Adulthood

• Designer: Johnny O’Neal
• Publisher: Brotherwise Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 13+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Amazon Affiliate Link: https://amzn.to/40hksSR
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Live your best life in Adulthood! Every turn, this game challenges 1-4 players to spend Time and Energy to generate Money, Happiness, and positive Impact. Choose a Career, seek out Experiences, find a Partner, and try to spend time on Wellness while dealing with unexpected Life Events. Featuring the art of Tim Brierly, Adulthood highlights the joys and absurdity of everyday life.

Each turn, players have to choose how to spend their Time, Energy, and Money to maximize their personal Happiness and positive Impact. Spend Time and Energy on your Career to get Money. Seek out Experiences to gain resources and Happiness, spend Time on Health to maximize the benefits of your other efforts, and find a partner to build a relationship with! Earn your way to the top or make a difference in the lives of others! The game ends when a player’s Happiness and Impact tracks meet!

To setup the game, place the scoreboard on the table (with its two scoretracks – Happiness and Impact) and each player puts a marker at the start space of each – on opposite sides of the board.  The five decks of cards (Adulthood, Values, Life Event, Partner and Career) are shuffled and placed above the board.  5 Adulthood cards are placed on the five slots on the main board.  Each player gets their own board, 8 Time markers, 1 Money, 1 Energy.  They also get 3 Values cards, only one of which may be looked at and 2 Career cards, which are reviewed and only one is kept.

Each of the player boards has two rows of actions in four columns (Career, Community, Leisure, Wellness).  The bottom action in each column is a base action and will be available throughout the entire game.  The top action in each column is a starter action, and these could be covered up with cards during the game to give you different action options for that slot.

On a turn, the player allocates their Time, Money and Energy tokens to their action spaces.  (Energy can be used as Time). You can only use each action spot once per turn.  Activate your chosen actions in any order and take the rewards as shown.  Note that you cannot add any more tokens to the board once you start resolving actions.  After that, you can now play and buy cards.  If you buy a card from the market, paying the cost seen above the slot where you take the card.  You can also play any previously acquired cards at this time – some have activation costs, and you must pay these costs to do what is on the card.  If you play an Experience card, place it in a stack next to your area.  If it is a Career, Community, Leisure or Wellness card, place it on top of the corresponding action slot on your board.

Some of the cards have different effects based on your life status. Some Career cards have a regular job option but also an advanced one if you are Promoted.  Some Partner cards have a base action as well as advanced one if you are Married.  In general, you can only have one active card per each type (well, you can have unlimited  Traits and Resources) – and you simply place the old card into your experience stack.  The icons at the top of these cards will be counted at the end of the game; they reflect your life experience!

Finally, clean up your board. Discard any spent Money and Energy tokens. Take back your Time tokens.  Slide the Adulthood cards to the left in the market and refill from the right. If you passed a Life Event space on the score track, gain that many Life Event cards and reveal them.  If you passed over either of the grown-up icons (at space 6), you become Grown Up and this will change some of your action options for the rest of the game.

Continue playing until one player’s score markers have met on the track.  This triggers the end of the game, and the current round is completed so that all players have the same number of turns.  All players now reveal their Value cards and the game is scored.

• Gain 1 Happiness for each matching Life icon in excess of 2 (a 3 icon set scores 1pt)
• Gain 4 Impact if you married a partner that matches one of your Values
• Gain Happiness from each of your Value cards
• Subtract Happiness or Impact if you had to take negative tokens for them

Add together the two scores, and the player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker.

My thoughts on the game

When I was given a quick demo of this game at Gen Con 2024, I wasn’t quite sure what to think of it.  I’ve been a pretty big fan of Brotherwise Games in the past, but the cartoony art of this game and the feeling that this was a modern version of “The Game of Life” left me with questions.  Given how much I have enjoyed Call to Adventure from the same designer though – I still wanted to see what this was all about.  And now that I’ve played it – it’s an interesting simulation of growing up and being an adult – the theme oozes through all the different cards in the game, and there are so many card events and captions that I can totally relate to.

Early on, I try to build up my engine – getting replacement actions for the ones pre-printed on the board so that I can better use my time and money.  This is most often an improvement in my job, but not always.  Getting a promotion also helps you generally get better things from working.  One thing which is entirely unclear from the rules is whether or not your promotion status is retained if you get a new job.  In real life, that is probably not the case, especially with the wide shift in jobs that you can have in the game, but we felt like it did stay in place.  It would be great if the rules said something to clear this up.

Also along those lines, it was unclear what happened if you got married and then something caused you to lose your partner.  At that point, since you have once been married, you just skip dating and go straight for marriage every time?  Again, rules are extremely murky on this point.  The rules also have a bunch of typos and mis-spellings, so my overall confidence in the rules is low.  Another discrepancy is that the rules tell you it costs 2 time to interview, but then the board only says 1… 

There are a lot of little things to track here, and that will keep this otherwise light game from being a good gateway game.  The costs and prerequisites for building cards take a bit of brainpower to figure out, and it’s not something that I think that a beginning gamer would easily grok.

Despite these hiccups, I have enjoyed my plays of Adulthood so far – I have felt like I have had decent opportunities to get the right cards to generate a decent life engine and work on getting both Happiness and Impact scores up.  However, I have noticed that in all of my games thus far, there has been at least one player who simply didn’t get much of a chance.  If you don’t have access to certain cards from the display, there’s nothing you can do to improve your basic actions.  This is the sort of game that really wants to have a mechanism in place to allow you to somehow wipe the card selection and have new ones dealt out.  

Given the prerequisites for some of the cards, it is entirely possible that you don’t have a great option to draft from early on… and if this happens to you more often than others at the start of the game, you simply fall behind the curve too much and, at least in my experience, end up with no chance of catching up.  The arc of the game is very steep… early in the game, you mostly collect resources and work diligently to get one of your scores to 6 so you can get the Grown Up marker. Once you get this, your options broadly expand, and your ability to get more cards and actions dramatically increases, and you will quickly find yourself in a spot where you have more resources available than you can spend.   Being able to refresh the card row would be nice, or maybe a way to at least be able to just buy a random card if you were really stuck would at least give the player something to do other than grumble about how much life sucks where there aren’t any good cards to buy on their turn.

That all being said, the strength of the theme is actually possibly enough to overcome the above comments.  The art is quirky and amusing, and as I mentioned, it really does feel like you are trying to live your best life through the cards in the game.  There is definitely a bit of polish lacking here that might break the game for some… but for others, if you’re willing to just roll with it (just like real life), you could end up really liking the experience.  Try not to grouse too much about the table tent player aid.  Which kinda looks cool, but is super non-functional because people on the other side of the table can’t read it. Why not just give every player their own flat player aid?

Because of the theme, and the fact I’m a sucker for life experience games, I’ll probably still play this again, but I can see where other gamers might think that Adulthood is not their thing.  They’ll probably just sit around with their friends and play (different) boardgames all night.

Amazon Affiliate Link: https://amzn.to/40hksSR

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor