The Game of Life

The major problem in reviewing this classic board game is that I simply couldn’t find it! I knew that when I was younger I had played it a couple of times. I had memories of sitting around with my brother and sister, clothed in parachute pants, a headband and a mesh top, fighting off pre-adolescent boredom with a go at The Game of Life. I don’t remember much about the game itself, as I didn’t play it very often. The truth is that even at 8 or 9 years old, I knew that it was pretty damn boring.

If memory serves, the game involves puttering your family sedan shaped game piece around a pretty conventional playing board. The board was a multi-colored affair with a little green hill in the middle and a miniature version of the Wheel of Fortune off to one side. Effectively, this drab board represented the game itself.

Life was a collage of late seventies kitsch and stereotypically fifties aesthetic, a hodge-podge mix of contemporary pop culture and overbearingly traditional white middle class values. The point of the game was to race to your sizable dream house and amass as many kids and material possessions as you could along the way. You had numerous opportunities to pile the meager treasures of American society into your sedan as you rat-raced your opponents to the grand prize of a relatively early retirement and a healthy 401K.

It’s ridiculous to even pretend that Life came anywhere close to representing real life at all. There was no metaphysical rush upon finishing a game, no semi-profound realization that "My God! I’ve just lived my life in miniature!" The board game Life at best offered some distraction from the day-to-day grind of being a kid-nobody aged adolescent or older would touch the thing. As if designed for and by 10 year-olds, the game provided an extremely simple goal-oriented pursuit.

The distilled rewards that playing Life offered really hurt its popularity in my house. It dramatically paled in comparison to aggressively capitalist games such as Monopoly or testosterone-charged engagements like Risk or Battleship. However, the ultimate mark against Life came not from us kids who played it a few times, but from the parents who owned it. To adequately review the game, I wanted to look at it and possibly force myself through a few rounds. However, upon searching the cabinets and boxes in my parents’ house and finding all the other board games I had played as a kid, from Sorry to Trouble, from Hungry, Hungry Hippos to Candy Land, I could not for the life of me find Life.

Upon asking my parents, I learned that they had gotten rid of the game quite a while ago. Whether it had gone to the trash or Goodwill they could not recall. When asked why they had removed that specific game, out of the plethora that still remained, they reminded me of a forgotten reaction I had had to Life. "When you played it, you just got so mad!"

— Jeremy Richards (richarje@msnotes.wustl.edu)