The Checkered Game of Life

Milton Bradley was a 23-year-old lithographer whose signature print was a portrait of Lincoln — clean-shaven. Then Lincoln grew a beard, and overnight his stock of portraits became unsellable. Out of that setback came The Checkered Game of Life — a board where players advance across squares of virtue and squares of vice. It sold 45,000 copies in its first year, and is called the first mass-market parlor game in America. There's a smaller but telling detail: it used no dice, because dice carried the smell of gambling. Instead, players spun a six-sided top marked with numbers. Stripping the whiff of gambling out of a game's own equipment, in order to sell the game — this one move shows how commerce and play were tangled together from the very start.