"By 1960, the Checkered Game of Life had disappeared from most American game tables. It had been replaced by such as entrants as Monopoly, which rewarded winners with riches, punished losers with penury and became one of the top-selling board games in the United States during the Depression.
Mr. Klamer’s task, as assigned by the Milton Bradley Co., was to create a game to mark the company’s 100th anniversary.... With the assistance of colleagues... Mr. Klamer updated [the Checkered Game of Life] for the aspirations of contemporary players. For instance, players of the new version would choose between a 'business' route, which afforded an immediate salary, and 'college,' which promised a larger but delayed one.... To board game enthusiasts, the Game of Life was a beauty: a marvel of topography with raised roads that players traversed in their station-wagon game pieces. According to the volume 'Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them,' by Tim Walsh, Life was 'the first three-dimensional game board using plastic.'... Destinations in the 1960 version included 'Millionaire Acres' — or the 'Poor Farm.'"
I played that game when it was new in the 1960s, and I guess those 3-dimensional aspects and the built-in spinner were pretty exciting. But what a drag it made life seem! You're a peg in a car and you gather family members to fill the hole in the car and keep driving till you get to the end. At least the end wasn't called "Death."
And it seems that this is where we Baby Boomers learned we'd better go to college. The game had determined the income difference. But you didn't even have any fun in college or learn anything deep. You just upped your earning potential, and the point of life/Life was to make the most money. What an awful game!
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Kimmy Schmidt: Who wants to play monopoly!?
Titus Andromadon: Eww. I'm not playing a game where the whole point is to pay rent.
(Music) "You will learn about life as you play the game of Life!"
The things that stick in one's memory...
I vaguely remember playing that game as a very little kid but found it boring. I liked "Sorry" a lot more, because you got to say "Sorry" and ring a bell. And my neighbor had a Military game called "Hit the beach" which i liked. There was also a WW 1 game with airplanes and cards which was fun.
its amazing how much more fun kids in the 90s had when computer games arrived.
"At least the end wasn't called 'Death.'"
Maybe not, but that's still the end.
In case you missed this: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/249
and the point of life/Life was to make the most money. What an Great game!
fify! Adam Smith's Invisible Hand STRIKES AGAIN!!!
I don't think the game was awful. My clan of kids all understood we shouldn't didn't take the theme of the game too seriously. We saved that angst for the 'adults'...
...If any damage was inflicted it was to me and my sister by the television commercial for the game
'..decisons...decicions- OH! PAY ME! Lawyers, salary, please...'
'...oh why didn't I buy insurance?...'
'...I'll have to sell the cattle ranch...How much?...TWO...HUNDRED...THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!'
Yah, that hurt a bit...
I loved that game in the 60's. I didn't have it but some family friends did and when we visited them, I insisted we play it. The little car had holes in it to plug in your children, those little blue or pink plastic pegs. I loved the spinner too! I don't remember taking any life lessons from it or taking it all that seriously. But what a great memory. Thanks!
Also - it was competitive but not cruel. In Monopoly the goal was to drive the other players into insolvency in a slow death spiral. That always seemed more harsh to me. (Plus it could take forever.)
Life as pretty fun for a few times, but ultimately each game had the same trajectory and it got boring fast.
A better game was Careers. You decided ahead of time what your goals would be: Fame, Wealth or Happiness. You could allocate all of your goals into one (bad idea) or more evenly, like 20 points of each.
The board had a main route, like Monopoly, with squares running around the perimeter of the board. But there were all these side paths, which were the eponymous "careers". Examples: Business, which mostly raised your salary, Farming, which gave you lots of happiness, Hollywood, fame etc. There was even a side-path of college, which I think got you a discount into various career paths.
"What an awful game!". Agreed! We quickly learned that you couldn't win unless you went to college. And just as quickly we quit playing.
Kind of interesting how different the life led by the inventor of the game was from the game he invented and called "Life." As if there were an elevated highway and he took an off ramp and continued to drive below or within sight of whizzing cars above. But he was slowly going through ethnic neighborhoods and hitting red lights and running beside great rivers and seeing sublime dawns and getting pulled over by the police - and sometimes getting up on the elevated highway again, but always taking an off ramp again
What an awful game!
It was a simulator or trainer rather than pure entertainment game. The line between these blurs, but some love simulators. I played Life once or twice with my family as a child, but played Monopoly dozens of times. Life was a downer indeed, but it alerted me/sobered me to what was to come.
