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This video encapsulates the essence of the game in 99 seconds while avoiding a drudgeful trod through the rules. Let's see whether I can do the same while adding a bit more detail about what's going on in CV.
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Freelancer?! Maybe I'm doing something wrong...
Speaking of background, that's exactly what you'll create over the course of this game: a new personal background and history of yourself from your childhood years right up to the edge of death. Heck, you can imagine St. Peter tallying up the scores of the newly dead, should you wish to carry things that far — and since the Tandy soul calculator on his podium might not have precise values for things like a collection of paintings or a villa in the mountains, Miłuński has gone through the trouble of detailing such values on the cards you'll acquire. (The paintings are worth more than the villa, believe it or not, and the villa barely nets you more points than a television set, which is nuts! Arguing about such things is one of the fun aspects of the game.)
Everyone starts the game by drafting three childhood cards: school science fair, first love, trip to the zoo, clubbing — that sort of thing. That's right — clubbing. (You mean you didn't go clubbing in your childhood? How much poorer your days and weaker your legs.)
Whoever has the bicycle starts the game, and on a turn you roll dice up to three times, rerolling dice as you like except for bad luck symbols, which you cannot shake off no matter how much you like. (Fatherly advice resonates throughout the gameplay: "You want to avoid bad luck? Then sit in your room and don't do anything. Nothing bad will happen to you then. In fact, nothing will happen to you one way or another. If you're going to try, sometimes you're going to fail and you just have to get used to that.")
After you stop rolling, you can acquire one or two cards from the five available, with cards coming first from the young adulthood deck, then the middle age deck, then the old age deck. Each card has a cost on the top and a benefit on the bottom; if the benefit is expressed in symbols, then you have access to those symbols each turn, 7 Wonders-style, so that you can acquire more expensive cards. Some cards — marriage, Wikipedia author(!) — give you one or two extra dice to roll each turn. (If you write for Wikipedia, you're writing and rewriting history, right?) Other cards, such as child, have a cost on top of their benefits; if you can't throw a dollar sign at your kid each round, the state takes him away and gives him to someone who will care for him properly.
In addition to providing you with health, knowledge, relationships and money — along with the aforementioned bad luck — the dice can also supply good luck. Sometimes good luck is required as a cost — an inherited flat, say, or a job as a game designer — and if you collect a trio of happy faces, you can take nearly any card on offer. Dame Fortune, bring me an MBA! Have bad luck land on your doorsteps three times, however, and you lose something previously acquired, seeing it repossessed by the bank or driving away with that handsome tennis instructor, curse his wavy hair.
As you acquire cards, you generally stack them according to their categories — possession, work, relationship, health and knowledge — forming a history of your life and sorry choices. (Event cards go to your hand, from which you can play them on any future turn. If you keep playing the lottery, it's bound to pay off someday!) You receive benefits only from the cards on top of each stack, so as in life your choice on the present day can wipe away whatever advantage you've gained in the past. Hope that choice was a good one! Well, as good as you could manage given the options available to you...
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As you move from one deck to the next, anyone who has only half as many cards as the player with the most cards receives social assistance in the form of a free card. When the old age deck is nearly empty, the game ends and while gasping and wheezing from your hospital bed, you compare your life to everyone else's, most likely finding out that while you thought you were living the good life, it hardly compares to that of Golden Joe across the street who was racking up a life history tailormade for his life goal.
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In addition to each player's secret goal, one or more public goals are revealed at the start of the game, society laying down for all the rules under which you'll be rewarded. Well, possibly rewarded because in the end only the player or players who score the most points from these goals get to count those points toward their score. Sure, you might be a Renaissance Man, too, acquiring skills in every field possible, but if you're not the best Renaissance Man, then you might as well not have even bothered.
Before playing, I had likened the game to Friedemann Friese's Funny Friends, and others have made the same comparison. After playing two games, both with three players, the resemblance is still present in concept, but in execution they share little except engaging artwork that draws you into the playful spirit of the game, which comes across more about sharing experiences and joshing with one another about the strange turns in one's life (and one's games) than about beating down your fellow man (or woman). You banter about getting stuck taking health food or pining for that trip to Essen, which costs a ton of money but brings a double dose of good fortune. So true! Getting my hands on a finished production copy of CV while in Essen a few weeks from now will be part of that good fortune...
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The well-worn dice in my prototype and...
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the actual dice included in the game
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