BABY BOOMER
PLAYERS: 2-6
TIME: 45-55 minutes
AGE: 12+
Play a Baby Boomer competing with other Boomers for happiness – who will accumulate the most wealth and grandchildren?
Your children need help finding a partner, so you’ll have to invest in their careers, personality, and looks. They’ll also need a house but the market is going through the roof!
And have you budgeted for your own retirement?
Forget the hype – it’s not easy being a Baby Boomer.
How Baby Boomer Works
At the start of the game all players are assigned a Baby Boomer whom they must help to find happiness. Each Boomer is unique – some are wealthier than others, some are unhealthy, and some like their children.
Happiness comes from wealth and grandchildren, unhappiness from poverty and not having a place in the retirement village. But different Boomers place different values on these things. This creates your challenge: to make decisions based on your Boomer’s personality, balancing the competing goals of wealth and grandchildren.
Steering your Baby Boomer towards fulfilment will lead you into conflict with other Boomers who are also trying to arrange fruitful relationships for their children and competing with you for houses and investments.
Each turn you must choose to either play for yourself or play for your children – do you make yourself rich or pour money into your kids’ looks, career, and personality to help them find a partner?
This can be risky.
Sending your kids off to get a Masters degree will help with their career, but they might undo your hard work by reading The Secret and launching a crystal-reading startup!
Each of your possible actions has effects on the other Boomers as all aspects of the game are responsive and dynamic. If, for example, all Baby Boomers rush to buy their children houses, then prices will skyrocket and drain Boomers of the resources that they need for a comfortable retirement. Wealth can usually be created by speculating on the stock market, but a crash is always possible, which is why some Boomers feel safer with gold!
Your children are constantly surprising.
Some are destined for costly heartbreak, while others will couple only once in their lives and then produce a harvest of grandchildren.
This means that you may have to make some difficult decisions: your Boomer’s happiness may require that you send your children into doomed matches again and again in order to grow your stable of grandchildren.
There are many ways to win.
While patience with your wandering children will always pay off in the long run, you may not have time on your side as the game ends when any Boomer has three grandchildren. Money, time, and children: make the right decisions and resolve the generational conflict of our time!