Computer games blur the game/simulator line too, with game series such as Sim City and the The Sims requiring all sorts of exciting things like urban zoning, setting tax rates, road repair, taking showers, and getting to the bathroom before accidents happen.
These are some of the most successful and influential video game titles of the last 20 or 30 years.
Combat games (e.g., Doom, Quake, and many followers) have been used for military recruitment and learning about close-quarters team strategies. Flight simulators have about 100 controls to learn and user manuals about 3 inches thick, but are useful for learning some of how to fly advanced real aircraft.
Workaholic entertainment.
Oh, Life wasn’t such an awful game. In the early-dark, snowy winters of western New York of the ‘70s, my teenage friends and I played many board games -- Life, Monopoly, Sorry, Parcheesi. Now, Life was a total goof! Sneak a couple beers from the fridge and buy a ticket to Squaresville. We all remembered, just a few years before, hiding under our school desks from a thermonuclear blast. College or straight to work (no military option!), piling up money and kids -- whatever...we’re all turning to ash any day now anyway. Lol!
Now, if you want a truly awful game, look up The Mystery Date game. It, too, had an innovative use of plastic. The center of the board was a door behind which men (straight white men, naturally) in various outfits were hidden, one of which was a slovenly dud. The players (all girls, dontcha know) moved their tokens around a Monopoly-like board collecting pieces of an outfit. When the outfit was complete, the player opened the door to reveal her mystery date. Will he be a stud or a dud? Some girls really liked this game, but to me it was just an abomination.
I remember Art Linkletter hawked it on his show, House Party, and I believe his picture was on the game box. He was one of those guys, like Paul Harvey, who could sell ice to the Eskimos. Or sand to the Saudis.
The game itself, as I recall, sucked. It was a last resort on an inclement day.
I recall that players losing at the end of the game could pick a number and spin the spinner. If it stopped on the right number, you hit the lottery or something, and stole the win.
How fortunate we all are that the current administration is destroying the archaic notion that getting a good education, working hard, getting married, rearing children and building a nest egg are honorable goals in life.
1970s/1980s versions
About halfway through the production of this version, many dollar values doubled. This description focuses on the later version with the larger dollar amounts. The late 1980s version also replaced the convertibles from earlier versions with minivans. Early 1960s-era convertibles were still used in the 1978 edition. The "Poor Farm" was renamed "Bankrupt!" in which losing players would "Retire to the country and become a philosopher", and "Millionaire Acres" was shortened to "Millionaire!" in which the winner can "Retire in style". Like the 1960s version, there were spaces that forced a player to go back; in the case a player landed on one of these, they were forced to take the shortest route and pay no attention to any penalties and rewards in doing so.
The gold "Revenge" squares added a byline, "Sue for damages", in the 1978 edition.[6]
1991 version
The Game of Life was updated in 1991 to reward players for good behavior, such as recycling trash and helping the homeless, by awarding players "Life Tiles." The spaces that forced players to go back were removed, starting with this version.
The 1998 PC and Sony PlayStation video game adaptations of The Game of Life are based on this version. Players could play either the "classic" version, using the Life Tiles, or the "enhanced" version, where landing on a space with a Life Tile allow players to play one of several mini-games.
2005 version
An updated version of the game was released in 2005 with a few gameplay changes. The new Game of Life reduced the element of chance, although it is still primarily based on chance and still rewards players for taking risks.
2013 version
The 2013 version removed the lawsuit square which was replaced by a lawsuit card. A new "keep this card for 100k" feature was added as well.
2017 version
The 2017 version includes pegs and squares for acquiring pets.
2018 version
The 2018 version includes pegs and squares for becoming Russian agents, and being investigated by Special Counsels.
2019 version
The 2019 version includes 10 new colored pegs representing some of the newly discovered genders.
2020 version
The 2020 version includes squares for mail in ballots, and pegs for Anfifa membership. Additionally, tiny masks are provided for the each players' peg.
2021 version
The 2021 version included squares choosing to get a vaccine or becoming a modern leper. Also, a rot in jail square was added for anti-government protesters, but only if your peg is a particular color.
In those days, Life cereal was more influential. As I recall, girls liked to play Life more than Monopoly or Kriegspiel.
