Friday January 06, 2006

Monopoly - a game of skill

This game is a really interesting board game. As a child my parents being relatively poor I ended up getting hold of a secondhand Monopoly board, a few houses and hotels, some monopoly money and some chance and community chest cards and ended up making up the rest of the set myself. Nowadays there are many versions of the game, Thunderbirds, Junior and so on. On New Years day we had a game with my wife's sister's family - which included two boys. It is amazing how competitive everyone got and when someone lands on your property with a nice expensive hotel on it it feels good to lighten their bank balance by a few hundred pounds or so. We usually play in teams instead of individuals and to get a set of property like the reds or yellows I do dodgy deals where I swap a property for one I want with another player usually handing over some extra money to encourage them to part with it. We also sometimes combine teams which has the effect of speeding up the resolution of the game and avoiding stalemates. New Years day's game was the first where I have seen Park lane and Mayfair playing a pivotal part in the end result. Our opponents landed on each in turn, first with three houses ( Seven hundred pounds rent ) and then with one hotel ( something like twelve hundred pounds rent ) The fact that before the first visit we had just increased the number of houses from one to three made that rent even sweeter to us. I don't have any favourite sets of property I tend to avoid the blues and browns as they return so little rent back. The stations and utiities I don't tend to bother with either . Ideally you want two colours on one edge of the board to maximise your chance of collecting rent. With the advent of computer games and DVD's it was great to see this game is popular still and I know many other families who enjoy playing it too.