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'The Yin-Yang Errands' Turns Hell Into a Workplace
A tabletop game blends Chinese folklore with office bureaucracy, sending players through underworld departments with quotas, salaries and ghost-bribing money. The concept is striking a chord with players who see their own 9-to-5 grind in the afterlife.
"The Yin-Yang Errands" drops players into a supernatural workplace where the afterlife is run like a government agency. Tasks involve fulfilling warrants, meeting quotas and collecting a salary when crossing the starting square.
Players can also burn spirit money to make a ghostly problem disappear, a playful take on real-world offerings. The game draws on a long-standing tradition in Chinese folklore that pictures the underworld as a facsimile of the imperial civil service, with departments, paperwork and middle managers.
The premise has sparked a recurring joke on Xiaohongshu, where players wonder why the dead would still face a 9-to-5 grind. Many find the concept both absurd and eerily relatable.
By mapping office life onto the afterlife, the game turns a philosophical question into a lighthearted—and slightly grim—board game experience.