Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so I had the day off from work. I have to admit that I don't really know much about MLK, since he died before I was born and none of my U.S. History classes ever went past the Korean War (uh-oh, I better keep this on topic before I go on an education rant). In the 80s, when his birthday became a holiday, someone with a fungineering degree decided that the best way to teach about King's life was a board game. Seriously, a board game. And somehow, my family ended up with one - probably from a yard sale. Years after it was purchased, my brothers and I decided to play the game on this very holiday. Sadly, it's not much of a game.

There are 64 squares on the board, and you simply take turns rolling a die (actually, it was a "spinner" with numbers from 1-6) to try to get ahead of the other players. If you landed on a square with MLK's face on it, you drew a card which would give additional, if not creative, instructions such as "go forward one space." If you were lucky, you'd get a more interesting command like "Wed Coretta Scott" and you'd go to the space on the board (which was in chronological order) corresponding to that event. When we landed on an event square, we would exclaim what was written "I won the Nobel Peace prize" and such. As we neared the end of the game, however, we noticed that there was an actual square for his assassination. None of us wanted to land on that square, but two of us did by chance. A third landed on the "face" square just beyond it, only to cruelly be told to "go back on space." In short, it wasn't a nice way to end a game. But the real problem with the game was that it didn't reward skill in any way. If possessing knowledge of Dr. King's life and accomplishments resulted in an advantage, I'm sure the game would have been more useful as a learning tool for us. Fortunately, there are well clever blogs with many links to help us learn these days.