The Game of Happiness

The Game of Happiness is a social group game about exploring what makes you (un)happy.

On your turn, you draw several random cards giving you possible events, such as “Becoming rich” or “Causing an accident” You must rank these from unhappiest to happiest—and all other players do the same, together, for you.

Once done, you compare your rankings and see how well the others know you!

What’s special?

If you’ve seen any of my work or articles, you know I lost my ability to “enjoy things” or “be happy” a long time ago. I’ve been trying to get it back ever since. This project was another attempt to perhaps find or trigger something inside me.

This is barely a game. The rules I gave above are all the rules. It’s a game where you’re presented these interesting dilemmas, or situations, or potential superpowers, and you have to decide what would make you more or less happy.

It’s surprisingly hard to create your own ranking. It’s even harder for others to imagine how you’d feel about these events and match that ranking. That’s what turns this very simple idea into something that really does feel like a challenging game—even though it’s really a therapy session in disguise.

The other crucial part, of course, is the enormous list of possible cards. They’re divided into different categories and packs, to keep things manageable (and the material to print low). But once I got started, and asked others for their ideas, the list grew to 500+ entries over time.

As such, creating the game was 30 minutes of intuitive work, while creating the cards took way longer than any other game.

Also, this inspired the spin-off project The Game of Dilemmas. It’s smaller and more of an actual “game”, but still very much focused on emotional or moral dilemmas that are hard to answer.