The Game of Life

(wow...there's a lot of pondering going on ...welcome to the 700th post)

Today I went over to Carter and Maddie's house to sit with them while their mom and dad went on a much deserved date for their 17th wedding anniversary. It's hard even for me to wrap my head around the idea that my friends have children that are almost teenagers and can be married 17 years but this is a fact.

More and more I find myself commenting "when we were kids..." This is true for the game of life.

To distract Carter from playing five more minutes of Sonic the hedgehog and the eardrum splitting background music of death game, I suggested we turn the tv off and find a board game to play. He was accepting of this and immediately went to the game closet and pointed at Pokemon Trivia game which probably would have been worse. Because aside from Pikachu is yellow, that's about the summation of my entire breadth of pokemon knowledge.

I spotted the game of life. I remember this game as a child and while Pete merely liked spinning the spinner, it was one of the more tame games and how hard could it really be?

Well they've made a few changes. Not difficult ones, just updates to the game to update it.

First observation - the cars are smaller and styled and the people are even smaller than they were and darn difficult to fit into the car.

There are all sorts of new cards (two forms of house, share the wealth, and these life cards that I'm not sure were a good addition to the game although it does leave for an element of surprise at the end of the game.)

You choose college, you immediately need to borrow money from the bank. The first time through college I was a vet. But wait, there are two or three spots to lose your job and I must have landed on all three spaces so I went from earning a $90,000 salary to being a store clerk and bringing home $20,000.

Then there is a house...the first house I purchased seemed fine for my little startup family but no, it's manditory to upgrade the house halfway through life to some other sort of thing. Carter upgraded to a mansion. I upgraded to a double wide trailer for $300,000 which seemed like a costly downgrade to my current lving quarters.

oh and somehow Carter ended up with eight kids and I had five. That too seems excessive. There's a whole route in life for "babies" where you could seriously end up with four or five more children and while they do make a contribution to retirement etc. I still think that many of the upgrades to this game made it more boring. Not that it ever was all that interesting in the first place.

Carter was happy. He won. $1,350,000 to $400,000. Seemingly that was the only thing tru eabout the real game of life...I will probably end the game with less money. And perhaps I'll be living in a double wide trailer.