The Checkered Game of Life (1860)

This was the first game by Milton Bradley, who was real person with quite a story.  It dates all the way back to 1860, and here is an excellent article on the early days of his game company.  It is played on a basic checker board with each square showing different virtues, faults, points, or arrows to other squares.  Here is my version of the board, with one difference from the one shown in the article.  We'll get back to that in a bit.

There were similar games at the time, and they were played by starting in the bottom left corner and moving as in Snakes & Ladders: bottom row left to right, then up one, next row right to left then up one, next row back the other way.  When writing is done in this way the pattern is called boustrophedon, which is one of my all-time favorite nerdy words.

But there was an extra piece to this game which shows the actual movement scheme of the game. Each player would get one of these cards with the scoring dial and move chart.

So, the actual gameplay was to roll a die to see which direction you get to move.  The object of the game was to get to the top right corner "Old Age", get those extra 50 points and retire with 100 points or more.  Landing on an opponent's piece sends that player to Jail, which I suppose means losing a turn or maybe rolling a 6 to get out.  For "Speculation", roll the die, and on a 3 or 6 go to Wealth, any other rolls sends you to Ruin.

Now check out that next-to-last space on the third row up from the bottom.  Mine says "Roll Again", but the original actually had "Suicide" with a man hanging from a noose in a tree.  That seems awfully harsh.  But at the time, most board games were preachy things full of virtues and evils, as if anyone actually learned from words printed on a board. 

The article linked above has a few other rule variations and tons of historical info.  I just wanted to go over our own test results here.

It turns out to be a very indirect and random wandering, and you often get very close to the goal only to get a bad roll and have to move away again, or land on a space that send you back.  But it was fairly enjoyable to test out.  Without the official rules, it was not clear what spaces like 'Poverty" or "Disgrace" do.  But "Ruin" is most likely the end of the game.  Somewhere there is an official rule sheet, which I will try to track down for more insight.