Steven Rhodes: Living Well Is the Best Revenge

Living Well Is The Best Revenge…

… is a dice strategy game for 2 to 4 players competing to live their best lives.

During Living Well Is The Best Revenge (game of part luck part strategy), players take turns rolling dice and unlocking cards in an attempt to live better than their opponent/s and/or reign their revenge down upon them.

The artwork is from Steven Rhodes and perfectly portrays his style of nostalgia which a twist of darkness. This game really does conjure up that wonderful reminiscent feeling of a 1980s misspent youth that perhaps, wasn’t all together wholesome.

Hell Hath No Fury

Gameplay is really simple. Choose your favourite colour between blue, purple, green or red and take the matching dice, cards and player board of that colour. To set up, lay out your cards numbered 1 to 10 on their locked side and place your scoreboard within easy reach for all those points you’re going to start wracking up. Pick up your score marker, your 2 coloured dice and black power die.

Players will also begin with one re-roll token each, the rest should be placed within easy reach of everyone playing. These let you re-roll any die at any point as you are playing the game, which could be vital when unlocking those last few cards. You can also earn more of these tokens if you unlock the Cow-Boy card (number 2). And, if luck is on your side at the end of the game if you still have any re-roll tokens left that you haven’t used, each one will give you an extra 2 points.

Each player has an extra yellow power die placed on the tenth ‘Alone’ card. This card is worth unlocking quickly if you’re lucky enough to roll a dice value of 10 or above as when you turn this card over to its unlocked ‘Clone’ side you get to claim and use the die which provides an extra chance of activating card’s abilities each round.

In The Beginning…

To begin players won’t have any cards unlocked so everyone rolls their two coloured dice together, unlocking their first card/s at the same time. Cards are unlocked based on the dice number rolled. For example, if the two die rolled equal 10 you could choose to unlock the number 10 card or any combination of cards that equal 10, for example the 6 and 4 or the 7 and 3 cards. Choose wisely as you can only use the power of the card when it has been turned to its unlocked side.

The person who rolled the lowest number gets to then go first. On this turn that player rolls their two dice AND their black power die (the dots on the die will match your chosen colour) and if you’re fortunate enough to unlock the yellow power die (again the dots will match your colour) you can roll this too.

Let’s Take Action

Once the guest player has rolled their 3, or 4, dice all other players will roll their one (or two if activated) power dice. They then look to see if their power die matches any of the current player’s roll. If it does they get to score 1 point.

Next… activate your powers! This is where the evil of living well truly begins. If you roll a number of an unlocked card you may use its power. Some cards, for example ‘Pariah’ (number 3) allow you to steal points from opponents or even reduce their score by half with cards like ‘Zero’ (number 6). This is where the strategy element comes in… statistically with a die numbered 1-6 what number will most often be rolled? Do you think that could be a good card to unlock first?

Finally unlock new cards. At this stage it is worth noting that cards 7-10 don’t require a power die to activate, once unlocked you can use their power at any time, for example ‘Lame’ (number 7) becomes ‘Fame’ and lets you remove 1 from the total of your dice whilst ‘Hot Mess’ (number 8) becomes ‘Hot Rod’ allowing you to add 1 to the total, whereas when ‘Twerps’ is unlocked to ‘—‘ it allows you to remove a die all together. And you can combine these abilities, so say you rolled a 4 and a 3 but all your card combinations of 7 had been used, however, card 5 was still locked! You could simply remove the number 3 die and then add 1 to the number 4 die to unlock the ‘Ding Dong’ (number 5) card to its ‘King Kong’ side. This is really useful because as soon as you can’t unlock cards anymore, as they say in the playground, you’re out.

Suddenly you’re thinking… hang on… which cards do I focus on unlocking first. The ones that require a Power Die to activate but tend to be a little more evil or do I go for the later cards that are free use and help me with my game? This element adds a little bit of strategy and manipulative thinking preventing Living Well from just being a game of luck.

Gameplay continues until only 1 player remains. When this happens the final player gets to roll their two dice, adding their total to their score. Then reset your cards and start again. After playing 3 rounds the player with the most points is the winner.

Revenge Is Sweet

One thing I really like about this game is the way it is easy to believe you have a clear cut winner during round 3. Maybe there’s a standoff between you and another opponent. They’ve got 62 points but you’ve only got 41. How would you ever catch them? Pow, Bam… unlock ‘Zero’ to ‘Hero’, get a double 6 on your power dice, Bang suddenly you’ve halved, then halved their score again right down to 16, and just like that… you’re back in the lead!

Final Thoughts

At first glance you might think that this small looking game Living Well Is The Best Revenge won’t take up much table space. Well, let me tell you, you’d be wrong! Spreading out 10 cards, having your point scoring board and leaving room for reroll tokens as well an area to roll all these dice takes up a lot of table space! That said, this is such a fun, easy to play game with a quick playtime. I really enjoyed it but boy oh boy when your opponent activates that card 6 ‘Hero’ power and you lose half your points it is BRUTAL! Watching your opponent chuckling away to themselves just harnesses your inner vengeful spirit and makes you want to keep bringing this game back to the table just to enact your revenge.