The Pursuit of Happiness - First Play!

21st August 2023

It's Monday and we're deep into a gaming weekend at Matakishi's and the game of the hour is The Pursuit of Happiness.

Someone once said 'Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.', but in The Pursuit of Happiness, a worker placement game all about your life; it's definitely​ a goal!

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Note: The version of the game shown in the photos is the from the 'big box' which have a number of expansions incorporated into it, which add extra card tracks and actions. Also being used are the upgraded deluxe components as well as (I think) the neoprene playmat. 

What's in a game?
​Board: This is a busy looking board packed with a lot of card rows and spaces, all of which combine to display quite a lot of information.

• Card rows: The left half of the board displays a number of rows of card tracks with 4 spaces each.
  Core game: The first 4 tracks which are from the core game are; Project, Item-Activity, Job & Partner.
  Extra tracks: These are Friend, Experience & Community.
• Action spaces: The right hand side lists the game's 12 'actions', 9 of which are from the core game with the additional 3 coming from the expansions.
  Core actions: Study, Play, Interact, Take Project, Spend, Temp Job, Get Job, Start Relationship & Overtime.
  Extra actions: Plan Experience, Dream & Start Friendship are extra actions.
  Each action also has its own unique, humorous and cartoony illustration. 
• Trackers: The board also has a round tracker as well as trackers for stress, rest & time spent, popularity and short term happiness.
  ​A score tracker (Or long term happiness.) runs the perimeter of the board.

The board is very colourful but this is more than decoration, as the actions are colour coded to the card rows. You will see the Take Project action space is the same colour as the Projects card row and so on.

Half the board.

The other half!

Cards: The Pursuit of Happiness makes use of a lot of different types of cards broken up into decks which correspond with the rows on the board and are also colour coded accordingly.
Thus, there are project cards, item-activity, job and partner cards.
​More on these later.
​Some of the card types are double-sided and come with a cover to keep them hidden during play.
Generally, cards feature a illustration along the top and tend to feature cartoonish artwork depicting their subject matter while the middle and lower parts given over to displaying game information.
As a rule, in some manner or other, cards tend to have a cost associated with acquiring or using them and there's also a reward for paying the cost. Some types of card will also require paying an upkeep to maintain - this may be in the form of resources or hourglasses. Upkeeps also generate rewards as well.
Additionally, there are also Child Trait and Life Goal cards. These function differently.

Project and item-activity cards on their respective rows.

Tokens: The Pursuit of Happiness uses quite a few types of token, particularly with some of the expansions thrown in.

• Hourglasses: There are 9 of these in each player colour, obviously used to represent time!

Hourglasses.

• Currencies: There are essentially 4 currencies in The Pursuit of Happiness used to pay for cards and there's a token type for each.
  The tokens in the photos are the upgraded deluxe 3d tokens. The core game comes with standard card tokens.
  • Creativity: Initially, I thought these tokens were orange balloons and obviously thought; 'what do balloons have to do with creativity?' Of course they are actually lightbulbs which of course represent getting ideas!
  • Influence: Influence is represented by a pair of disembodied hands in a handshake. I'm not going to lie, they look pretty creepy to me, especially since they're a purple colour which lends them a putrid quality! I think I prefer the card tokens in this instance.
  • Knowledge: Red books represent knowledge.
  • Money: Yellow discs are used to represent money.
• Unavailable action tokens: These tokens look like 'banned' symbols (A red diagonal line through a red circle) and are used to mark which particular actions that players may be unable to use.
• Wooden cubes: Like all self-respecting games, The Pursuit of Happiness makes use of lots of little wooden cubes.
  • Player cubes: A number of cubes come in each player colour which track actions specific to players.
  • Black cubes: These are used to track progress on cards throughout the game.
  • Round tracker: Lastly, there's a purple round tracking cube.

Creativity and influence tokens as well as money - all in 3d!

Black tracking cubes as well as book-shaped knowledge tokens.

• First player token: This rather oversized token looks like a blue star but is actually the game' icon for long term happiness - in other words victory points (VPs).

A star is....errr.... starts the round?

The oversized plastic components are all well made; chunky, sturdy and well shaped, they're colourful and pleasantly tactile. The hourglasses in particular are quite huge.
Obviously these are the deluxe components and the base game comes with standard card tokens which are also fairly colourful and uniquely shaped for their individual types. I.e., the creativity tokens are shaped like 2d light bulbs and so on.

