If you go to college, you are saddled with $100,000 of debt but you could get a career with a higher salary. There are “Trade salary card with any player” boxes you can land on but those were added later to balance out the game, there's no Real Life equivalent. It starts at the beginning and it determines your income for (potentially) the remainder of the game. In The Game of Life, there is only one major life-altering decision you can make – Start College or Start Career. (OK I let them play it but you get my point, but no thanks to Monopoly) There are more than two paths That's why I won't let my kids play The Game of Life. The Game of Life is one massive invisible script for how you should Real Life. Invisible scripts, a term I learned from Ramit Sethi, are those beliefs that are “pre-written by our societal values.” Limiting beliefs, which seem to go hand in hand with invisible scripts, are those beliefs that constrain us in some way. We go through life with invisible scripts and limiting beliefs.

(or more to the point, it would have messed me up if I believed life had to be lived that way) Here's something I realized much much later – the Game of Life kind of messed me up for actual life. (what we really need is The Game of Being a Kid – I'll trade being told to eat my vegetables if I don't have to write TPS reports) It was fun because it let you pretend to be an adult while you were a kid. You gave the spinner a whirl, drove your little plastic car around, and “lived” life – picking career or college, getting married, having kids, buying insurance, upgrading your house, etc. If you were a kid in the 80s, you probably played it too. When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was The Game of Life.

The game of life cards