![]() ![]() In this when you get to the end of this section you roll for your education and the choices invariably are low pay, low status, and entirely inadequate to keep you out of debt and misery the rest of the game. The first course of the spiral is your education. However the game mechanics make it impossible to ever get to those squares, and you constantly zip by them with only a look, just like your real life counterpart who knows there is such enormous wealth but utterly beyond him as if it was on Tau-Ceti 4.īut there is more than one joke in the game. ![]() The only way to get out and succeed is to land on certain squares of the board which will give you absolutely enormous wealth. This is made eminently clear by a cursory look at the rules. I find the game truly sadistic because for the player WITHIN the game, there is no way 0ut. If you are inclined to doubt check out Jerry Springer, or Judge Judy, or a host of other shows which troll human misery to present these situations for people to look down upon and feel smugly superior to. ![]() I note that the same game could be reworked “Middle Class Futility” and be just as complete a satire about most of the rest of us and played by the very wealthy. I cannot believe that at $39 for the base game and $18 for each expansion this is a game that is a pure gag gift and not played, which says something about non-rednecks more or less whistling past the graveyard. This I suspect says something about people in general. On the other hand… the game is popular enough that TWO game expansion kits have been produced and sales seem to be brisk. So the satire is supposed to be aimed at the true slackers. A huge swath of the people who join the armed forces and do valiant service for the country come from these classes, and so do those who work as hard as they can to keep body and soul, family, and decency together. Simple observation of these people in real life shows that few accept this and most are desperately trying to avoid the circle of poverty and petty crime it depicts. The satire of he game is on those people who WILLINGLY chose this life style. It is, I suspect primarily for the enjoyment of non-rednecks who have been born above such a status commonly known as “poor white trash” and the game would have redeeming social value if it was played by persons in that lower class as a demonstration of what their life will be like unless they change their ways. A grim and savage satire on the life of rural and urban lower white classes and there is a message in here, but on the whole the ruling principle of the game is “schadenfreude”– a fine old German term which means deriving pleasure from the misery of others. For example I ripped off Buccaneer for my sailing ship rules. I bought it simply for that for my board game archive, which I use for inspiration for ideas to rip off for miniature game design. Your life is liquidated in every sense, usually at half price, and the winner is the person with the most teeth. you start, you pass through squares which give you life “adventures” and you get to the end and that is it. It is not circular like Monopoly or many other family games but essentially a line. Games Ancient and Oriental for a good exposition of the early versions of this game design). Historically the game is the only one I have ever seen which rips off the game design of the “Game of the Goose” with the board being a spiral. Which is better an end in horror, or a horror without end? Morally the difference between murder and mayhem is up to you. Unless it’s a zombie game in which he can be brought back for an even more hellish existence. The guy shot by the Ak47 is at least dead and out of his misery. It’s technically not a war game but there is competition between players and for my part there’s precious little between shooting down another player with an AK47 or bashing his “rig’ to bits in a demolition derby or drag race thus forcing him to go deeply into debt which he can never pay. ![]()
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