I’m not a big board game person. It’s pretty rare to see me playing ‘Monopoly’ or ‘Chutes and Ladders.’ But there is one game I loved to play when I was a kid – The Game of Life.

I liked this game because, as a kid, you could pretend you were in that elusive class of people known as “adults.” Adults got to do cool things like buying stuff and driving cars and staying up late and going to work. In The Game of Life, you got to do all these things. You got to act like an adult.

Two things drew me to this game. First, the game had a real spinner. You could snap your thumb and index finger and really get that baby going. Also, it had a little plastic bridge over which you could drive your little plastic car. This was different from other board games that were flat with no raised areas.

All four of us kids could play at the same time, and the game was easy enough for my little sister, Ginni, to play. We each got a little plastic car with an adult in it – a plastic peg with a head on it. Then, you’d spin the spinner, land on a place and do what you were instructed to do on the space. Sometimes, you had to draw a card that had further instructions on it.

The best part was when my brother, Phil, would draw a card that sent him to the hospital because his wife had given birth to twins. He would name his twin kids Harold and Darold and would call them Hal and Dal for short. For some reason, each of siblings would find this hilarious. Ginni and I would laugh, and my sister, Sandi, would tell Phil that he was so weird. I cannot remember a lot about the game other than this, but we would all anticipate the card draw that gave Phil twin kids. The irony of this is that Sandi is the only one of the four of us that had kids, and she had twins. She did not name them Harold and Darold.

In the real game of life, I have driven over many bridges and had many spins at making this a good life. Right now, my car is filled with people, but they are not plastic – a good wife, Mary, wonderful grandkids and step-kids, and many, many friends. It has been a good game of life that is not quite over, yet!

(Pictured: The Hanks Kids, 1960.)