The Pursuit of Happiness uses a humorous and cartoony art style, interestingly this is further broken down into 2 further styles.
The cards all feature bespoke colourful cartoony illustrations of their subject matter - e.g., a car for the car etc.
However the board uses a more abstract stickman style against the brightly colour coded backgrounds to represent the game's actions. It's a bit of a curious mix of styles but it works well enough. i like it and it makes the game look good and gives it a good table presence.

There's nearly a dozen icons used in the game, they are mostly self explanatory and will be able to quickly learn them. Players should not have any issues understanding the game.

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Player aids.

Player aids side two!

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Note: For this game overview I'm going to limit discussion to the core game. There are numerous expansions for The Pursuit of Happiness and we've played some of them. Broadly speaking they mechanically tend to function in the same way.

How's it play?
Setup
​Board: Put the board into the central playing area.

• Rounds: Place the round marker on round 1 on the round tracker.
• Unavailable actions: Place these tokens on to the Get Job, Overtime and Start Relationship action spaces.
• Cards: Sort the cards into their types, shuffle each into a face down deck and place them adjacent to their pertinent card rows on the board. Since the the Job and Partner cards are double-sided, their respective card covers should be placed on top of their decks to hide the cards.
  • Project and item-activity cards: Deal 4 cards from each deck on to their card rows.
    Life goal cards: Deal a number of Life Goal cards equal to the player count and place them adjacent to the board face-up.
    These provide extra scoring opportunities.
    ​Job and partner cards: While these cards are not placed in the game during setup and are not used during 1st round of the game. They come in to play during subsequent rounds and they are managed as follows.
    Firstly, these 2 types of card are always dealt from the bottom of their decks.
    Job cards: It does not matter which side of a job card is displayed, both side are functionally identical. 
    Partner cards: As with job cards, both sides of partner cards only differ cosmetically. 

Players: Give each player the tokens in their player colour.

• Hourglasses: Players start the game with only 6 of their 9 hourglass tokens.
• Trackers: These should placed on their relevant spaces on the following tracks:
  Long term happiness.
  Short term happiness.
  Stress.
• Child traits: Shuffle the child trait cards into a face-down deck and deal 2 to each player.
  All players should keep 1 and discard the other out of play.
  These cards determine the player's starting resources and also provides each of them a unique ability they can use.

First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
The Pursuit of Happiness is played over 8 rounds and each round represents a different stage of life, starting with being a teenager and going all the way through to old age.
Each round round contains 4 phases, the bulk of gameplay takes place during the Actions phase and in this regard the game uses a typical turn structure with the active player completing their action and play then progressing to the player on their left.
The core mechanic in The Pursuit of Happiness involves acquiring cards and then using them. This will generally involve paying to use but will then provide rewards. Rewards may be any of a number of things, money or the 3 other resources, short term happiness, stress or even long term happiness which equates to VPs.

Slots: Before continuing to how the phases play, 'slots' need to be explained'.
Each player has 3 slots in their personal area and every 'active' Project, Job or Partner cards they acquire in any combination fills 1 of those 3 slots.
If a player has more than 3 of those card types active at the same time, every card in excess of the 3 slots causes the player to lose stress. That's the cost for 'burning the candle at both ends'!
The phases are played out as follows:

• Preparation phase: Preparation for round 1 occurs as part of setup. But from round 2 this phase is resolved. Several events occur during the preparation phase.
  • Game end: Check to see game's end conditions have been met. See below for more info on this.
  • Rounds: As the game progresses through its rounds, certain actions become available and unavailable.
    Round 2: Jobs, partners and overtime become available.
    Round 6 onwards: From round 6 onwards, the players will be in old-age, this will mean gaining stress! 3 stress for round 6 and up all they way to 9 stress for round 8!
    Overtime becomes unavailable in old age.
    
