JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 238
Like everyone else, I've played the fine Milton Bradley board game Life, piling in blue kids and pink kids, getting a house and a mortgage, sweeping the family over plastic hills and Prussian blue waters (well, not really), all in the one-way race to the big white plastic house at Millionaire Acres. There was make-believe 
cash,a fun spinning device that made a cool plastic-y noise, and of course the vaguely 1960 Lincolnesque convertible car with six holes in it. It was fun and almost never provoked a fight.
There's also the 18th century precursor (shown below) to the Milton Bradley game (which actually first appeared in a rudimentary form in 1860), which was a more subtle form of the progress of life, taking us from baby to bones. On a completely different plane there is the great John Conway's (ca. 1970) AI/cellular automata Game of Life; and on still another, different level is the semi-evolutionary mega-life mega-death game by Sims creator Will Wright, called Spore.
Different from all of the entries above though is this sweet toxicity of an invention by Eugene Edwin Graves and William Edwin Brown (called, simply, incongruously, Graves and Browns Improved Game), which was patented in 1902. It was really a Hang 'em Higher game, with players shooting a marble or other projectile from one end of the playing field to the other, with the intent of knocking the stool out from under the condemned person's feet, who stand there with their head in a noose, a marble away from infinity, awaiting their just reward to be delivered by children.. I'm not a gaming expert, but I imagine that the genre of games calling for children to hang condemned criminals would be mighty sparse.(I'll have to consult with my friend and wooden board games expert Andy Archie of Asheville on this.) I can just now hear the faint glee of the kids as they rock loose the stool, sending their criminal's-name-to-be-determined swinging into space. I'd rather not have my kids playing this one; somehow, in someway, splitting apart the universe at its belly in Spore doesn't seem quite as gruesome as the Graves game.
It is slightly interesting to note that there is at least one woman among the condemned. (The last woman hanged in England would be103-pound Ruth Ellis, who went swinging in 1955.) 
The abstract of the British Patent Describing the Graves and Brown Game (the original patent illustration found above):
Abstract of GB190201860 1860.
Graves, E. E., and Brown, W. E. Jan. 23. Games played with projectors and projectiles.- In the arrangement shown in Fig. 1, a board, provided with a pocket 2 at one end, is fitted with a gibbet 7, to which are connected model figures 6, standing on supports 5. A projector 10, consisting of an elastic cord 12 stretched on supports 13 carried by a base, is adjustably pivoted on the table, and serves to throw projectiles of the form shown in Figs. 3<a>, 3<b>, 3<c> along the board or through the air, so as to knock
\the supports 5 into the pocket 2, leaving the figures suspended. Flags 9 may be placed on the board. The gibbet may be dispensed with, the figures themselves being knocked into the pocket. The projector may consist of a trough-shaped piece fitted with an elastic band, which engages a slot in the rear end of a conical projectile. To enable two players to use the game simultaneously, the parts may be duplicated, the projectors being arranged at opposite ends, or in opposite corners of the same ends, and the pockets being opposite the projectors.
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