Independently published in 2020 out of a small print studio in Boulder, Colorado, Playheart is a social bonding activity for friends and family, a single-player self-care game that can be used as an extension of other therapy tools, and a gamified self-improvement guideline system for individuals attempting to achieve more well-rounded lifestyles. To quote its author Jordan Quaglia:
Playheart is a dice game that turns daily life into a treasure hunt.... With a simple cast of the dice, Playheart can serve as a mirror for self-reflection, a muse for creative conversation, or a means for cultivating well-being.
It achieves this effect by providing three unique sets of gameplay instructions for every possible combination of rolls among the provided set of dice. The first "Contemplation" set of rules gives a solitary player a baseline range of topics to serve as a starting place for quiet introspection. The second "Conversation" set of rules gives a pair or group of players a handful of discussion topics, featuring deep
"getting to know you" questions and prompts which could also be used for solitary
journaling. The third "Cultivation" set of rules gives the player(s) a physical, mental, spiritual, or social task to perform "away from the gameboard," for purposes of raising their personal
merit or sense of self-worth, supporting their physical health and fitness, or helping them become more socially integrated into their community.
Along with the reference and instructional text, titled The Playheart Playbook, the game comes bundled with four dice. One six-sided die coloured gold, with white pips, represents the scoring system, and is called the game's "treasure die." The pips can be treated as outright points values, but the Playbook encourages treating each distinct roll as representing a different type of abstract value from the task one performed for the game, like improving one's vitality, or deepening one's relationships.
Two four-sided dice are coloured white and black respectively, in reflection of the "yin / yang" of the Tao. These are called the "shades dice," and their numeric values are compared to each other, to indicate how dynamic and energetic (yang) or serene and methodical (yin) the activity is intended to be. Running a foot race against one's friends, for example, is competitive and demands a great deal of one's physical energy, and it is also a task with a short duration, so Playheart would interpret it as a "yang" task. Quietly reading books together in each other's company is a task of long duration, requiring little investment of outward-facing energy, so it would be interpreted as a "yin" task.
The final die is an eight-sided transparent die with black inked numerals on each face. This is called the "Prism" die, and each face is treated as representing a hue of the rainbow (1 is red, 7 is violet, and 8 indicates the full spectrum of the rainbow), as well as one of the "chakras" of New Age mysticism. The specific category or nature of an activity is selected by the Prism die, according to the widely-accepted New Age interpretations of what each chakra represents or pertains to in human life. Rolling the value for "yellow," indicating the solar plexus chakra manipura, for example, will provide a list of activities that pertain to one's willpower, creativity, healthy social boundaries, and enfranchisement or empowerment to exert one's own agency without being subordinate to others. Rolling the value for "green," indicating the heart chakra anahata, meanwhile, supplies a list of activities relating to compassion, community volunteerism, benevolence, kindness, and self-directed love in the case of people who suffer from self-recrimination and a sense of inferiority or guilt.
In all combinations of Playheart game activities, the Playbook reminds the player(s) to approach the prompts with a playful mindset, and not a solemn or overly competitive mindset. It is encouraged that a player disregard all concern they have about failure or losing, and not trouble themselves over questions of whether they are doing a good job at accomplishing what the prompt is requesting of them, but instead they should prioritise simply enjoying the experience, and whatever is to be learned from it will unfold itself to them naturally over time.
A very similar type of bonding, therapy, and personal betterment game, called Nine Arches, similarly attempts to inspire an adventurous and exploratory posture toward one's own mundane life and surroundings, using a deck of cards as prompts rather than a set of dice. It was developed by Fortnite and DOOM producer Geoffrey Gray, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and the resulting social isolation and creative potential caused by millions of people suddenly having thousands of hours of unstructured but stressful free time on their hands. The Wonder-Walking series of books, journals, and prompt card decks by artist Amy T. Won uses a similar approach, directed at taking strolls through one's neighbourhood, or hikes into nearby unpaved areas, to experience greater psychological integration and attachment to one's home region and local ecology, for the purpose of inspiring artistic endeavours and waking up one's Muse. I can recommend all of these systems to people who are looking to adventurously gamify their lives, through highly varied task and conversation prompts. Of the three systems named here, Playheart is the least demanding to learn and set up, because every prompt always provides at least one option which can be performed sitting down indoors (while Wonder-Walking is effortless to learn, but does require leaving the house every single time). This makes Playheart the most accessible of the three for players who have mobility-related disabilities. Playheart also always includes prompts that are age-appropriate for small children, as well as prompts which have enough challenge and sophistication that an adult would not consider them to be pandering or overly easy.
Having played Playheart a handful of times with a close companion, I find it overall to be a charming and beneficial way to approach unstructured free time, though a handful of the prompts feel a little bit "phoned-in," as though the author might have been running out of ideas for unique activity ideas. The scoring system also mostly feels like a tacked-on afterthought, only existing to accommodate players who insist on keeping score in the first place. Playheart does not actually need a points system, and as far as I can tell, the scoring neither adds anything to how the games are conducted, nor detracts anything from the experience. The yin / yang and chakra interpretations of activities are reasonably intuitive, and once the general pattern of the idea is understood, it stops being necessary to use the Playbook for game instructions, because one can reasonably extrapolate what sort of activities would be suggested for each dice roll combination. I consider this last point to be a great advantage of the system, because a few tiny dice are very portable - indeed, pocketable! - and the book, while small (about six inches by four and a half), is still less portable, and more subject to wear and tear. The ease of bringing Playheart along with me anywhere is one of the reasons it has been a simple matter to playtest it frequently, and thus to provide this review.
Iron Noder 2024, 11/30