Questions About the "Game" of "Life" Please Help

In My Humble Opinion
1

Ok my family has a family game night on Sunday. You know so we can spend quality time together. And we tried playing the game of “Life” last night.

It didn’t go very well to say the least. Seems like we are all pretty competitive and don’t like to lose. And since the rules were not that clea, it turned into a family game “fight night”. One of the problems was understanding the rules. So if “Life” players could possibly help reduce the squirmishes we have about the game rules, it would be appreciated. The “rules” are not that clear at least when I read and my kids and my wife. Here are my questions:

  1. What is the advantage of going to college because it only limits your career choices not salary and then you have to pay back the money you borrowed going to school?

  2. At the end of the game what is the advantage of retiring to the millionaire estates when people can grab you “life” cards?

  3. At the end of the game do you add up your property value (houses,stock)to or only your cash and life cards this is not clear either in the rules afterall your house and stock have value? And what about cars they don’t have any value either at the end of the game?

  4. If you land on one of the spaces where it says to buy a lakeside cabin for 90k and another player has it, do you pay the cabin owner for his cabin? And then does the person that sold the cabin to the other player have to buy another house? And how does he/she go about that?

  5. Does the game only end when everybody reaches the retirement space in otherwords do other people have to what until everybody is finished? Also can you retire early?

  6. What is the point of having children those little pegs just fall out all the time when you are moving your car around?

Any additional pointers and strategy you have would be appreciate also.

And btw when your family plays games do ya’ll fight to or is my family just disfuntional? Please help? So far I like monopoly better. Those little life cards add to much luck to the game.

2

I’ve never played Life, so I can’t answer your main question. But my father and I are both very competitive about games, and my mother is not at all, and my brother is easygoing about it (he deals well with both competitive and noncompetitive people). When we played bridge, my father and I always had to be partners, because otherwise whichever one of us was playing with my mother would tell her everything she had done wrong and she would eventually quit. I don’t think we were dysfunctional; I just think that different people have different levels of competitiveness, and that a family should try to accommodate the styles of its members. If all of you like to fight over games, I don’t think there’s a problem. If one or two people are feeling distressed because of the competitiveness of the others, then you may need to institute some family rules for gameplaying together.

3

Y’know, I was gonna come in here with a snarky comment about how “well, you hit the spinner and move your little car” only to find out that’s what you were talking about. Dammit.

If you skip college, you draw one career token and one salary token, and get stuck with that (until you hit Night School or Lose your Job or whatnot).

If you choose college, you draw three career tokens and three salary tokens, and take your choice of what’s drawn.

Ergo, hitting college makes it more likely that you’ll get a better salary. You can also get a better career (remember that money paid at certain squares is paid to those holding certain careers; for example, medical bills get paid to the doctor, taxes to the accountant, etc. Being the accountant or doctor is much better than being the salesman in this regard).

Before the game begins, four LIFE tokens are places at millionaire estates. At the end of the game, of the people who retired to millionaire estates, whomever has the most cash on hand gets those free four LIFE tokens.

Houses and stock has value. Cars and Insurance do not.

Treat this square just as a straight “lose $90,000” square. It doesn’t matter what type of house you already have, and if more people land on it, they are considered to be buying seperate lakeside cabins (remember, these are vacation homes you’re buying).

The game ends only when everyone has reached the end of the board and retired to either Millionaire estates or the other one, can’t remember it off-hand. You cannot retire early.

Jeez, man, get them to wear their seat-belts!

As for the game purposes; you get a LIFE token for each child you have (twins get you two LIFE tokens).

Not many pointers or strategy to add; the game’s 80-90% luck. But here’s what I’ve learned:

Try to finish last. Take the long way around paths (assuming it doesn’t hurt to do so), go to college, etc. Sure, your LIFE tokens will be available for stealing that much longer, but you’ll be in a much better position to decide whether you can win the four free tokens at millionaire estates or should just go for the safety of that other one.

