Boardgame Review: Game of Life

MB games

10-adult

2-8 players

Last week I was coerced by my niece and nephew into playing the Game of Life.

Despite billing itself as an accurate representation of a human life (from the sweaty, anti-climatic grind of conception, through to the foggy no-man's land of end-stage dementia) this nauseatingly optimistic game omits any possibility that you will develop an incurable disease, that is likely to kill you before you reach the age of 50. Furthermore there is no option to die in a joint suicide pact because your cunting Victorian parents have made you so ashamed of your homosexuality that you cannot live with yourself.

When will MB get up off their arses and design a game that accurately represents both my lifestyle and the lifestyles of my prematurely deceased friends? Does our demographic count for nothing?

The cars in which you undertake your monotonous, materialistic trawl towards retirement resemble the Lincoln Continental stretch limousine that John F Kennedy was assassinated in. I like to think that this is a comment on the death of the American dream. There were times during the Game of Life when I prayed that Lee Harvey Oswald would shoot me from the 6th floor of a book depository in Dallas.

For some fucking reason, dying alone in a dingy, one-room apartment, reeking of cat urine is not encouraged in the Game of Life. The pegs used to portray yourself, your tedious spouse and your insufferable brood of children, are featureless and unremarkable. What MB Games seems to be saying is that there is nothing to separate you from the other 7 billion souls who are currently clogging up the planet. Your lives are meaningless and god is dead.

Dice are too real for this game. Instead your progress around the board is determined by a plastic wheel, bordered by some kind of fake rock garden, which is presumably there to protect it from being rammed by players who have decided to take their cars off road.

In the interests of providing parental guidance, I explained to my niece and nephew that if the Game of Life was real, then every few turns somebody would sweep the board and all its contents onto the floor. You would have to crawl around looking for them, occasionally banging your head on the corner of the table. By the time you had put everything back the way it was, you would be 30 and all your hopes and dreams would have died.

In summary: Go fuck yourself MB Games.

Next: I review the Barbie Fashion City Board Game - a fun and entertaining game for all young Barbie fans, aged 5 and up!