Sweet Existence: A Strange Planet Card Game

 

Here are the rules: You look at 3 cards and place them face down in front of you. You take turns drawing an action card. If you get a pink card, you do what it says, like taking a point from another person or swapping one of the hidden cards. If you get a purple card, you give it to someone else at random. Once you have two purple cards you can flip over a hidden card and take a point from someone else. You also got a "dating profile" card at the beginning of the game, and if you have the same exact one as other players then you all get to take a point from someone else, including each other, when one of you gets two purple cards. When someone flips over the "Perish" card, the game ends.

Oh, and did I mention that each card has an alien comic on it that adds absolutely nothing to the game?

Don't get me wrong, the comics are funny. I used to follow the Instagram account of Nathan W. Pyle, the guy who made them. Each comic describes a mundane thing in a weird way from the perspective of aliens. For example, the aliens describe a birthday by saying "This is where the planet was when you emerged." When cleaning up, they say "Let us store irregular shapes inside shapes with flat surfaces." 

The problem is that the comics don't have any relevance to the gameplay. The rules may sound complicated, but they boil down to taking turns drawing a card and moving cookie tokens around. At the beginning, my grandparents took the time to read every card, thinking that there would be some meaning to them, but it turned out to just be a waste of time.

When we first opened the game and looked at the cards, I thought it would be an Apples-to-Apples style comic maker where we used the weird comic panels to make silly combinations. That would be a fun game that actually involved the comics it was based off. As it is, "Sweet Existence" was boring and uncreative, and I would not recommend it.

Full disclaimer: I didn't get a chance to play a good board game this week. The only game I ended up having time to play was this one, something my dad grabbed off a random shelf at a restaurant to pass the time. Next week will (hopefully) mark the return to good recommendations.