Not to mention the fist fights among 13 year-old contestants.
Commenting before I read any other comments: "The point of the game was to make money. What an awful game!"
This is the First World in a nutshell, isn't it?
Money=an exchange medium for the things you need and/or want, including the leisure to choose how to use your time. Gaining this optionality has been the primary focus of humanity since we have been able - physically and mentally - to focus on anything beyond meeting our basic needs.
It's all very high-minded to consider the pursuit of filthy lucre evil or bourgeois or just too declassé for words, dahling. But money is not an end. It's a means. The end is up to you. The game never dictated what you'd do at Millionaire Acres.
(Yes, some people seem money as an end in itself. That's true greed, and it's similar to sanctimony: valuing the trappings over the real thing.)
There is a new version I've played with my kids. It has the college/no-college option, but it's honestly well done. The college option adds a bunch of extra spaces before choosing a career, while no-college one gets a career and income earlier. College has higher overall, but there's a bunch of options for careers in both that provide a much closer example to reality. Same thing with marriage and no marriage, kids and no kids, they're treated like options with their own benefits and problems.
There's a lot I liked about the old version, but I think the new one does well with current realities.
A better game was Careers. You decided ahead of time what your goals would be: Fame, Wealth or Happiness....
Farming, which gave you lots of happiness
Oh, i don't know about that. My most favorite line from the Lord of The Rings, is when they're sitting with Farmer Maggot, having a few beers and:
a few remarks about the weather and the agricultural prospects, which were No Worse than usual
Here in Fayette county, we had a Great growing season... The corn looked as good as i've Ever seen it.... That is, is Was great...
Before the hail storms, the wind storms, and the flooding
Now,
fields look like they've already been harvested, but they Haven't been harvested; just ruined
In Monopoly the goal was to drive the other players into insolvency in a slow death spiral.
This was my husband's objection to Monopoly: you could know you were going to lose an hour before the game was over.
In contrast, a quote from Jean Kerr, recreated from memory: "A game of checkers [I don't think it was checkers, but that's the idea] with a 6-year-old would last fifteen minutes or so, and a reasonably intelligent person could ensure that he would lose. But when playing Uncle Wiggily, you could play for an hour or more, and then, God help you, you could win!"
"The Game of Life" always cut too close to life. You weren't likely to build three hotels on Boardwalk or "Go directly to jail" in real life, but ending up in the Poor Farm is always a possibility. "Shoots and Ladders" was based on a similar dynamic, but abstracted away from real world possibilities.
My brothers and I didn't have Life, but our friends and their sisters did and we sometimes were reduced to playing it.
Us guys played Dogfight (already mentioned--I picked up a battered copy for $5.00 at an estate sale a few years ago), Broadside (whose nifty little ships with removable masts were easily commandeered for use with more realistic rules), Island War (which was a race by multiple players, not a binary contest), I can't recall the others. The TV series Combat had a spinoff game using transparencies and colored wax pencils.
Everyone remembers Risk, but the good one in my estimation was Stratego--it had a mix of factors to consider that rewarded good deployment and planning.
And things like HG Wells's Little Wars, and RL Stevenson's similar pastime, and Fletcher Pratt's naval wargaming rules were known even here, even in the 60s.
But the key element here was Layman's Games, retailing the products of a little company from Baltimore called Avalon Hill.
I loved Life back in the 60s. Still do.
'You just upped your earning potential, and the point of life/Life was to make the most money.'
I never played it.
These days, kids that go to college end up owing thousands.
But since they mostly major in grievance studies or left-handed lesbian philosophy, it will work out well for them : )
I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that even if you didn't go to college, you could do fine in that game. Anyway, I enjoyed it. Played more checkers, Euchre, poker, gin, and 500 rummy though. Parcheesi was maybe a curiosity and Monopoly may have been banned due to too many loud disagreements among the six brothers.
What an awful game!
No it was an amusing game, but an awful metaphor for life -- on the other hand you could skip the metaphor and just take it as a game. That was how I and my brother, our parents, and friends when they joined us, all took it. I don't think anyone felt burdened by a carry-over to so-called real life. We laughed at the life-lessons that sprung from the game's rhetoric, whenever they became too explicit.
In our parents' presence we had to be respectful of legitimate teachers, but we could feel free to razz a board game if it turned sententious on us, and razz it we did.
