A moral checkerboard and a centennial commission.

The Game of Life has two starting points. The older is 1860, the year that Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker in May 2007, gives both for The Checkered Game of Life, the board game Milton Bradley made at the start of his business, and for the founding of the Milton Bradley Company itself. Lepore describes a red-and-ivory checkerboard on which a player begins on a square labelled Infancy and usually, though not always, finishes at Happy Old Age; the route could just as easily end at Ruin. English Wikipedia adds that players moved by spinning a top called a teetotum rather than throwing dice, which were associated with gambling, and that like many games of its century it carried a strong moral message.

The newer starting point is 1960, when the company marked its centenary. A June 2021 opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, summarising findings made at trial, sets out how the modern game came about. In 1959 the toy developer Reuben Klamer visited Milton Bradley’s Massachusetts headquarters and was asked to develop a product to commemorate the centennial. Looking through the company archive for ideas, he found a copy of The Checkered Game of Life and saw the potential for an updated version that reflected contemporary American society and values. The court described Klamer as the developer who came up with the initial concept, and the game designer Bill Markham, head of a California product development company, as the person Klamer approached to design and build the prototype.

Lepore’s account adds another name, saying that Mel Taft helped design the 1960 game. In her telling the commemorative edition bears almost no resemblance to its namesake: a nineteenth-century game about vice, virtue and the pursuit of happiness was recast, in her words, as “a lesson in Cold War consumerist conformity.”

A hand-built prototype, a celebrity pitch and Hasbro.

The prototype was made by hand. According to the court’s summary, Markham’s team began work in the summer of 1959 and moved quickly so that a launch could coincide with the centennial. Klamer and Markham together contributed the features that define the game: play advances along a track winding through a three-dimensional board, and a spinner decides how far each player moves as they pass through the milestones of a life. The artist Grace Chambers built much of the prototype board, making houses, mountains and the raised track from balsa wood, cardboard and paper. A second artist, Leonard Israel, drew sketches for the box cover; Markham and Klamer chose a favourite, and Chambers worked it into the cover. Sue Markham, a copywriter, recorded the agreed rule changes in what became the rulebook.

The game was pitched to Milton Bradley executives at Chasen’s, the Hollywood restaurant, with the broadcaster Art Linkletter present. The court says Klamer and Linkletter had co-founded Link Research Corporation, which developed products and used Linkletter’s celebrity to promote them, and that the licence gave Milton Bradley the right to use Linkletter’s name and image in promoting the game. Milton Bradley refined the prototype, published the game in early 1960 and registered copyrights in the board and rules later that year, naming itself as author. In June 2021 the First Circuit affirmed a district court ruling that the game was a work made for hire, in a case brought by Markham’s successors against Hasbro, Klamer and others.

Ownership then passed to Hasbro. English Wikipedia dates its purchase of the Milton Bradley Company to 1984, and the court’s opinion says Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley, and the rights to the game, in the 1980s; Hasbro has owned The Game of Life since then. Lepore wrote in 2007 that Hasbro had revised the game in 1994 to market it to baby boomers, and that it was releasing The Game of Life: Twists & Turns that spring, a version without a fixed goal in which each player tracked Life Points on a branded card. Wikipedia lists later updates in 2013, 2017 and 2021, and says that, as of 2022, Winning Moves marketed a classic 1960s edition. In March 2026 Deadline reported that Amazon MGM Studios, Chernin Entertainment and Hasbro were developing a Game of Life film, to be directed by Sean Anders from a script by Allan Loeb.

Design and documentation.

A board game reaches its players as a box before it is ever a set of rules, and the box lid usually does more of the identity work than any single piece inside. The lid carries the name, the logo and often a photograph or illustration chosen to show who the game is for, and that image can be redrawn many times over the years while the name stays the same.

Inside the box, the identity continues in physical form. Moulded plastic pegs, discs, frames and trays, printed boards, cards and rule sheets each carry colours and shapes that players come to recognise, and a change of supplier, licence holder or market can quietly change all of them at once.

Each guide in this group looks at a game brand through those layers: who devised the game and when, which companies have made and sold it, how its name and box art have been handled, and what its components look like. It separates what independent, dated sources record from what a publisher says about its own history, and treats the palette shown here as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

A landscape, a spinner and a small car.

The Game of Life identity is built from objects as much as from a name. The 1960 game turned a flat board into a landscape: the court’s account of the prototype describes houses, mountains and an elevated track, and English Wikipedia describes a track that passes along, over and through small mountains and buildings, travelled in a small plastic automobile with holes for pegs that are added as a player marries and has children. The spinner, which Deadline called the game’s signature in 2026, sits on the board itself and does the work that the teetotum did in 1860.

The box was a selling tool from the start. Wikipedia says the 1960 edition carried a rousing endorsement from Art Linkletter on the cover and his likeness on the game’s paper money, and that it was advertised as a Milton Bradley anniversary game and as “A Full 3-D Action Game.” The court’s record of Leonard Israel’s sketches and Grace Chambers’s assembly shows the cover art being worked out alongside the board, by the same small team. Later editions changed the props while keeping the format: Wikipedia notes that the convertibles of the early editions gave way to minivans in the late 1980s, and that the end spaces were renamed, so that Millionaire Acres became Millionaire and the Poor Farm became Bankrupt. The game is also known simply as Life.

For a design guide, The Game of Life shows how a nineteenth-century moral board and a mid-century plastic landscape can share one name, with a spinner, a winding track and a small car carrying the identity from edition to edition. Compare it with Monopoly, another Hasbro board-game brand, and Mouse Trap, the three-dimensional game that Milton Bradley turned down in the early 1960s. For this guide we use checkerboard red, ivory and spinner blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Game of Life’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.