Time to pull the peg out of the plastic car

This was 1A in the childhood board game pantheon alongside Monopoly.

Reuben Klamer, Creator of The Game of Life, Dies at 99

 

Terrible game with very few actual decision points.

 

The board and the cars/children make it fun for kids, but there is nothing in it.

 

The wheel was fun to spin till it got worn and no longer spun.

 

An updated one based in reality would be great: student loans for college or go for trades or enlist, bank and credit agencies give you higher interest rate because of your race, divorce, bankruptcy/the company you work for goes out of business and you are laid off, kids move back in with you after they graduate college, second and third mortgages, health emergency and/or stock market crash wipes out your savings. Fun times!!!

 

I think that makes it a fairly decent facsimile of real life.

 

I remember the “occupations” on the version we had (“likely late 1970s). They were doctor and lawyer making $50,000, psychiatrist making $40,000, journalist was $30,000, teacher was maybe 25,000, other was like 22,000 and then no college was 18,000. That totally set me up in a way thinking that journalists and doctors were in relatively the same socio-economic brackets. Also, when I bought a version as an adult circa 2005, journalist had been scrubbed.

 

Fucking Alden.

 

In the version I had the lowest paying occupation by far was teacher. As the son of a teacher that kind of messed me up.

 

It's always so much fun to have six or eight kids and one of those little cars

 

When I read through the Wikipedia article I found out about some of the changes (no more Poor Farm!) Like I said I loved it as a kid, but probably haven’t played since I was a young teen at the latest. The salary penalty for skipping college probably was a little too persuasive for me, although I’d have sucked at manual labor.