Use Up All Your Sick Days really takes the cake for bizarre board game concepts. The two games contained within its deck of cards are about taking sick leave from your job to prevent exhaustion. Sick days are often a point of tension between employer and employee, a conflict between productivity and profit and the unpredictable health of human beings. When I think of them, the phrase 'the horrors of capitalism' springs to mind. Why, then, would a light party game with adorable animals be a fitting theme?
Game one is a competitive card game that pits you against your fellow employees, each racing to maximize your sick leave without causing clashes in the company calendar. It's a simultaneous party game that plays a bit like Uno. Play cards from your hand to reduce your fatigue tokens, and win the game if you can clear them all before anyone else.
Remember when I said this was a simultaneous game? The twist is that there's no turn order, but if another player slaps a card down at the same time as you, you both draw cards as a penalty.
The crowdfunder calls this a "hilarious" game, but I can't stop overthinking it. These rules imply that your co-workers are not fellow victims of a toxic push for workplace productivity, but the real enemy of your free time. Don't confront the failings of capitalism! Don't look the problem in the eye! Look, here's a cute axolotl crying over quarterly results, look at him instead!
The second variant of Use Up All Your Sick Days is a co-op or solo game. Are you playing as exhausted workers petitioning their employer for support with burnout? Is this a mutual fight for better working conditions? Absolutely not. You're playing as the company HR team, trying to organize everyone's leave to minimize clashes.
The rules as described by the Backerkit page sound simple. "Play a card on to the top most column matching its number. Get 3 matching workers in a row to make them happy, make all the workers happy to win!"
To make things more tricky, players can only communicate by marking spots on the calendar with limited 'pizza party' tokens. At this point, the game is cracking jokes about how management insists AI will help with your job, and I'm convinced this has to be satire, or at least a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
If this sounds like your kind of (pizza) party, you can grab a copy of Use Up All Your Sick Days for $25. Crowdfunding ends on January 1, right before we all go back to work.
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