On the other: Poverty, Idleness, Disgrace. On the one hand: Honesty, Bravery, Success. There are good patches, and bad, in roughly equal number. “The game represents, as indicated by the name, the checkered journey of life,” Bradley explained, in his Rules of the Game. Play starts at the board’s lower-left corner, on an ivory square labelled Infancy-illustrated by a tiny, black-inked lithograph of a wicker cradle-and ends, usually but not always, at Happy Old Age, at the upper right, though landing on Suicide, with a noose around your neck, is more common than you might think, and means, inconveniently, that you’re dead. In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected President, a lanky, long-nosed, twenty-three-year-old Yankee named Milton Bradley invented his first board game, on a red-and-ivory checkerboard of sixty-four squares. Illustration by Zohar Lazar, photograph courtesy Connecticut Valley Historical Museum. Bradley avowed that his game would promote virtue.
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