Vintage Board Gaming : The Game of Life

When I was growing up in the 1980s, we had the standard stock of board games in the house : Monopoly, Boggle, Scrabble, Sorry, Clue, Chutes and Ladders, Mouse Trap, Master Mind, and a functional, but generic, 1980s edition of Life.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was formally introduced to the many Lives that one could play through, from Pirates of the Caribbean to The Simpsons, or Indiana Jones, or the one that I was most familiar with (whether I liked it or not), Spongebob Squarepants. While the Spongebob edition of Life was still a lot more interesting than the version that I grew up on, because Krabby Patties and pet snails beat ‘get a raise at work’ any day, something always felt like it was missing. And then I came across a completely intact 1960s edition of Life. Don’t be fooled by the ‘vintage wooden box‘ editions that are being sold now – they’re just not the same game.

Its design is completely stark compared to the colorful pseudoscenery of the many successive versions, but the central rainbow spin-wheel remains – and much to my surprise, the squares are INTERESTING! In the 1960s, people who played the Game of Life could expect to profit from finding circus elephants and uranium deposits (though I’m compelled to take a Dungeons and Dragons stance on this and force the player to roll against being trampled or irradiated). You can lose a turn for poison ivy, or end up paying a hefty fee when your crazy aunt leaves you 100 cats – the latter of which IS a square I recall from the 1980s edition, but I never saw why I couldn’t just KEEP the cats.

All of these things are relatively realistic compared to the square that says ‘Catch a whale (while) skin diving’. Because of this, I’m inclined to believe that the denizens of the innocent 1960s knew as much about the difficulties of catching whales by hand as they did about the magic of the atom. Were the game based on real life, you’d leave that ‘uranium’ square with a few less pegs in your little plastic car. The best part about 1960s life, though, is that the paths twist and turn and intermingle across the board, creating a much more apropos metaphor for life.

Milton Bradley’s original 1861 edition of ‘The Checkered Game of Life’ seems to match this metaphor, and came 100 years before it was reborn in the 1960 edition. The original was actually played across a modified checker board, and even included a ’suicide’ square which came in curious proximity to the ‘college’ square. Also a bit morose is the presence of green ‘Revenge!’ squares in the 1960 edition, which don’t reappear until the 1998 CD-ROM edition of the game.

With the news that Hasbro has removed the important ‘lead pipe’ weapon from Clue (and replaced it with the much less violent ‘ax’ weapon), keeping track of the subtle evolutions of these games over time can say a thing or two about the socioeconomic climate of the time. Life’s money values have even fluctuated with our own economy, and sometimes, the old rules ARE the more fun rules. Sometimes, it’s worth hanging on to, even if the more common board games of this era rarely have any astronomical values.

In 50 years, some future blogger will snicker at the idea that my Game of Life featured squares about ’stock markets’ and ‘getting married’, and he’ll squeeze his magic alien dog before he sets off to his polyamorous clan’s nightly space-feast.