The Board Game: The Checkered Game Of Life

Depending on what year you were born, I am sure that you will remember playing board games before electronic games came along. The toy aisles in department stores were once lined with various games. They were all different genres, made for different age ranges, and different types of people. There was literally a board game for everybody out there, The Game of Life used to be my board game. But the thing is, this game has changed throughout the years to accommodate the younger generations like for colors and fun. As adults, it is often hard for us to remember childhood memories unless they hold some significance. So, it is strange that for some reason we can seem to remember the old games that we played. Whether it was something simple like …show more content…
It was originally a parlor game, to give men something other to play than cards. This original game was shockingly truthful, there was no sugar-coating the real aspects of life. But this was the point, the game of life was meant to teach you about life. Parents eventually caught on this new game and allowed their children to play due to its teaching properties. The Checkered Game of Life had a layout like that of a checkered board and each square was good or bad. It was up to the player to make the right decisions to reach happiness and riches. Or they could do make the wrong decisions and reach poverty or even possibly suicide. Now remember that this is a time where religious values were of major importance, so suicide, even game suicide was one of the worst places that you could land on. Others included disgrace, prison, and ruin just to list a few examples. While the games layout might have been like a checkered board, Milton made sure to create a way that players could move around the board while still having the opportunity to decide where they wanted to go. There was not always the option to make a good choice, so just like in life sometimes there were setbacks before a player could move forward again. Unfortunately, Milton Bradley would pass way in 1911, and the original The Checkered Game of Life would die along with …show more content…
It was intended to show others just how much the good or bad choices that you made impacted the outcome of your life. After Milton’s death in 1911, developers from The Milton Bradley Company took over complete development of the game. The changes that they would end up making over the years would completely change the meaning of this game. The Game of Life was developed in 1960 and while the layout of the game was altered there was still an attempt to keep the teaching and virtues. But as the years passed and the preferences of kids changed these qualities would be lost. It seemed that with each new version, the game gained more color in exchange for less lesson. Children no longer wanted to be taught but rather to be entertained. They wanted what was fun and appealing to the eye. And nothing is better at catching your eye than colors and cartoon characters. Even myself at the age of nineteen would be more inclined to notice color over dullness. The Game of Life is a game that I used to play time and time again, though it is not something that I would find myself playing repeatedly today. The game has been turned into one that a player literally cannot lose. Those of us who have survived past childhood and teenage years know that life is not something you can always win at. The Game of Life that I played was one of the first things to teach me this lesson, just as it had taught children in the