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Life's Playground is an indie board game that draws inspiration from Monopoly, Pay Day, and LIFE, and puts their characteristics into one single randomly-generated board game which appears to go only in a single direction, but once the player passes the sunset square at the end, they magically appear at the sunrise square at the very beginning. Games allow for two to four players, and can be set to have a time limit of twenty-four, thirty-six, or sixty laps ("months" as the game calls laps) or "survival" which has no time limit and ends when only one player remains. Players have jobs which earns them money upon completing a lap around the board, and properties can be purchased which can be upgraded on a player's very next turn. (The player may purchase all three upgrades for a property at the same time if they so wish, and upgrade multiple properties at their discression.) Apart from money, the game also features Fortune Points which can gained and lost through chance and used to either count towards a player's final score or used to cover costs if the player does not have enough cash to otherwise make a payment.


The graphics mostly feature what appear to be stock photographs. The random pictures depicting life and wealth on the board help with setting the mood, but this is the best feature about the graphics. The graphics are boring, and especially the bland playing tokens that look just like the playing tokens used in the board game Sorry!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1544182523

The stock pictures used for mini-games on the other hand, are more exciting at times, but still have the feeling of being stock pictures that make the player feel like they've seen the pictures somewhere before, but couldn't recall exactly where.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1544181985

The music is a rare find for an indie game. While the game has very little music to speak of, the music is both pleasing and fits the mood for a high stakes financial setting, but the player is recommended to mute the game's sound and play some greed-themed music in the background.


The mini-games are fun despite being overly simplistic, and are perfect representation of real life scenarios dealing with situations ranging from yard sales, settlements with insurance companies, and one game involving locating one's lost car in a parking lot.

The intangibles are such that players will love to play for hours on end despite the negatives, though a player will most likely wish that they sincerely want to enjoy the game if the negatives are too extreme, and be left wondering what could have been after having sought their refund.


The game was made by a indie dev/publisher who has a history of making games that do not support the Steam overlay, so unless the player is one of the chosen few who has the power to take screenshots in non-overlay supporting games and upload them to the Steam cloud, the player will not be showing off their boring screenshots to friends. (Just kidding about being one of the "chosen few"! Everyone on Steam can do this, it just requires a little research.)

The player may as well quit once they're eliminated in a single human game, because if the player wants to see how the rest of the game plays out, they're going to be pressing the "roll" button over and over again because AI players do not roll on their own.

The occupational titles do not fit the theme of a high stakes, cutthroat financial setting. Unless this author did not experiment enough with searching for new jobs, seeing people with entry-level jobs owning properties containing Football stadiums and airports looks silly when you think of owners of such properties being big shots identified as business tycoons, investment bankers, or professional athletes. Playing tokens could have represented grotesque symbols of wealth, but the developers blew it on that front.

The cost of properties look like they're from the days of Monopoly. (i.e. The 1930's.) If players do not take things like $226 airport construction or $267 Football stadium construction with good humor, the player will certainly be left wondering why the game's currency isn't measured in millions of dollars.

Players who draw Fate Cards will find that the dice have already been rolled for them, taking away from the excitement of throwing the dice and hoping for a positive outcome after undergoing various good luck rituals.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1544180976

The single biggest, game-breaking negative is that the only multiplayer support, is local multiplayer. The lack of online multiplayer is the only thing stopping the game from receiving a positive recommendation. (Even if multiplayer was limited to just being able to play against the people on one's own Steam friends.) With AI opponents who cannot even roll their own dice, the game is really just not fun.


The game is a positive game, but the negatives are just too severe. The developers have their hearts and minds in the right place, but apart from the inability for non-local multiplayer games, the positives of the game aren't enough to compete against other board games on Steam such as 100% Orange Juice and Business Tour which both feature non-local multiplayer. (100% Orange Juice's sale price is lower than the regular price of Life's Playground while Business Tour is a freemium game.)

Users are advised to hold off on purchasing the game until at least true multiplayer becomes possible. (If ever.) But if a player wants a cheap casual game on Steam for the same price Life's Playground, SimProse Studios has an indie game called Star Merchant which is far better.


This review made possible through the generosity, consideration and contribution of Review Experts(REXnetwork) and the developer/publisher.