  • Hourglasses: Each player gains hourglasses according to their position on the stress track.
• Upkeep phase: Many elements of the game have ongoing effects and/or costs/upkeeps. This may include, time or money or anything else. These are all managed in this phase.
  If a player cannot or does not want to pay an upkeep, the card in question is discarded out of play and they gain stress and lose short term happiness.
• ​Action phase: This is where the meat of the game takes place and players now take turn placing their hourglasses, triggering the actions for those spaces.
  It should be noted that if a player places more than 1 hourglass on to a board space, it increases their stress on its tracker. This restriction does not affect cards.
  There are 10 main actions and they work as follows:
  • Study: Placing an hourglass on this space earns 3 knowledge for the active player
  • Play: This earns 3 creativity.
  • Interact: Finally, this space earns 3 influence.
  • Take project: Placing an hourglass here allows the active player to draft one of the available project cards. There are 3 types of project card but all project cards have a associated cost and reward in some manner or other.
    Normal project: A normal project will have several 'stages'. When one is taken, the active player must pay the cost for stage 1 and they also earn the stage 1 reward. A black cube is used to track the progress through a project.
    The player may subsequently spend actions later to place hourglasses directly on to the project card, allowing them to pay to work through all the later stages, gain those rewards and ultimately complete the project. This can be achieved over multiple rounds.
    Eventually players will have completed all stages on a project card and it will no longer be considered active for the purpose of filling 'slots'.
    Single round projects: Like normal project cards, these ones have stages or more accurately levels in this case.
    When the active player takes one of these project cards, they pay as they normally would but these cards are discarded at the end of the round, thus the player only gets 1 opportunity to buy it's rewards. Again; use black cubes to track which level was bought.
    Group projects: Like single round projects, group projects only last for 1 round. Unlike the other 2 types of project, these do not have stages, instead they have 'areas'.
    Each area has its own cost and reward and when it is acquired, the active player can put the hourglass used to acquire it on to any of those areas, paying the cost to gain the reward.
    Using later actions the active player may chose to place more hourglasses on to other areas to pay the cost for their reward.
    Furthermore, other players (in their own turns) may also place hourglasses on another player's group project to pay for it's benefit.
    When all the areas on a group project have been completed, that group project is also considered completed. Players who contributed towards the completion will later earn additional rewards according to how much they contributed.
  • Spend: The spend action allows the active player to take a item-activity card. Like a project card, a item-activity card has stages or levels and players can choose which level to 'buy' the card at and gain the relevant reward.
    Item card: When the active player buys a stage of a item card, it cannot be advanced any further. Additionally, some item cards also have upkeeps that must be paid for in later upkeep phases.
    Activity card: These can be paid for like item cards but differently, they can be upgraded to later stages with further actions.
  • Temp Job: Not to be confused with the Job action, this action allows the active player to gain 3 money.
  • Get job: This action allows the active player to take a job card (from the 2nd round onwards) and put into one of their slots. Since they are double-sided, they can choose either side which will have different job titles. Jobs also have types which is significant for promotions.
    When the active player acquires a job card they must pay the recruitment cost and gain the recruitment reward. Additionally, jobs will have a upkeep cost but will provide a upkeep reward. Typically the upkeep cost will include hourglasses (Time at work.) and reward money (Wages.).
    Promotion: Each job has a 'level' of 1-3 and a player can use a hourglass to take the promotion action, this allows them to gain a job of a higher level and the same type.  This is done by taking another available card from the card row. Higher level jobs have more expensive upkeeps but also provide better rewards.
    ​Retirement: When a player reaches level 3 in a job, they can opt to advance to retirement. This essentially ends the job which will no longer have an upkeep but will also pay a pension.
  • Start relationship: Placing a hourglass here allows the active player to take a partner card. They can can use either side as they differ only in identity of the character in the relationship.
    Like other cards, partner card have stages or levels which can be moved through and represent the player's commitment to the relationship, going from dating all the way to raising a family.
    Partner cards have both a upkeep cost and a requirement. Requirements do not need to be 'paid' but the player must have the necessary resources available.
  • Overtime: In certain rounds, overtime will become available to player. By placing an hourglass on the overtime space, the active player may gain 2 more, this is a net gain of 1. Additionally, they must increase their stress on the track.
  • Rest: The opposite of overtime, now that's more like it! The active player may put as many hourglasses here as they want without increasing stress and in fact: every hourglass placed here will lower stress.
    ​More on how stress works below.
• Resolution phase: Once all players have placed all their hourglasses, the resolution phase occurs, this can differ from round to round.
  • First player: The first player for the following round becomes whoever is furthest along the short term happiness tracker.
  • Reset short term happiness: Joy can be all too fleeting and everyone's position on the short term happiness tracker is reset to 0.
  • Group projects: All rewards from group projects are distributed and the group project card is removed from play.
  • Single round projects: These cards are removed from play.
  • Remove hourglasses: All hourglasses are removed from the board and personal playing areas.

