The ideal workplace is hard to find; instead, offices are often rife with dynastic politics, with employees at the mercy of smug and supercilious superiors.
As power-hungry managers work to impress the higher-ups and sabotage their counterparts, their hapless underlings can only hope to live long enough to get their next paycheck.
If you’ve ever experienced such madness – or wish to manipulate that madness to your own advantage – local game developer Yee I-Van has just the thing for you.
Through his company Alchymy Creative, he has come up with “HR: The Toxic Workplace Game” – a card game that pits up to four players against one another. The goal? To sabotage the success of rival teams and managers.
To that end, betrayal and backstabbing are your keys to victory. In fact, the box that contains the game’s 108 cards comes with a warning: “Caution: May cause loss of your job, friends, family and sanity.”
Fun fact: “HR” is based on Yee’s own experience of being a middle-level manager having to deal with employees.
By design, the game is simple enough for most Malaysians to play – though while it can be understood and enjoyed by teens, young working adults are likely to find it a lot more relatable.
Each player takes on the role of a Manager, and each manager is placed in charge of a team of employees.
There are 16 Employee cards in the deck; so, the more managers there are, the fewer the number of employees each player receives.
These employees are based on real-world stereotypes of office workers in Malaysia. You are likely to have met some of these before (or perhaps you are one): the innocent intern, the bootlicking “Igor”, the coveted IT wizard, the promiscuous lover (hmm).
The goal of each manager is to undermine fellow managers by getting their teams fired. Alternatively, a manager can win by completing a project.
Four types of cards are used in play: warning letters, action cards, instant cards, and project progress cards.
At the start of turn, each player must have five cards in their hand. Each player can only play one card during their turn, and the goal is to send out warning letters – the most common type of card – to employees from the other teams.
If an employee gets three of these, they are considered retrenched and are removed from play. These warning letters are humorously inspired by real-world workplace offences such as “sexual harassment” and “overtly racist”. Oh dear.
Action cards, on the other hand, allow you to do things that improve your situation or impede your rivals’ progress.
“Seduce the Boss”, for example, allows you to remove your team’s warning letters. “Hotshot Lawyer Cousin” gives your team immunity from warning letters for two turns.
While far fewer than action cards, instant cards are powerful as you can play them even when it isn’t your turn.
Hence, feel free to play “Meeting Purgatory” to skip a targeted manager’s turn, or issue a “Forced Transfer” to steal an employee from another manager.
Finally, the project progress cards come in four variants: initiation, planning, execution, and closure.
Play each of these and you win! It’s an alternative route to victory without having to focus entirely on destroying your rival managers’ teams.
“HR” is clearly tongue-in-cheek, with descriptions on the cards often worthy of a giggle or two. For example: “Pathological Liar: When you bend the truth so much you should have become a politician.”
“Blabbermouth: When you are known as the office’s ‘Weapon of Mass Distraction’.”
And “The Igor: This snivelling Employee creeps around scheming and fawning over the bosses in hopes to one day climb the corporate ladder.” Sound familiar?
So if sabotaging your colleagues’ chances of success sounds right up your alley, get yourself a copy of “HR: The Toxic Workplace Game” and start crushing those dreams!