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Review of The Pursuit of Happiness KS Promos 3
Blurb from the publisher: 'The Pursuit of Happiness: KS Promos 3 includes all the additional content that was generated in the Pursuit of Happiness:Experiences crowd-funding campaign. It adds more Projects, Items, Activities, Partners, Jobs, Life Goals, and Child Traits in your games. It also introduces the Group Items, Educational Projects, Health Activities, Store Owners, as well as 2 new mini expansions: Kids and Inheritance.'
What you get: Your EUR 14,99 or equivalent will buy you The pursuit of Happiness Promos 3 for The Pursuit Of Happiness game line, a light worker-placement game.
In addition to the English rulebook that can be also found on the company's website free of charge, the product contains the following: 26 Projects, 8 Items, 9 Activities, 12 Jobs, 6 Partners, 13 Kids, 8 Relatives, 2 Child Traits, and 2 Life Goals.
The expansion has been funded by the same kickstarter that funded The Pursuit Of Happiness: Experiences, and it has not been fully released yet. It is expected to hit the stores in December (2019, in case you read this review with a bit of a delay). I am reviewing a final market copy, identical to what a purchaser will receive.
Gameplay: The mechanisms of KS Promos 3 are modular, and can be mixed and matched as you desire.
The Experiences expansion brought Kids to the table. The present expansion adds more Kids to the mix. This is a modular element that can be used irrespective of the game's remaining configuration. To have kids, a player must develop a relationship to the Raise Family level with a Partner before Old Age. Kids function like the other cards of The Pursuit to Happiness: pay their prerequisites in order to receive their rewards (LTH, most of the time), yet there is a small little caveat: kids advance to the next level on their own irrespective of whether you want them to, and you are obliged to meet the new level's prerequisites. If you do, more LTH for you. If you don't, lose LTH. A player can have as many kids as he likes.
Some Partners are Single Parents, a concept that didn't exist before. As soon as a player starts a relationship with one of these Partners, he immediately gets to get a Kid.
Group Items go into the Item deck, in reality however they function like Group projects (i.e. they require the participation of more than one player, each of which will take a different role and will reap a different reward). Expect cards like Boardgame Sale, Aid for Disaster, and Real Estate.
Higher Education is a new type of Project cards. Each of them has only two levels, and once the second level is complete, the card no longer occupies a slot in front of you. Fun fact: once completed, the cards provide an ongoing ability, the Degree. Invariably, this is a discount on new Arts, Science, or Social Jobs.
Health Activities is a new type of Activity cards. They always start at L1, with the player slowly making his way to L2 and L3 linearly.
Safety and Security is a new type of Job cards. Their difference in relation to other Jobs is that Promotion may be used on them even if it is not available on the board. The player will get to search the Jobs pile to find the card he needs.
Store Owners is a new type of Job cards. The black cube is immediately placed on such a card when it gets purchased. On each upkeep a new cube will be placed on the card. A player may sell the card whenever he chooses, receiving the reward multiplied by the number of cubes on the card.
Inheritance is the expansion's final novelty. Each player receives a Relative during setup. Each relative has a requirement that needs to be met before he dies. At the end of the first adult turn each player rolls. If the result is higher than the indicated number, the Relative survives. If he does, the player will roll again at the end of the next round, this time against a higher difficulty. If he dies, the player gets to claim his inheritance, but only if the preconditions have been met. The prerequisites can be anything, like having a Kid or at least three items. The inheritance is always a combination of money and LTH.
The strong points: I am very happy about Artipia Games making its additional kickstarter material available for purchase. Even more so, when said material contains quite a few rule tweaks that make the game more interesting.
The first thing to underline is that everything is modular. You can add Store Owners and omit Health Activites. You can add Inheritance without Group Items. Admittedly some of the modules interact (e.g. there is an Inheritance card that requires you to have a Kid, thus you'd need to remove it were you to play without them), this is however as plain as day. You can't insert Single Parents on the Partner deck if you don't play with Kids!
The cards that get added on existing piles without altering the rules are always welcome. The tweaks that some of the game's standard mechanics got however are even more exciting. Projects that will permanently diminish your expenditures in the future once completed; Jobs where you don't need to wait to get promoted; Activities that set a path as a permanent option once you start them; Jobs that multiply their outcome the more you stay loyal to them; these are all good ideas and they are elegantly implemented. I see a conscious design effort to reward planning, and to make players stick with their choices. Health Activities, Store Owners and Kids follow this same philosophy. Safety and Security tries to remove the random element from the equation. This is about having more control.
I already stated in my review of Experiences that I liked the Kids mechanic. Feed them and win LTH, neglect them and lose LTH. I enjoyed the thematic inclusion of Single Parents even more. Mechanically this means that you will start reaping the benefits of your first Kid far earlier than your opponents, yet you will have to diver the appropriate resources for that. Make sure you find the right balance, lest you find your game engine sputter left and right.
Art-wise, everything you have come to love with the game can be found here. The drawings are cartoonish and warm, the cards are of a good quality and easy to sleeve. This is a happy game, not an exercise in stress.
All the cards are marked as belonging to this set. If for any reason you wish to remove them from your game, you can do so with ease.
The weak points: I don't think that the minor rule tweaks add impenetrable complexity to the base game, I am certain however that the more social gamers amongst us might. I think of the base game as light, with some of the expansions gradually steering it towards moderate complexity. I don't have problems remembering rules exceptions, admittedly however six out of the eight new chapters in this expansion are exactly that. You know better what works for you.
The expansions' modules are very likely to increase game time and the need to analyse. If you face a/p issues or if your games degrade into painfully slow affairs, you might want to take notice.
This is an expensive expansion for what it includes. It is clearly addressed to the game's more committed fans.
Conclusion: I am genuinely surprised by the amount of new tweaks and content that has made it into The Pursuit of Happiness KS Promos 3. Almost everything is new, almost everything is different. Your life has a myriad of new, distinct options, with both tactical and strategic paths to victory. Solid stuff!
For more info on The Pursuit of Happiness KS Promos 3 and Artipia Games visit their website at http://www.artipiagames.com.
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