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got it with coupon, worth 0,27.
cons are you cant volume change or resolution
had way more fun than i would have guessed.
thank for reader

You get what you pay for. It's less than 5 dollars, and it honestly shouldn't cost even that much. It is nothing but a glitchy ripoff of Monopoly. It didn't even bother improving or significantly altering the concept from Monopoly.

A lot of hate for this game in the review section, and that could be because it cost more at one point based on what I'm reading, but it's actually a cute little game with a lot of potential. It does miss the mark in many key places - I hope it's not overly harsh to say, but this is an excellent viewing for Game Design students because it's a title within their reach that really highlights what can go right and wrong with an initial offering. For example, the sound blared when I first fired it up and I searched around desperately for a volume control, which made me really consider the importance of adding one to my first game.

On the flipside, the minigames and the cutesy music/sound effects and the altered influences all worked pretty well to entertain me for a bit. Could easily be made into a game worthy of a $5 price tag with just a few quality of life tweaks and a minor art upgrade.

I have no idea what this is, or trying to be.
But it kinda feels like malware.

life play gorund is best game i ever play : D i play money and buy money leave clovers and cado win because he rely on welfare and take all my moner and cheat and he jobless and i pick the couch and bucket and win money yayyayaya life palygrund best game evrrr :3 !!!!1

very interesting, i like it

You get what you pay for. It's less than 5 dollars, and it honestly shouldn't cost even that much. It is nothing but a glitchy ripoff of Monopoly. It didn't even bother improving or significantly altering the concept from Monopoly.

Life's Playground is yet another construction kit template copy+paste from serial shovelware pushers, Trinity Project. These guys do nothing but copy premade game templates and game tutorials, fill out a few things/stamp out basic levels using the construction kit templates, slap on an asset flipped set of sprites/assets, and dump them on Steam and into cheap nasty shovelware game bundles as cash grabs. Trying to get paid for someone else's game templates, assets... at best, this is shovelware, at worst, it's a scam/cash grab.

This crap boardgame looks like it was made in the 1990's and stolen by Trinity Project/Dnovel and dumped on Steam as a cash grab. That's what they like to do, so there's no surprise here if this is another one of those kinds of scams. The quality is deporably bad, we'll get into the technicals later. This is a very direct ripoff of The Game of Life (copyright Milton Bradley, 1960), with some minor elements of Monopoly. At this stage it's unclear whether Milton Bradley has taken any legal action against the Russian asset flippers at Trinity Project/Dnovel/Freeanimals_Software (this guy uses a lot of aliases to try hide his identity) to enforce their intellectual property rights.

SimProse Studios/Trinity Project have shown a repeat pattern of unethically dumping other people's work onto Steam as a cheap, nasty cash grab, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. Here's some examples so you can see for yourself:

• "69 Ways to Kill a Zombie" = Simple Apocalypse Cartoon Assets Pack[assetstore.unity.com] developed by Synty Studios
  
• "Fox and Bunny" = Sunny Land[assetstore.unity.com] developed by Ansimuz
  
• "Primitive Shooter" = Create a Game Source code developed by Sebastian Lague

One of the big problems here is in terms of the general design and the way the boardgame was ported. There's two aspects of any game. The mechanics of the game, and the interface that the players have with that mechanic. Poker, for example, is about randomly generated hands that players get, and the interface is the randomly drawn paper cards. If you keep the random hand, but remove the physical cards, the game still works, but it's streamlined, more pure. That's video gaming. The best video games put the players directly against the core game mechanic. We don't love games because of their interfaces, we love them for their mechanics. The less that the interface gets in the way, the better. So here, we have a boardgame/cardgame conversion, and the focus of the developers has clearly been to keep, and emulate the annoying physical interface, without bothering to improve on the mechanics or put the players closer to them. As a result of this hamfisted decision, the game is clunky and annoying to play compared to games that were designed from scratch to be PC games.

Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.

There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. That's right, only 2. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.

It's also important to note the "developer" here has connections to a number of shady Russian asset flippers and review manipulators who show an organised pattern to scam and defraud gamers with fake reviews and asset flipping the work of others for profit. While reviews are about the games, gamers should be informed when developers act unethically. Whether these connections are the same developer using multiple accounts, or just working closely with other unethical developers, gamers should be warned about the harm to gamers by this developer and their associates. Buying games from unethical developers puts your money at risk.

Life's Playground is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.