Other rules: Here are some of the rules not covered above.
Short term happiness: As well as determining the first player in the following round, a player's position on the short term happiness tracker will affect the costs they pay, positive happiness gives them a discount while negative does the opposite.
Players may also pay short term happiness to discard any number of cards on a card row and refill them
Stress: The stress track consists of 7 differently bands​ with several spaces in most bands and 15 spaces across all bands.
This is a very important tracker. Not only does it determine how many hourglasses a player receives at the start of a round, it also dictates when they shuffle off this mortal coil!
Certain actions will increase stress which moves a player's marker towards the 'red' spaces, this is bad because it will lose them hourglasses, if the marker is moved all the way off the board then the player has met their end and they are eliminated from the game.
Actions that move the marker into the 'green' spaces are good, it provides the player extra hourglasses and longevity. Here's the thing though, a player cannot move bands when decreasing their stress unless they gain a specific reward called Good Health!
Just like real life, Good Health is very good thing and being able to move bands is important. Remember that in old age, players automatically gain 3, then 6, then finally 9 stress. What this means is; if a player hasn't gained good health by the end of round 7, they are guaranteed dying at the start of round 8! Ouch!

Stress tracker, things start to look bad when you get into the orange band and worse!

Right, I think that's a broad explanation for the rules.

Endgame
Play continues until all players have died - which is a bit of a sobering thought! This will usually occur during the preparation phase when players deal with ridiculous amounts of stress!
Players then count their finishing VPs which comes from 3 sources.

• Long term happiness: These count as VPs.
• Resources: 1 VP is earned from each set of 5 of each of the games resources.
  
• Life goals: Players check to see if they've met any of the criteria on the life goal cards, earning VPs as directed by those cards.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
The Pursuit of Happiness is all about the use of hourglasses, time and the passage of a lifetime.
Players will find themselves quite figuratively spending time at work which will provide money which will allow them buy stuff. Get into a relationship? Raise a family? These require more time.
Between this and having a job, half of your hourglasses will used upkeeping these two! If you ever wondered. 'Where did it all go?' Now you know!
As you might have guessed, The Pursuit of Happiness is a very thematically appropriate game.

While the game is I'd say 'mid-weight' mechanically (At a basic level it's a worker placement game that allows players to gain extra places to use from acquiring cards.). There's quite a lot going on and equally a lot to remember. I wouldn't call it fiddly but it probably take a couple of playthroughs to get a handle on everything.
There's some unique elements of course such as the short term happiness track which something that players will need to keep an eye on and manage as well as the stress track. Both of which can significantly influence the game.

One thing I will note about gameplay related to the stress track, it's how rare cards that grant 'good health' are and how infrequently they appear. I don't think we ever saw more than 1 or perhaps 2 during any single game.
Whoever manages to gain that good health will find themselves in a good position gameplay wise as gaining it and consequently being able to shift into a different band on the stress tracker is a strong play, in fact an almost game winning play as it can give that player and entire extra round.
I feel that cards with cards with good health perhaps could have been a bit more common and other players may well need to remember to use short term happiness to rinse through the decks looking for those cards.

Gameplay wise, The Pursuit of Happiness is about the most optimal placement of hourglasses and management of resources.
Things like project and item-activity cards will when fully maxed out give players VPs but they are also useful for changing 1 kind of resource into another which can be used else where. This lends the game a bit of a engine-building aspect, albeit a fleeting one, since cards can generally only be used a couple of times before being 'completed'. Players will always be looking for the next opportunity to exploit.
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If I were to be a bit harsh, I would say that The Pursuit of Happiness a bit overlong particularly at higher player counts and that the gameplay is little average and is pretty standard stuff mechanically.
Where it excels though, is in a added storytelling angle the game creates. As a player progress through the rounds (and the years), they'll find themselves creating a bit of story during their playthrough as they acquire cards that add to that story. Did they get a job, what hobbies did they have and so on?
It gives the game a great deal of charm

I was a charismatic archaeologist who married Sherry and ran a scout group. The comic book collection is definitely me and the celebrity item collection made up for never finding the Ark of The Covenant! I was also a fan of basketball, TV and dining out.

The result of this is that The Pursuit of Happiness provides a bit of unique game experience and one to definitely give a try.