Game of Life: Pirates of the Caribbean edition
Let’s be honest here: The Game of Life is sort of dorky.
I appreciate the basic concept — playing house in a boardgame context — but even as a child, the notion that you would win the game if you were married, had as many children as possible and as much cash as possible sat poorly with me. Brilliant artists, fulfilled social workers, poor-but-happy people in public service, they all lose the standard Game of Life.
I liked the little cars and 3-D board, though.
But the victory conditions work a lot better for the Disneyland/Disneyworld/Downtown Disney-only version of the game, The Game of Life: Pirates of the Caribbean edition. In it, you sail around a very attractive little board in die-cast metal boats (which do poorly on the sloped 3-D landscape, but that’s not a crippling issue) and acquire a historical captain (who determines how much booty you get whenever you cross a Share the Loot space), a ship (with which you can fight other players’ ships, in a mechanic almost identical to the way D&D works, in an amusing twist) and even one or two mascots (all of whom have some combination of eyepatches, peglegs and hooks for limbs). You acquire gold treasure through the course of the game, but don’t know what you’ve gotten until you reach Treasure Island at the end, where you can end up doubling the value of some pieces of treasure based on which mascots you picked up along the way.
We played it this weekend when Jenn and I visited my parents in Oakland. It was a little slower than it might have been at first because of reading through all the rules. While simple, there are a lot of them. A second run-through, with just Jenn and me, went lightning fast.
The game is a lot of fun, although a mechanic for playing either as a sailor or a deckhand (which my father pointed out is a false split to begin with) seems to be half-finished: There are a ton of benefits for playing as a deckhand, with more money coming in most times a player gets money and having to pay smaller fines at the times when a player has to pay a fine, as well as being able to get the two best captains (one of whom, Edward Teach, was better known as Blackbeard). The benefits to being a sailor: A few fewer spaces to travel to reach Treasure Island. Since we found ourselves picking the longer path to get to Treasure Island on the two times on the board you can choose directions at a fork in the path (the better to get more chances for loot and more chances to attack the other players), this isn’t much of a benefit, either. All I can think is that they meant for there to be more benefits for being a sailor, but they never made them into the final vesion of the game. When we play in future, it’ll be as all sailors, I think.
Although this version of the board is a Disney exclusive, it looks like it’s also a test run for a mass market version of the game: This summer, the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie will be accompanied by new versions of Life and Battleship with flavor taken from the new movie. I suspect, other than the addition of movie art and characters, the Life game will look a lot like the one I’ve got at home today.
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