Race to your final resting place

Game tokens from locally created game 'Funeral Director: A Race to Your Final Resting Place.' (Jeff Kan Lee/PD)

Forget about planning for retirement. Ken and Jannice Kolsbun are way beyond annuities, Social Security and long-term-care insurance. The Forestville couple is determined to help Baby Boomers, the generation whose every passage has been put under a public microscope, leapfrog right over the Golden Years and get ready for The Pearly Gates.

The Kolbuns have dreamed up a new board game, “Funeral Director: A Race to Your Final Resting Place,” aimed an helping people “toy with their own mortality” by taking the fear and denial out of death.

The game, still in a prototype stage, is sure to get people talking, if not squirming and laughing nervously as they move tiny coffins around a board and, in the process, make arrangements for their own demise and ultimate disposal.

Jannice and Ken Kolsbun

It may be ghoulish subject matter but the Kolbuns, who have a long history of making cooperative games with social themes, think American society needs to lighten up about death. The game laces a heavy subject with plenty of humor. Players get to choose how they want to die and none are lingering: “Die Laughing” “Die of Boredom,” “Die of Fright” or “Die of a Broken Heart.”

“People in our culture often have phobias about death and funerals. Professionals all agree it can be a difficult and often ‘forbidden’ area of discussion,” said Kolsbun, a writer and former landscape architect, urban planner and businessman, who sees the primary consumers of his game as Baby Boomers and Gen-Exers as well as professionals like counselors and clergy.