Buy stock early; if there are five or more players, go into debt and buy it your first turn. It’ll likely hit enough extra times to pay off the interest on the loan.

Expect to lose. Sorry; it’s nearly all luck of what salaries you draw, what spaces you land on, and which LIFE tokens you get. Choices are few and far between. If you want a more skill-based game, get Clue or Pay Day!.

4

LOL. Thanks John for the answers I know that required alot typing and time and I appreciate it. Thanks again.

5

Did they revise the game in the last ten years or so? I don’t remember any tokens like you guys are describing; you landed on the career square (hoping for doctor) and got paid the same amount every time you passed a pay day.

6

Once more thing that seems to be kind of like a glitch in the game about lakeside homes. They have value don’t they? Seems like you ought to be able to add those to your estate value.

7

Yes. Dramatically:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=16452

8

Wildest Bill said:

My pleasure; were there more trivia questions regarding board and war games on this board, I’d be much more well known for my shining intellect than my sparkling wit.

Sure, but then you ought to be able to add the value of the sports car, take any of the ‘donations’ you make by landing on squares and write them off on your next taxes, etc. Trying to compare “the game of LIFE” with “real life” is almost akin to comparing “the cereal of LIFE” with “real life”.

9

As a matter of fact does anyone want to buy the new version.

Hell, it sucks so bad you can have it.

10

I’m sure this thread will move over to its brethren in another forum, but I was quite alarmed by the changes.

I loved “Life”. I wanted to have kids and tell them to go to college and med school so they could get a good job that would pay them $20,000 a year.

11

Oooh I SO got ticked at “That 70s Show”. They were playing the NEW version of life a few episodes ago! Acck Continuity Department!
We still have the old version in the games closet at my mom’s house…wasted many an afternoon playing, but I dont recall ever finishing a game.

12

Life Tokens? Sounds like the new version is pretty sucky. I remember the old one where you wanted to finish first (so you could collect the toll at the bridge) and never buy insurance because there was only three spaces where it would help you…ahh the good old days…

13

Resol-

You always buy Auto and Life insurance, and Stock, but never Fire. You buy Auto because it is cheap, and you buy Life because it’s worth beaucoup deneiro. And of course, stock is biased towards a positive return, so you get that as well.

You always go to college because you have the chance to be more than just a ‘business person’, and get a higher salary.

To those ‘new’ life people, I am a simple cave man. Your ‘salary’ and ‘career’ tokens confuse and frighten me.

14

I’ve played the old Life many a night and have never heard of this newfangled version of one of my favorite games (Life appealed to the accountant/capitalist in me). I love the Revenge feature, which is in the other thread above as having been removed from the new version. Jophiel is right in the parallel thread, the new Life does sound wussified. The old thread looks too old to bump (ubb codes and all), so I’ll vent here. It’ll be moved to MPSIMS soon (the locale of the old one) or IMHO (as a poll thread).

15

think Hillary & Whitewater

16

Well, this thread did start off as a General Question (heck, if we can have threads about the rules of baseball, then we can have threads about the rules of Life), but that seems to have been answered, and the rest of the thread is squarely in IMHO territory.

If it’s any consolation, John Corrado, I thought it was going to be about the cellular automaton “Life”.
Blank stares from everone else in the thread
Um, sorry. Forget I mentioned it.

17

Well I came in here with my glider-gun loaded. Hangs excessively pointy head

picmr

18

You too, huh?

I wish I hadn’t lost the copy I had on my computer in a crash…::Sigh::

Anyone know where to D/L one?

19

http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/Life32.html has links to a Win32 version.

http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~callahan/lifepage.html links to both Unix and Java based versions.

20

Thanks, Purd. (Like the name, BTW).

Heh, actually though, just after posting that I did a google search, and found that first one…AFTER a lot of sifting through source-code, Java-applets, Palm Pilot versions, pages about the game without any software versions, unrelated pages (Which never even had any of the words I searched for!!!)…