It’s your day off! Obviously you should be spending some time on Care for yourself, but then there are all these Chores to do that you won’t otherwise be able to take care of until who knows when. There are only so many hours of the day, so you’re going to have to plan things out – don’t do too many Chores so you actually get some rest, don’t spend so much time on self Care so that the Chores just pile up. Coffee will help! Now if only that darn cat would stop knocking over all the cups. This is Self Careless, the life balance game for 1-2 players from Jason Anarchy Games and Cassandra Calin!

Setup begins with drawing and laying out 12 of the Care/Chore cards face up in a 4×3 grid. Each space corresponds with an hour of the day, from Noon at the top left down to 11pm at the bottom right. In addition to the act of self Care or the burdensome Chore that you can now see, each Care/Chore card has a specific time printed on it as well. So, what you want is for each hour of the day to have a properly scheduled activity in its spot. As you’ve shuffled your deck and then dealt these cards out randomly, very few if any of them will be where you want them to be. You put your coffee token and your Coffee Cards off to the side to deal with later, your player pawn on the first turn of the turn tracker, and then you’re ready to start your day!

Every turn you draw two cards, and then you can either Set A Task or Sip Your Coffee. If you Set A Task, you choose one of the cards you have drawn and use it to replace a card that’s already a part of your day and the 4×3 grid. This is the most direct way that you’re going to be able to get your properly scheduled tasks into your day, and in a truly luck-blessed game it would be all you ever have to do. However, if you don’t want to Set A Task (you’ve already got the right tasks in those time slots, or you’re keeping an eye on the balance part of final scoring) you Sip Your Coffee – the first time you do this you place the Coffee Token on one of the cards on the outer border of the grid, and for every subsequent time you can move it to an adjacent card. The reason you want to do this is that some cards have a little coffee cup icon on them; if the coffee token lands on one, you get to use a Coffee Card!

Each Coffee Card offers a unique action that could really make your day easier. Zen Coffee lets you swap cards already in your day around up to two times. Zen Coffee lets you draw three cards on the next round and use as many of them as you want; if it’s the last round you can draw and play immediately, making this particular type of coffee a great last ditch effort. Bop Coffee chases away your pet cat with the music you’re listening to, letting you optionally discard any cards that have a cat icon on it. Why do that? Well, because if your coffee token ever lands on a card with a cat icon, the darn cat knocks it over and sends it back off the grid! Now, that has to be more or less deliberate – you would have to choose to move it onto such a card, or replace the card it is currently on with a cat icon card. There may even be times you want to, if there’s a coffee icon  you might reach faster by starting over at the border. Thus, the Bop Coffee is the most situational – you might use it to clear a path you want to send your coffee token on later, or to get rid of cards that are mucking up your schedule anyways in the hope that you get something better.

At the of the round you discard any unused or replaced Care/Chore cards, flip over any Coffee Cards that were used, and move the pawn to another round on the tracker. On the 5th and 9th turns the pawn will reach a spot that lets you flip a Coffee Card back over to being face up, making it usable again. You play for twelve rounds, and then take a look at your day! You get one point for each hour of the day that has a properly scheduled Care/Chore card in its slot, and you can get an additional point if you’ve maintained a good life balance and have an equal number of Chore and Care cards in your day, for a top score of 13 points. You can record your score on the back of the rulebook, and try to get the most balanced day you can!

Now there is a two-player mode of Self Careless! Well, actually, there are two such modes. The one detailed in the Rulebook is, more or less, a case of parallel play. Playing from the same deck, both players have a ‘day’ of cards, and the name of the game is simply to get more points than the other player by the time the game ends. The players are sharing coffee cards and the token can be taken from the other player’s day and put onto your own, and all coffees refill on the turn tracker instead of just one, but otherwise the gameplay of this “Balance Battle” is unchanged.

Not so with the Cat Deck, the rules for which are explained in the same rulebook but for which the cards and cat (token) are sold separately. When using the Cat Deck, the second player instead takes on the role of the Cat, placing their token on one of the border cards before play begins. Then, every turn the cat player draws two cards from the cat deck and and chooses which one to play. Whereas getting your coffee spilled is  more or less a deliberate choice in the single player mode, here it is much more an active threat, as the lion’s share of the Cat Deck cards are about moving the cat token around to actively hunt your coffee.

It gets worse, though, because the cat also has cards that can flip over Care/Chore cards to render them useless for scoring – the human player will have to get the coffee token over there to flip them back – and discard and replace Care/Chore cards. That’s before you account for the fact that if the cat token reaches a card with a coffee icon on it, the little jerk apparently sips some bean juice and goes a little nuts: the cat has its own Coffee Cards which can lead to drawing more cat cards per turn (this stacks), moving Care/Chore cards around, or immediately drawing two cards for the human player and replacing a card in play with the worst one. It doesn’t all go the cat’s way, though; since there’s now an active adversary, the human player no longer has to choose between playing cards and moving the coffee token, being able to do both each turn. At the end of play, the human counts up all of the points they got as per usual… and the cat gets every point that the human didn’t.

The only problem with the Cat Deck is that it makes the other modes of play not shine quite so brightly. The Balance Battle is, and I think I can get away with an ‘objectively’ here, just not as interesting as actively struggling with that darn cat. It’s certainly not as adversarial though, so maybe that’s a feature. In a post-Cat Deck life both the threat of the cat and the choice between cards and coffee token seem a little underwhelming in the solo mode  (that one is definitely subjective), although again you could look at it being the more Care-flavored option. There are already some variant rules for changing difficulty (draw more cards to make it easier, the different Care/Chore cards have to alternate on the hour for harder), so I think if you wanted a more Chore-flavored solo game you could automate the cat deck by drawing one Cat Deck card every turn, so long as you’re honest when a card tells you to make things worse for the player i.e. you.

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I’ve spent all these words so far talking about how the game plays, because obviously that’s important to the experience, but one can’t talk about Self Careless without putting the spotlight on the art of Cassandra Calin and its accompanying flavor text. Cassandra Comics is well known as a semi-autobiographical work that’s equal parts charming, funny, and deeply relatable to its readers, and all of that is on display here. Half of the enjoyment of playing Self Careless is looking at the art, reading the text on the card, and either laughing or shaking your head while muttering ‘yeah I get that.”

The 6 Hours of Sleep card in particular hit home.

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Self Careless is very much on brand for Jason Anarchy Games, an easy to play and overall fun game, that also gets you more content from a beloved creator in the bargain. $24.99 will get you the base game. While ‘mandatory’ expansions are not by default a good thing in this case I do have to advise going up to $39.99 for the deluxe version which includes the Cat Deck (among other doodads like stickers and a slip cover). It provides too much depth to the game to skip, There doesn’t seem to be an option to buy the Cat Deck separately after you’ve tried the base game on its own, online anyways, so keep that in mind

$54.99 will also tack on a fancy playmat you can set your cards up on to the deluxe version, if that’s what pours your coffee.

Alright, I’m going to read a book at Noon, take out the garbage at 2:00, enjoy a board game night at 6:00, and then I can clean up my place at 11:00… no! No, cat, get away from the coffee! Noooooo!

Thanks to Jason Anarchy for talking with us about the game at PAX Unplugged ’23 and giving us a review copy to try out, and to friend of the site Adam for lending us a Cat Deck to full explore Self Careless!