Favorite Childhood Game

Growing up my sister and I loved to play board games like Life, Clue, Mystery Date, The Inventors, Shoots & Ladders and so many others. I can't speak for my sister, but some of the best memories I have of playing these games was making variations of them. Mostly, we were trying to make them more life like, and more interesting than just the typical game, over and over again.

The game I remember the most was Life. The game where you pick out a car, a little blue or pink person depending on your gender. Then you travel around the board going through different stages of life including college, career choice, getting married, buying a home, having children and running into all sorts of problems and surprises along the way. We would always play the game in the same sort of manner, we just added in a few things to make it a bit more fun.

To begin, we would start out with at least two characters, typically a little blue peg and a little pink peg. We would choose college or career and continue normally around the board until we got to the STOP and get married spot. Then instead of continuing on, we would wait for our mate (our other player) to catch up so we could continue on with our "life" together. Sounds like a pretty good deal? These two characters came together, adding their careers and their salaries together to share their "life" together. So we would then continue on with the rest of the game, landing on various spaces, and paying or receiving whatever we landed on. There were a few catches we added to the game, for example on a spot that said we had bought tickets to a sports game, instead of just paying one amount, we would choose how many of our family would attend and then pay that amount for each character we had. We were usually very generous, thinking that our "family" would want to go together.

Adding fun little things to the game made Life fun to play over and over again. There were also times where we would add things from around the house. We found little beads from our crafts supply that we adopted as motorcycles for our more daring characters, and for all those children that ended up not fitting in the little Life cars half way through the game.

These are just a few things my sister and I added to the game to keep us entertained as kids. I would say looking back as an adult now, that these were some very fun times and provided us a break from our Barbie dolls and playing house with our kitchen set. I would have to say that Life is still one of my favorite games today. Now that we're older I enjoy the older version that has REVENGE spaces that adds a bit more of a challenge.