These writers take games too wackily serious. A loser at a game of Monopoly isn't "punished" -- any more than a loser at Stratego is conquered, or a loser at Hangman dead. (The loser now will be later to win.)
Duck-chasing is a game like any game. When it is over it is all over.
You know who pushed through the bill to make student loans non dischargeable, while the credit industry gave his recently graduated son a no show job as a V.P.?
"you could know you were going to lose an hour before the game was over."
We would just make a suicidal side deal with whichever sibling we wanted to win that day, most likely to get back at some other sibling we were mad at.
Yahtzee!
That is all...
Black Pegs Matter.
"But you didn't even have any fun in college or learn anything deep. You just upped your earning potential, and the point of life/Life was to make the most money."
Yet the old saw "Tell me what makes you happy and I can put a dollar value on it," is still true, tell me it is not. Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof knew what he was talking about.
Regarding College, 15% of the high school class benefits from college, including a large number trained in college in allied health fields and k-12 education. I guess RN and the therapies students get some culture but also on the job training and thus good jobs.
It seems 60% of the girls are there for the 40% of the boys. But the girls only want bad boys until they tire of them and settle for the good boy accountants, engineers, and MBA's. The good boys require the girl to have a sheepskin (or is that a naturalamb?)
rcocean - There was no bell in Sorry! Not officially anyway. The bell part was made up for a classic skit on the Carol Burnett show, which I remember from when I was a kid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNG1DkS_f4g
I often made games out of other games. With Life it was a racing game. I had Mouse Trap. I dont think I ever played that game correctly, or cared.
It’s the journey, not necessarily the destination…
I loved spinning that tick-ticking wheel as hard as I possibly could, fill my car to overflowing w/little pink and blue kids- cutting them shorter for emphasis! It wasn’t the end of the game that lured me forward, but the chance of the space I landed on.
I thank this man for fond memories of my youth.
Well, I thank his spirit.
Irony: The creator of Life dies.
Sorry!
Althouse writes "At least the end wasn't called "Death."
I never played G-of-L, but it was a Milton Bradley product and therefore more likely to be boring, dreary, and if it contained any mechanical bits like Mouse Trap! it probably wouldn't work at all. The only MB game I owned was Stratego!, which was mildly entertaining. I preferred Parker Brothers games, particularly Monopoly and Risk. They had enduring play-value, whereas MB products were gimmicky dreck aimed at the "special" kids. A kid in my neighborhood got Operation for his birthday and none of us would cooperate and play by the rules. What a POS.
The absolute nadir of games was a Mattel product, which was unexpected as Mattel was basically guns and dolls. A Mattel game was an aberration. In this case, the aberrant toy was called Lie Detector. Somebody at Mattel should have gone to jail over that un-fun fraud.
The entire Milton Bradley product line needs revamping. For example, the opening move in The Game of Life should be "Avoid Abortion". Mess that up and you lose before you even start. Tik-Tok influencer needs to be added to the careers. Mystery Date needs a pink-haired trans. And the Operation patient needs a little plastic foetus in the mid-torso. It would be paired with a card reading Take out unviable tissue mass. Then the girl players can say, "HA! HA! HA! It's my choice but the boys have to pay!"
You know who thinks that earning more money is a bad life goal? People who only ever looked at or saw poverty out the window of daddy's big comfortable car.
I have to correct myself--it wasn't Island War (that's a later hex-and-counter game) but Hit the Beach, as someone mentioned above.
"Diplomacy" was a thing for a while.
"Risk" sucks. It comes in variants--all cosmetic differences, I think. The basic pile vs pile combat remains, and the card sets.
"Axis and Allies" seems to be pretty popular. Even some of my wargaming friends play it, but it has all the MB weaknesses.
"Mousetrap" and "Hungry Hungry Hippos" can keep kids busy, which makes them good games.
rcocean - There was no bell in Sorry! Not officially anyway. The bell part was made up for a classic skit on the Carol Burnett show, which I remember from when I was a kid.
Yes, you're absolutely right. There is No bell in SOrry! It was a "false memory" implanted by the Carol Burnett skit which I saw AFTER i stopped playing Sorry!
Gee, and I could have sworn there were dice too, but there wasn't. It was Cards.
How much more of my life is LIE? How many more FALSE memories do I have? Am I really RCOCEAN or is too a LIE? OMG.
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