The Game of Life

We need to get a child lock on our games cabinet. The children cannot seem to stop getting out the games and dumping the contents on the floor. This is mostly an issue with Serena, since Ethan usually asks before making a mess with the games.

So Serena today emptied out The Game of Life. This is not a good one to spill on the floor, especially if you step on the spinny number wheel. (It hurt pretty bad, but that was a couple days ago...) Mostly though, the game is just a big mess to pick up. There are so many pieces. I started trying to put it back in a nice orderly way, so it would be easy to set up next time we wanted to play it, and it was taking FOR-EV-ER. I abandoned the effort, and just started tossing everything in the box when I realized two things: one, we rarely play the game, and two, the children will probably dump it out again before we do.

But as I was picking it up I started thinking about the basis of winning the game-- it's all about money. We had just had our financial guy over too, so I was really thinking about money and insurance and stuff. It's a pretty materialistic game really. So I was pondering the meaning and purpose of life and thought maybe we should come up with our own Game of Life. The Mormon version of the Game of Life, where the goal is to be an eternal family and get to Heaven. Like on every payday you are supposed to pay tithing, but it's optional. But if you don't pay tithing you miss out when you land on squares that say, "Good Deed done. Get $10,000 IF you paid your tithing." Instead of Life tiles you could get Blessing tiles. There would be squares that said things like, "Fell asleep during sacrament meeting, lose next turn." "Didn't go visiting teaching, go back 10 spaces." "Made dinner for new family in the ward, Get a blessing tile." But then I started thinking, this could get pretty blasphemous pretty quick, so better not go try to sell the idea to Milton Bradley. I mean nobody wants to land on the square of, "Bad mouthed the Bishop in front of your children, lose next 4 turns" or "Commit major sin, go back 20 spaces if you want to repent, or quit now--you lose." Oh well. I guess I'll have to think of some other way to make my millions. Maybe BYU monopoly. Oh wait, it's been done.