I toyed with giving this article a trigger warning, as Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr is a game about death and dying, but recent research indicates that trigger warnings don’t actually work. Anyway, if thinking about mortality troubles you, it might be an idea to stop reading now.
If you need another prompt, the back of the box reads:
“All my life I’ve kept my mouth shut—out of loyalty, out of fear… out of shame. And look where it’s got me, lying here with my rear-end hanging out of a blue gown, all you lot fussing around me. Sure, that’s no way to live. No way to die.”
Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr is a co-operative game where players work as nursing staff tasked with providing care for the terminally ill. Your latest patient has been rushed in following a massive heart attack on a flight from Sydney to London. When the game begins, all you know is this—his name is Billy Kerr, he is sixty years old, and he has been given days to live.
Players must work together to provide Billy with appropriate care, responding to medical emergencies while gaining his trust. Over ten fully replayable Scenarios, you will need to piece together a lifetime of memories while being drawn deeper into his troubled past. As you discover more about Billy, can you help him find the courage required to confront the three regrets that keep him holding on?
Dealing with themes of dying and regret, Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr invites players to experience the extraordinary life of an ordinary person in his final days.
Designed by Michael Fox and Rory O’Connor and published in 2018 by Hub Games, Holding On features artwork by Bryn G. Jones. It’s a 2–4 player co-operative game, estimated to take 45–60 minutes (per scenario).
I picked this up because the theme was intriguing—though a huge sale discount helped too. Billy is a dying patient in a hospice and the job of the staff—the players—is to help him achieve a peaceful closure in his final days. Make no mistake, there’s no saving Billy; he is going to die—but will he be able to tell his story before he passes?
Playing the Game
The game consists of 10 scenarios, success in each of which reveals some of Billy’s story, letting you progress to the next. The first one is relatively basic, and lets you get to grips with how the game works.
A scenario is played over a sequence of days, each with 3 shifts. Players are nurses, and have the support of assistants and on-call assistants, and one player is designated the shift manager for the day. The shift manager reveals the next patient card (the large cards on the board in the picture above), then assigns nurses and assistants to deal with it, depending on how many spaces the card has; if nurses or assistants are assigned to multiple shifts, they accumulate stress (in the form of odd little red hoops being placed on them), and will eventually have to have a day off to recover, meaning they won’t be available to deploy in the next round. After assignment only the assigned players determine how to proceed—this, along with time off for stress, is quite a nice way to avoid ‘quarterbacking’ in a cooperative game, as a single player can’t dominate.
Most cards offer the option of medical care or palliative care, i.e., paying care tokens to move improve Billy’s condition (moving the white pawn left along the track at the top of the board), or at least keeping it stable, vs either taking a care token or listening to Billy tell his tale, possibly at the cost of letting Billy deteriorate (moving the white pawn ever closer to zero). A few cards are medical emergencies, which consume a lot of those hard-to-get care tokens.
Letting Billy talk gains you a partial memory card, which contains a few words from Billy and shows a blurred image of an event in his life, appearing below the board in the earlier picture. Note that the memory card’s picture isn’t revealed until the end of the day. Some patient cards have a question mark symbol on the bottom, which lets you ask Billy for more information (at the cost of a care token); this involves drawing a random card from the clear memories deck, again keeping it face down until the end of the day.
Two more shifts pass in a similar manner, and then the memory cards are revealed. Patrial memory cards have white stitch marks on the edges indicating where they fit in a 5×6 tableau, and the aim is to match clear memory cards with their partial memories. Because keeping the clear memory cards secret until they’re played is such a significant part of the game, I’m not going to show any—I’ll just say the artwork is lovely.
As long as Billy’s still breathing, the next player becomes the shift manager and another day starts. There are other ways to lose the game than Billy dying; if it was not possible to allocate the necessary staff for a day, or if Billy hasn’t received medical care at least once in the day, the hospital is given a warning. Two warnings, and the scenario is lost, with Billy’s care notionally being handed off to another hospital.
As I said, the first scenario is more or less a training run, and the objective is not too difficult, nor actually very meaningful. The story starts to grow in the second scenario and beyond, but as with the clear memory cards, saying more here would reveal secrets too early.
Overall, the game mechanism is not too tricky, though you need to keep on your toes about who’s allowed to work extra shifts, and to pay the penalty for undue stress.
Impressions
At times, playing the game feels like drudge work: there just aren’t enough care tokens to provide necessary medical care or to reveal memories, especially with an unlucky run of patient cards. Nurses are overworked and stressed—and need to be put in that situation in order to complete some scenarios, adding to the frustration (perhaps not so different to real life). But there is something compelling about retrieving Billy’s memories; it’s more like a story you have to work hard to reveal than a game.
As I played it, I felt a range of emotions—frustration, sadness, happiness when something comes together, and even a sense of letting Billy down when it doesn’t. For goodness’ sake, it’s just turning over cards and the luck of the draw! Why am I letting it affect me so much? It so happens that the last game I played before this was Final Girl, where death is treated very differently—there goes another victim (and in some gruesome fashion); oh well, moving on. And I died in that game, not some random stranger. There’s something in Holding On that makes me want to care—though sometimes I doubt myself about that. I know the story is that Billy ‘needs’ to tell his story, but is there something ghoulish about hospice staff practically interrogating a dying patient when they could be providing medical care? But then, as designer Michael Fox points out, when someone’s dying, is propping them up with drugs the right thing to do when all they want to do is talk? I think these are questions a lot of us will have to deal with in the real world at some stage in our lives, so it’s probably advantageous to tackle them in a safe environment like a game.
Niggles
Many, if not all, boxes have been packed with the wrong numbers of assistant pawn colours. However, it was explained that the extra one is only of use in solo play: a helpful FAQ exists on BoardGameGeek, mainly an assembly of questions answered by Michael Fox.
Having mentioned solo play, apparently single-player instructions were promised for shortly after release, but never appeared, so I guess the pawn count’s not a problem after all. People have been calling for a solo mode, but it seems you can get quite far acting as both players in a 2-player game. Yes, you’ll see a few secrets you shouldn’t this way, but that perhaps compensates for the lack of discussion between players.
The game components are solid; nice thick card, but the stress hoops are narrow and prone to peeling—perhaps a trip to the local DIY shop is in order, to get a few plastic washers. The box itself is about twice as deep as it needs to be, which is mildly irritating, and somehow more annoying than the pawn count and fragile stress rings.
The front page of the rulebook has a URL for a ‘learn how to play’ link, but it seems the Hub Games website has not collapsed to an Instagram feed—though it’s not difficult to find how-to videos on BoardGameGeek or YouTube. What’s perhaps more concerning is that I read somewhere (that I can’t find now) that said the final reveal points to a web page, and I’ll be thoroughly cheesed off if that page no longer exists. However, I feel I can’t cheat and look ahead to find out—Billy deserves my slog.
The game is claimed to be replayable, and the randomness of card draws does make every run different. Having said that, I’m not at all sure I would want to play each scenario again once I’d managed to complete its objective.
Final Words
This is a unique game, possibly more an experience than an actual game. I can’t decide if I like it or not, but I certainly appreciate the way it’s making me think, even if the game mechanic is somewhat repetitive.
There were suggestions that Hub Games would make further games with the ‘holding on’ theme, but there haven’t been any yet. Was this a bold experiment that didn’t pan out for Hub Games?
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
