A Lifer's Diary, Part 8: The Agony of Lost Jobs and Skipped Turns

A Lifer's Diary, Part 8: The Agony of Lost Jobs and Skipped Turns

Of all the types of spaces that have been featured in The Game of Life, few are more feared than the Lose Your Job space. Introduced in Generation II, there were originally only two of these spaces on the board, but their effect was the same: anyone who landed on them had to swap their current Career and Salary cards for unused ones. If their new salary paid less than their previous one, that player would find it harder to amass a sizable fortune by the end of the game, especially if they also ended up with a less lucrative Career Card. However, if they received a higher-paying salary compared to the one they once had, their chance of winning would increase, especially if their new career was also more lucrative than the one they lost. In fact, if the difference in value between the old and new salaries was greater than $50,000, it could significantly alter the result of a game. Moreover, the first of these two Lose Your Job spaces (located two spaces after the Buy a House space) had a greater effect on players' net worth if landed on due to being closer to the starting space.

The only problem with this was that in a six-player game, if everyone chose the Start Career option at the beginning, and one of them landed on a Lose Your Job space, the game would lock up due to there only being six Career Cards (out of nine) that did not require a degree. To get around this, a house rule was created in which the Teacher Career Card no longer required a degree at all - this became an official rule change for Generation 2.5.

Less detrimental, but no less annoying, were the "Skip Next Turn" spaces located before the Get Married space. Anyone who landed on these spaces would be forced to skip their next turn. Generation II originally had four such spaces (including two on the Start College path, located before the Career Choice space, and one immediately before the Get Married space), but two of these spaces were changed to Pay Spaces in Generation 2.5 (although you could only lose money by landing on these revised spaces if you did not have Car Insurance). Apart from forcing you to skip your next turn, however, there are no penalties that can result from landing on these spaces.

Lose Your Job and Skip Next Turn spaces were carried over for Generation III, but this time, there would be only one of the latter type of space. More significantly, however, there were now four Lose Your Job spaces instead of two, and the penalty for landing on one of those was far more severe: regardless of the type of Career Card they currently had, any player who landed on such a space must take a random regular Career Card (not a College Career Card) from the deck, and return all of their Pay Raises to the bank. As with Generation II, this was especially devastating if their previous career (with Pay Raises) paid out $50,000 more than their new one. Worse still, if they lost a College Career after passing the Return to School space (or lost it before reaching said space, only to not pay $50,000 to return to school), they would never be able to obtain one again.

However, as in Generation II, there was another problem with the implementation of Lose Your Job spaces: If a player reaches such a space during a six-player game, and all six players have regular Career Cards, the game will lock up due to there only being six regular Career Cards in total. Once again, a workaround was devised: under such circumstances, they would retain their current Career Card, but they would still have to return their Pay Raises.

These types of spaces would be removed altogether from Generation IV onwards, and for good reason: few people liked them (or even the idea of landing on them, for that matter). However, Generation IV did have two Action Cards which, if drawn, would force the player who drew them to replace their current Career Card with an unused one from the same deck (i.e. they could not swap a regular Career Card for a College Career Card, and vice versa). At least these two cards are worth the same $100,000 each as any other Action Card by the end of the game. Finally, Generation V no longer forces the player to change careers; instead, all career changes are done voluntarily, but only when a player lands on a Career Space.

In short, adding spaces that could force players to skip their next turn or swap their careers and salaries for new ones added unpredictability to Generations II and III, which seemed like a good idea on paper, but was generally disliked among players (especially on the very rare occasions where they could break the game), and few people were sad to see them go when these types of spaces were dropped in Generation IV.