QuickTake:

The Game of Real Life is a new take on the old Game of LIFE, where winning might not look the same for every player.

Welcome to Market Watch, a series in which Lookout Eugene-Springfield chats with different vendors at Eugene’s Saturday Market about how they got started and what they’re up to now.

For this edition, Lookout talks with Chris Pender of the Game of Real Life, a board game parodying the Game of Life,  where winning is achieved through the pursuit of happiness over money or material success. 

Responses have been edited for clarity.

Lookout Eugene-Springfield: How does the game work?

Chris Pender: So you go through different things like playing with a puppy, your parents love you, your first kiss, and all these things are happiness, and then you accumulate happiness as you go through life. The player who ends the game with the most happiness wins. 

However, throughout the game you also get or lose health, if you get shot in a drive-by (shooting), you lose 10 health, if you dance, you get 10 health, so your health goes up and down depending on what you do. When you run out of health, you are out of the game. 

How did the game get started?

Basically I played Life a lot as a kid, and I really loved it. But then I played a game called Careers, where you could have happiness as an objective. I thought games were all about money, now I saw that, no, you could also have happiness as an objective, so then I applied that to Life. 

I had some of the ideas when I was a kid and then as I got older, I started keeping notebooks. Basically in my 20s and 30s I added it to the notebooks and as I turned 40, I pieced it all together sort of like a puzzle. 

How’d you get started at the market?

I moved to Eugene, still with the game idea, and started coming down to the Saturday Market.

The problem with a board game is that it costs 20-30 grand to get it manufactured and get it printed. It’s really expensive. So then I thought at the Saturday Market, what if I just made it by hand? 

So that’s what I’m doing with the board game. I could start my whole business with about $2,000, and I never got away from it. 

How’s business these days?

It’s good, my business is pretty consistent. Christmas is the best kind of board game season. People are gonna be together; it’s rainy and cold outside so they want to get together and play board games. And I get through the rest of the year with mainly tourists, because they want something that’s really Eugene. And this has a Eugene flavor to it — you know, enjoy life, pursue life and happiness. 

You can follow Pender’s work and order your own Game of Real Life at his website: https://gameofreallife.com/