Pros

Well, the consuming you’re doing to buy this game isn’t bad at a first glance: distinguished cards, an insert, with a unique minimalist art style. The most entertaining thing is all of the different jobs you can make: from your starting game of playing as an Intern, to the Engineer who can make raw materials better. Or a Tycoon who can double his money! DOUBLE!

Speaking of money, buying whatever you want, as long as you can afford it, tends to be rather satisfying. You get to choose what quality of Materials you want! You can get a bunch of low quality stuff, or one high quality thing! Quality actually matters, because once a material is used up, it goes into your Landfill, which is unhappiness end game (negative points)!

Money manipulation gets very satisfying with the ‘Credit Card’ mechanic, to essentially take the risk of losing happiness later, for a huge current surge of resources. Just make sure you can pay it off in time. What could throw you off from your payment plans are your friends playing ‘favors’ on each other, which are take-that cards to forcefully resell materials to them, or snipe their last material. Alternatively, many of these favors are mutual favors too.

Raising your Happiness isn’t a smooth linear progression, which we suppose is a rather fitting at times. You want to work to get money to afford things, but in doing so, you’re pushing down your Happiness… you really gotta consider how many times you want to work. Yes, the game is really trying to say something about IRL working here.

Every turn here can actually feel like some degree of a lifestyle decision. To keep reflecting the modern world, there are going to be events that happen when people hit Happiness thresholds, like 'Bad Debt’ where you can’t buy anything if you own a credit card… ouch.

Cons & Nitpicks

LOOP’s rulebook is really all over the place though. Not sure what is going on with the proofreading, like the ‘Officier’ (yes, that’s how its printed), where his first played ‘favor cannot be reject’? Or the action of ‘apply a credit card’.

Speaking of gameplay issues, the game can sometimes grind to a screeching halt when no one wants to consume any of the Activities on the board. Because these Activities don’t actually do anything after bought, you purely want them for their symbols to match to your Goals, and sometimes none of those symbols are there.

A lot of other gameplay issues actually fall under more nitpicky things, because this game just isn’t trying to be that competitive: like event card RNG being everywhere, there being a complete unbalance of career strengths, or how activities being ridiculously one-dimensional (just buy once and forget about them).

Final Thoughts

But who knows!? Maybe this game wanted these activities to be reduced to symbols, because its viewing EVERYTHING through a material lens. LOOP is incredibly insistent on following real life, and with that, the core gameplay loop isn’t satisfying in the way many games are. Were they meant to feel somewhat repetitive? Were careers supposed to teach a lesson in how unbalanced they are? Like… all of these things sound terrible through a competitive lens… but maybe that’s the point.