Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr has the best theme – well, the most interesting theme, at least – of any board game I’ve seen this year. It’s a cooperative title where players work together to try to keep the titular patient alive while listening to his deathbed ramblings and trying to assemble his story from the memories you gain. The story aspect is just plain impressive – it’s a serious concept that could go really wrong in the guise of a game, but the writing is solid and does a good job of bringing the sense of partial memories to life. The game around it, however, doesn’t live up to the premise.
The game lets two to four players (although there’s no reason this couldn’t be a solo game) work together as ‘nurses’ in the ward where Billy Kerr is housed, and comes with ten scenarios that are each played over the course of a round of days, represented by the Patient deck of cards. On each round, players draw three Patient cards representing the morning, afternoon, and night shifts, and will choose to give medical care or palliative care for each. If they choose medical care, they expend Care tokens, which are the game’s main resource and not easy to come by, to either stop Billy’s condition from deteriorating, or, if he’s stable, improve his condition. (His condition is marked by a track, with his starting spot at 28; if he reaches 0, you lose.) If they choose palliative care, they may gain care tokens or acquire random partial memory cards, which come in five timelines.
On some cards, players may then expend one care token to Inquire, essentially asking Billy more about any specific timeline to try to get a clear memory. They then draw cards randomly from the clear memory card deck until they get one matching the chosen timeline; if that drawn card matches a partial memory card they’ve already drawn and placed on the table, they keep that clear memory card. Scenario objectives may require players to finish with a certain number of clear memories before the day ends (exhausting the Patient deck) or Billy dies, or to find ten specific clear memories, or to keep Billy’s spirits up with positive memories rather than negative ones.
The main problem with the game is the way players acquire clues and how they can satisfy objectives. There’s too much randomness involved in the process of converting partial memories into clear ones – if you draw a clear memory card before you have the associated partial memory card, you can’t keep it, and the partial memory cards you get are completely random. When going to the clear memory deck via Inquiry or another method, you can choose the timeline from which you’ll draw cards – the idea is you’re prompting Billy with questions about that set of memories – but whether you get one that matches a memory you already have is entirely random.
The rest of the game is very well designed because it’s tightly balanced: this is a hard game to win, as it should be. You have to choose well throughout a game, or just get incredibly lucky with patient cards, to even have a chance to meet any objective, which is a requirement for any cooperative game to work. The decisions around when to use care tokens and when to forego the chance to gain memories so you can acquire more tokens are reminiscent of the cure-versus-treat decisions at the heart of Pandemic, and the patient deck always seems to be just the right length to make you go down to the wire. I just wish the storyline were better tied into the mechanics in a way that gave players more control over those random clear memory card draws. The only way around that now is to burn more care tokens and keep drawing cards, but you’ll need those tokens if you don’t want to kill the patient on your watch. It’s such a great theme and clever, novel concept that I still think this game deserves a wider audience, but if you get it, consider some house rules to avoid the frustration of losses due entirely to randomness.