One of the hardest things to do in any art, and really the most important job, is to have the audience care. There’s lots of tricks and strategies to have them say ooh and aah, or to quickly turn to the next page. You can distract and bombast them with glitz and glam. But to have the person truly moved, to have them set the book down or walk out of the theatre and stop and think about what they just experienced, that is truly a feat in itself. That being said, I have never felt more like I was experiencing one man’s personal story than I did while playing Heading Forward.
It made me pause. And think.
Making Progress
Your goal in Heading Forward, and the game play itself, is relatively simple. In this solitaire game, you have experienced a traumatic brain injury, but you aren’t trying to discover what happened or reverse time or find the culprit. Your humble job is to simply – get better.
In a nod to the current mess of our healthcare system, one that treats mental issues with much less understanding than physical issues, you have to progress enough before the insurance runs out. Or they will drop you.
In Heading Forward to make progress, the four areas you can work on are called your “suits”. They are Financial, Cognitive, Endurance and Adaptability.
Each of those are split into categories like “Work”, “Socialize”, or “Memory”. And each of those are split into four levels, one through four.
At the beginning, all of your card levels are at one. Your ultimate goal then is to progress three categories, one from each suit, from one to four before time runs out – aka the big calendar sitting in front of you, ominously counting down the days.
This all sounds immensely depressing, especially if you have had any experience with the American Healthcare System. But there is a quite hope here. A tenacity that you wouldn’t expect from a quiet solitaire game.
Repeat After Me
To that end, there bits of game play that I would normally eviscerate in any other game. For instance, on your first go around of cards, it is very, very repetitive. You spend one card (either for time, heart or both) by placing it in the discard pile. You also move a spoon – which represent energy in this game – by moving it from one side of the calendar to the other side. This enables you to turn another card in your hand into a level two. You place that newly turned card also onto the discard pile. For the third card, you have no more cards or spoons left. That third card goes in the discard pile.
You then reset your one spoon, moving it from the used area back to the unused.
Draw three cards.
Spend one card.
Spend a spoon
Turn another.
Discard the third.
Reset the spoon.
Draw, spend, turn, discard, reset.
Draw, spend, turn, discard, reset.
Over and over and over.
I don’t mean to say that there is absolutely no strategic thought put into the beginning of Heading Forward. You do have to think about which cards you are turning into level 2. Because once they show up on your second turn, the rewards start appearing. Are you keeping things balanced? Do you have enough resources? Are you turning enough of different suits to progress enough to keep the insurance happy?
What I am pointing out is that it’s repetitive and basic and kind of annoying. “Couldn’t there be a faster way?“
And that’s the point.
I have never felt more like I was experiencing one man’s personal story than I did while playing Heading Forward.
It’s Always There
Heading Forward puts you in the place of the designer, John du Bois, who suffered a traumatic brain injury of his own and made this game out of his experience. The repetition is part of the process. You have to relearn the most basic things, doing them over and over, before you can move on to the next.
It’s moments like that that drive the point home of what it’s like to go through this type of recovery.
Most prominent is the “Trigger Card”. At the beginning of the game, you pull out one of the categories to the side and replace it with the red Trigger Card. Whenever that card appears, you have to try to progress that category first. If you can’t, because you don’t have the proper resources, that category is atrophied (brought down one level) and your whole hand is atrophied as well.
Hitting a Trigger and not having the resources to handle it is devastating.
There’s nothing you can do for that Trigger card. You can never get rid of it. You can never progress the Trigger out of the game. As the rules states, “The possibility of coming across a Trigger is always with you.” That creates an ever present anxiety that things can collapse at any moment.
It’s a burden you have to live with.
Quietly Changing Perspectives
And that anxiety only grows worse. As your progress increases, so does your ability to draw more cards. As you draw more cards, you increase your chances of coming across your one Trigger.
At the very least, you take on more and more tasks that you might not have the proper resources to handle. You then have to make a choice between the tasks you can at least keep at their current level and others that will atrophy, sliding back in their progress.
What forms every time you sit down to play is a strong narrative story of one person’s journey. The repetition, the having to choose between what is atrophied and what is not allows the simple yet effective story to unfold in front of you. There is heartbreak and sighs of relief and a sense of accomplishment.
The bare bones production value, save for the nicely printed map, the drawings on the suits, the minimal art – they all lend to the credence that this is a deeply raw and solitary journey.
Will this game change the world? No. But then, it’s not trying to. Heading Forward slowly and humbly doing the much harder job – making you care about the day to day things we take for granted.
(If you’ve enjoyed this review and what I’m doing on Cardboard Reflection, please consider helping the website by donating a cup of Ko-fi.)