Deal with your Stuff is a gamified model of life. It is geared towards anybody with capacity to tackle conversations and reflections about all of the complex factors at play in life. During gameplay, players work through life’s “Stuff to Deal With” in order to earn “Good Feels”, using healthy, and sometimes unhealthy, “Ways to Deal” cards. Players learn about community, teamwork, isolation, money, luck, and the consequences of your choices. Deal with your Stuff is intended to support meaningful engagement with serious topics in a humorous, fun, and accessible way. It is a game suitable for anybody with the capacity to handle conversations and reflections about life’s most challenging topics ages 14 and up, and as young as 12 years old with an adult present. Although the game tackles difficult topics with humor, players must feel comfortable with engaging with potentially triggering topics.

Play with any combination of these variants.

Economic Inequality – Each player roles a dice to determine their starting # of coins.

Teams, Families, Clans, and Factions – Break into equal teams, pick a victory option, and see which team can band together to collect the most good-feels.

Collaborative Group Play – See how many good-feels your group can earn in a period of time. Compare your scores to prior rounds. Good for 2 players.

Healthcare Variant – Each player roles a dice to determine their health insurance status. Roll 1-2: Normal Healthcare Rules. Roll 3-4: Player does not have insurance and cannot mental mental or health care cards (only coins). Roll 5-6: Universal Healthcare - All Mental and Health Care is reduced to 0 on Stuff Cards

GOOD-FEELS FOR THE WIN: Be the first player to reach an agreed upon number of good-feels. We recommend playing to 25-35.

DEAL WITH SOME STUFF: Randomly select any number of Stuff Cards to deal with and see who has the most good-feels once you run out of Stuff Cards. We recommend 20 cards to deal with as a start.

LIMITED TIME TO DEAL: Winner has the most good-feels after a certain amount of time. We recommend 30min.

It is intended for a general adult audiences, and can be used in high school classrooms, or with middle school students with adults helping facilitate and provide context for challenging topics.

Not all players are prepared to face these difficult topics. Some of the content and topics can be triggering for folks and that is why the content warning is in the instruction manual. Examples of some triggering topics: Cancer, chronic illness, depression, addiction, violence, death, etc.

The utilization of poop characters on Stuff cards is intended to bring levity and accessibility to challenging topics.

• Life is filled with “Stuff to Deal With”. Some is hard to deal with, some is easy. Some gives us “Good Feels”, some doesn’t.

• We need to utilize “Ways to Deal” deal with our “Stuff”.

• We can earn money to deal with “Stuff”. Money doesn’t automatically mean we can deal with our “Stuff”, but it helps.

• We don’t always have access to the resources to deal with particularly challenging “Stuff”.

• Sometimes we need the help of our community, and we need to learn to negotiate and navigate community dynamics to share in the “good feels”.

• Bad behavior in a community can make it challenging to receive support from the community.

• When faced with difficult “Stuff”, we might turn to “Unhealthy Ways to Deal”. They help us deal in the short-term, but at a cost. Sometimes this cost can make us keep turning to “Unhealthy Ways to Deal” in desperation.

• We don’t usually choose our “Stuff to Deal With”.

• “Good Feels” are the hallmark of a life well lived. Sometimes we can get the most “Good Feels” by dealing with the most challenging “Stuff”. It’s only a competition if you want it to be.

Players work to earn “Good Feels” by using resource cards from their hand to deal with “Stuff to Deal with Cards”. The resources needed to deal are self-care, healthcare, mental healthcare, political action, and coins. Players learn that relatively easy “Stuff” can be dealt with alone for modest quantities of “Good Feels”, but the most challenging, and most rewarding, “Stuff” needs help from other players (their community), requiring negotiation skills. Without help, players will be tempted to use “Unhealthy Ways to Deal” cards like “Addiction”, “Violence”, or “Blame”. Each helps them in the short-term but can impacts their resources, “Good Feels”, or negatively impacts other players who may no longer want to collaborate. During play, players might get cards that give them a job (coins), or they might get rich and have tons of money to use to buy resources. Players need to sacrificing their turn to deal with their “Stuff” in order to “Go to Work” and earn coins like in real life. Different victory and gameplay variations can help highlight the complex factors that impact the ability to earn “Good Feels”. Players can also choose to earn “Good Feels” as competing teams to represent family/community factions.