Do you dream of a life as a motorcycle-driving astronaut living in one of Paris’s 5-star hotels with your pet hamster? Or maybe you’d prefer a life in Nowhereville where you don’t require more than a few imaginary friends to keep you company in your tent when you’re not busy doing street performances, or riding around on your Segway. While the cards have figuratively always been in our hands to create lives of our own, R&R Games literally puts the cards in our hands with their newest party game, Get A Life.
If you remember playing Mash back in the day (or, maybe just the other day), then get ready to love Get A Life. Using brightly colored cards with hilarious (and beautiful) lifestyle images, Get A Life breathes new life (for lack of a better phrase) into the whole Mash concept, while creating twists and turns for players along the way. For many party games, more players makes the game more fun, but Get A Life is as much fun as it is funny when played among as few as three players, and I’ll tell you why.
To play, players build hands of five Lifestyle cards to represent either The Best or The Worst life for the “Contestant” (aka the person getting a new life). The Lifestyle categories include Occupation, Accommodation, Location, Transportation, and Companion—so the lives players create can get pretty whacky when the cards in your hand imply that a day in the life entails taking a sleigh to your mansion. With so many possible card combinations the results mean crazy, hysterical, luxurious, and depressing life options for players, which makes everything so fun.
To keep the game going round and round, each player gets dealt three Get A Life cards (aka “Get Wild!” cards as our amazing editorial intern calls them). The Get A Life cards are all different and range from allowing players to trade their location cards with a player of their choosing, to a card that allows a player to look through the deck and switch a card of his/her choice with his/her corresponding Lifestyle card. The game ends once everyone has either played or discarded all of his and her Get A Life cards, which means it’s time for the big reveal. Going in order, each player discloses his/her cards to the group and pitches the either terribly horrifying or incredibly wonderful life to the Contestant (if you really want to win, the sell is probably the most important part of the game). Once everyone’s pitch is done, the Contestant chooses one Best life and one Worst life and gives those players a Scoring Chip, and then you play again and someone else becomes the Contestant!
Not only is the game easy to play and understand, but it’s travel-friendly and perfect for sleepovers, car rides, and making things that are boring fun. Get A Life is designed for kids ages 10 and up, which is probably the same age I found Mash—which forever changed my life for the best. Like Mash, kids will love to play this game when they’re young, as much as they will when they’re not-so-young. And (the best part) no matter how many times you play, the game will seriously never get old. Never.
