ones outweigh the good ones, generally trying to manage those bad situations with a bit of luck and occasionally encountering generosity or greed. Maybe that really is what life is all about?

• Start and end tiles: This pair of tiles mark the start and finish of the route.
• Plus tiles: Plus tiles score points for players when acquired, there are 8 of them, ranging in value from 1 to 8.
• Minus tiles: When minus tiles are acquired, they lose points for the capturing player. There are 18 minus tiles valued from -1 to -10.
• Lucky tiles: These will turn minus values into plus ones, as they may be used to swing a large number of points they can be very powerful. There are 6 of them.
• Action tiles: The 4 tiles are double-sided and are marked gift/steal.
• Meeples: Up to 3 meeples per player.
• Die: Every roll and move game needs dice and this is a standard six-sider.

There's a more complex version of the game we didn't play that involves 'guard' meeples.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Take all the plus, minus and lucky tiles, then shuffle them into a face-down stack of 32 tiles.
• Put down the start tile.
• Draw 8 tiles from the stack and place them in line starting at the start tile to form a path, the exact route of the path isn't important.
  Next, place an action tile (Gift side up.) at the end of the path and after the 8th tile.
  Repeat this with the 24 remaining tiles on the stack and 3 action cards to continue the path.
• Place the end tile after the final action tile to complete the route.
• Give each player 2 or 3 (Depending on player count.) meeples in their colour and place them all on the starting tile.
• Determine the starting player.

On to play
The goal in That's Life! is to journey to the game's end, acquiring those scoring tiles as you go while trying to avoiding those minus tiles. How's this done?

• Roll the dice: The active player rolls the die and moves one of their meeples by that rolled amount.

That's it, well OK, not exactly, there's a bit more.

• Picking up tiles: When one of the active player's meeples leaves a tile and there are no other meeples on it, then they MUST pick up the tile (Unless it's an action tile - see below.).
  Tiles picked up by a player are placed into a single stack in the order they were acquired, thus the most recently collected tile will always go on top of the stack.
• Action tiles: If the active player moves one of their meeples off an action tile and there are no other meeples on it, then the action card's gift/steal ability is activated, depending on which face is up.
  Gift side up: The active must give the tile on top of their stack to another player, who places it on top of theirs.
  Steal side up: The active player takes the topmost tile from someone else's stack and places it on top of theirs.
  Flip sides: Action tiles are not collected by players and always stay in the route, instead they are flipped over to their other side.

Endgame
Play continues until all players' meeples have crossed the finish line.
Each lucky tile acquired by a player can now used to convert the score from a minus tile into a plus, then all points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
There's no getting away from that fact that this is a roll and move game, it may give you 2 or 3 choices from that roll, but it still is what it is. 
That's not to say it's all bad, usually at least 1 of the 2 or 3 choices a player is given is meaningful.
Finding a way to linger on a plus tile until other players have to leave (Or getting off the tile before other players even arrive!) will earn victory points and players will obviously also want to avoid the minus tiles. However, minus tiles sort of reverses this, players will look to linger on a bad tile in the hope that another player will land it, allowing them to potentially escape. Furthermore, minus tiles outnumber plus ones 18-to-8; that's more than double, landing on them is inevitable, so is picking them up.
This is what makes the lucky tiles such gamechangers with their ability to mitigate negative penalties, if a player has a lucky tile in their stack, suddenly that big minus tile becomes an asset, provided of course someone doesn't steal the lucky tile in the meantime.
All of this is also largely dependant on what other players do, because they'll also be trying to linger on good tiles and escaping bad ones.

That's Life! is a very easy game to learn and comprehend. I feel that it will have crossover appeal to non-gamers but for us, it felt a little too light and a little too luck-based; because players invariably end up collecting more negative tiles than positive, it ends up lending the game a negative feel - even though generally it will affect all player equally (Maybe life is like that?). It meant we didn't find That's Life a satisfying experience or a compelling game.