The wise player will strive “to gain on his journey that which shall make him the most prosperous, and to shun that which will retard him in his progress.” But even when you’re heading for Happiness you can end up at Ruin: passed out, drunk and drooling, on the floor of a seedy-looking tavern where Death darkens the door disguised as a debt collector straight out of “Bleak House”-the bulky black overcoat, the strangely sinister stovepipe hat.īradley avowed that his game would promote virtue. ![]() On the other: Poverty, Idleness, Disgrace. On the one hand: Honesty, Bravery, Success. There are good patches, and bad, in roughly equal number. “The game represents, as indicated by the name, the checkered journey of life,” Bradley explained, in his Rules of the Game. Play starts at the board’s lower-left corner, on an ivory square labelled Infancy-illustrated by a tiny, black-inked lithograph of a wicker cradle-and ends, usually but not always, at Happy Old Age, at the upper right, though landing on Suicide, with a noose around your neck, is more common than you might think, and means, inconveniently, that you’re dead. ![]() ![]() In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected President, a lanky, long-nosed, twenty-three-year-old Yankee named Milton Bradley invented his first board game, on a red-and-ivory checkerboard of sixty-four squares.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |