Many people are familiar with the Game of Life, and indeed, it’s one I remember fondly from my own childhood. However, after trying a few different games, I came to the conclusion that I just don’t like the game anymore. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been able to find the same version I had as a kid. My family even modified the rules a bit to better serve our family values, and I still can’t like it.
The Game of Life is great for teaching how to work with money
Now, Life has its good points, and there will be no judgment from me if you do decide to keep it in your game closet. It’s great for working with money and big numbers for kids. It introduces some risk assessment skills, however, there are plenty of other ways to introduce these concepts.
From a practical perspective, most versions have 3D elements on the game board, meaning you have to keep the giant box the game comes in. So many of our games have been bagged, with game boards stored in a separate stack, that if a game is going to keep its big box, it really has to be worth it for us.
My problems with the game
From a more philosophical and moral perspective, there’s just something about this game that doesn’t sit right with me. For one thing, there’s the Spin to Win aspect of newer versions. Since it wasn’t in my childhood version of the game, we never used it as a family, even though both versions we tried have it. When I want to teach my kids how to gamble (and believe me, I have! But I give them money to use), we use a deck of cards and play poker.
Then there’s the whole way you start the game, by choosing the college path or the career path. In the Game of Life, there’s a clear advantage to going the college route. However, in real life, my family is the poster child for choosing a different path. I have 2 college degrees and all the accompanying debt, yet have always worked in ways that I only needed a high school diploma, usually self-employed.
Whereas my husband didn’t even finish his AA, but held down a job in a factory for over 15 years. This is a definite personal bias of mine, and you might not share it, but it’s worth thinking about. How necessary do you think college is, and how necessary do you want your kids to think it is? Whenever we play this game, we always have this conversation with our kids. I still hesitate to introduce things that subtly send a different message than I like.
I don’t like the lawsuits
Another problem I have with this game is the lawsuits. One version we have has them buried in the Action cards, but our other version has them directly on the board. I think the version from my childhood might have had it embedded a bit more in the gameplay. If you sued someone else the lawyer got paid (if there wasn’t a lawyer the money went to the bank). Or something like that. One of these Action cards has you suing another player for stealing your stapler, and you get 20k. I mean, seriously? $20,000 for a stapler? Another card has you getting 80k because another player (of your choice) damaged your fence. Yet another pays $50,000 over prize tomatoes.
Money is skewed
This leads me to another problem I have with the Game of Life. I don’t know if my standards are just a lot lower than others’, but the paydays in this game are really inflated! I always interpreted it as a yearly salary sort of thing, but still, so much of the money seems to be grossly inflated.
When was the last time the bank randomly paid you $200,000? (And can you tell me the name of the bank, so I can switch to it?)
At the same time, the house prices seem very skewed to me. When we sold our house in the Pacific Northwest, I know that prices were ridiculously high, but many of the prices still seemed way too low to me. On the other hand, a teepee for 100k? And how about the cultural appropriation – super fun, right? (In case it’s not coming through the screen, I’m totally being sarcastic with this comment; I’m quite disgusted that they included that as a housing option.)
I was tempted for a bit to keep buying different versions from the thrift store, in an attempt to find one I was okay with. Ultimately, though, I decided that the game just didn’t deserve a space in our game closet. Two other games that incorporate money include PayDay and Monopoly.