Testing the Afterlife: Why Our Game Needed a Resurrection

Last week, we sat down for our first full playthrough of Living Well & Haunting Hard. The game had a solid structure and plenty of spirit (pun fully intended), but something in the mechanics flatlined. As much as we loved the concept, the pacing dragged. Players lingered too long in the same life stages, and we missed that feeling of cosmic momentum.

We realized that without a mechanic to force movement through the life rings, the game could stall. There wasn’t enough pressure to evolve, transition, or — let’s be honest — die. That bottleneck made everything feel slower than intended and stripped away some of the game’s potential chaos.

So we fixed it. First, we added the Tempt Fate rule: if you roll a 6, you must draw a Crossroads Card and move to the next ring. Instant existential acceleration. Then we tweaked the Crossroads spaces — now, living players always move forward when they land there, while ghosts can use them to shift inward or outward one ring to haunt more effectively. We also gave ghosts their own Haunting Die, turning them into hilarious agents of chaos. And we overhauled ghost movement, making them feel like eerie pursuers rather than passive background noise.

The result? Momentum. Tension. Mischief. Ghosts gained power. The living felt pressure to keep evolving. The gameplay finally felt alive — even when everyone was dead.

We’ll be sitting down again in the next few days for another playtest — this time with all the new mechanics in place. Here’s hoping we’ve exorcised the bugs and summoned a smoother, more entertaining experience.

Here’s to good karma, keeping sanity, haunting with intention and delightfully cursed dice! 🎲💀