A Lifer's Diary, Part 17: Revenge over Lawsuits - Which One's Better?

A Lifer's Diary, Part 17: Revenge over Lawsuits - Which One's Better?

Within The Game of Life, the concept of collecting money directly from an opponent by landing on a certain space (as opposed to having an opponent land on a space of a specific type) is not new, having first debuted with the Revenge mechanic in Generation I. It worked by collecting your salary from an opponent when you landed on a Pay Day space, but was strangely absent from Generation II (except in its video game adaptation, and even then, only in Enhanced Mode, where it could not be used against anyone who retired at Countryside Acres), only to be reintroduced in Generation III via the Lawsuit mechanic. This time, you had to land on a blue Lawsuit space to sue an opponent; however, whoever you sued won't have to pay you anything at all if they give you an Exemption Card. 

In Generation IV, Lawsuits returned, but only as part of two specific Action Cards; instead, they linked the Long-Term Investment numbers to the various Career Cards, and reworked them so that the player  holding that particular card would collect cash whenever anyone (including themselves) spun its number. Finally, in Generation V, there are once again Lawsuit spaces, but there are fewer of them, although investments must once again be bought manually, and are therefore no longer tied to careers (except in the spin-off video game adaptation, The Game of Life 2, which uses a different rule set).

While I liked the Revenge mechanic from Generations I and II, the logic behind it was flawed; it was most effective if your salary was high enough (although this raised the problem of players with such high salaries getting too far ahead if they got really lucky). On the other hand, if your salary was too low, you wouldn't be able to hinder your opponents as much as you hoped you would (even if you landed on Pay Day spaces often enough). It was for this reason that the standard ruleset for Generation II lacked this feature; unsurprisingly, later generations also forewent Revenge in favor of other means of disrupting opponents' progress as stated above.

On the other hand, I found the Lawsuit system in Generation III to be far more balanced. With only 8 Lawsuit spaces on the entire board, you can now only earn up to $800,000 from Lawsuits (assuming all of them are successful, and you also take the Risky Path where the penultimate Lawsuit space is found), but you are guaranteed to collect $100,000 for every successful lawsuit. In later generations, they are less lucrative, and the fact that you can now actually gain more money from your opponents through you investment number complicates matters even further.

So while the idea of reintroducing Revenge (by collecting your salary directly from any opponent who has not yet retired at Countryside Acres) through landing exactly on a Pay Day space is tempting, it's not as good an idea as you'd think. However, the Lawsuit system was never better implemented than in its debut for Generation III, and I'd like to see Generation VI revert to those original Lawsuit rules, even though they were still quite good in Generations IV and V. In short, Lawsuits are more useful in the Game of Life compared to revenge because although you get fewer chances to use them, you'll get the same amount of money from them every time you do so.