The Monopoly Smack Down

Lance likes to play the game Monopoly. I am not entirely sure why, but he does. He begged and begged that I buy him the game so that he could take it to school to play with his friends. He even got his teachers to approve taking the game to school. See it is a long game and they were not going to have “all day” to play it, so he had to have approval first. I gave in and went and bought him a brand new in the box game.

We had one at one point, but over the years of multiple children that are not responsible and other children living with us (who were also not responsible) the pieces went missing. I was not going to let him take a game to school that did not have all of the pieces, or even most of the pieces. It is mostly scrap pieces at this point. They could make their own game up and we would have pieces to use and I would not feel bad about it.

Anyway…tonight…after our trip to Fuddruckers and Yogurt Worx! Lance asked if we could play Monopoly together. Let me just say that Monopoly is not one of my favorite games to play. It is not. It is not that I am not good at it, it is just that I do not enjoy long grueling games of wheeling and dealing. I especially do not like them when people at the game board are little, whiny, and break out into tears. Do you see what the draw backs of the evening might be?

I agreed…

Lance got it out and set it up and then told me I was the banker. Quite the way to delegate there, son.

And then we began to play about 6:45PM (give or take)…

Lance learned that you do not need to own Park Place or Boardwalk to win the game of Monopoly. Those are the coveted pieces of the game. He learned that there are exactly 10 spaces between each Rail Road square on the board. He kept landing on them and he had to keep paying mommy $200 because mommy owned all 4 of them.

I think Lance learned that it is not about the big properties, but about how you use the lots of less expensive ones. Yes, those big ones bring in a lot of money, but they have smaller odds of people landing on them.

Another thing is that he learned a lot of PROPER Monopoly rules instead of the not so correct “house rules” that everyone plays by. I did let him play by some “house” rules so that he would have some fun collecting a lot of money at one time. Needless to say he did have a hard time landing on “Free Parking,” but that is the fun of a game of Monopoly.

He also learned that you cannot build a Hotel in the game of Monopoly if you do not have 4 houses on a street. He also learned that you have to build out evenly on your streets before you can build up. It was a learning experience for him. He also learned that NO ONE can build a hotel if you run out of houses. Once they are gone, they are gone. Building stops. There are only 23 houses in the game of Monopoly. We referred to the rules a lot to make sure we were playing correctly.

At the end of the game, mommy stomped Lance. Mommy had $11,700+ and Lance had $2570+. That was after over 4.5-5 hours of playing Monopoly. Lance was tired of grumpy. He was broke and ready to call it quits. I think he learned a lot. I do not think he will be going for the Utility Companies anymore. I think he will be heading straight for those Rail Roads.

I learned we really need to get a portable card table or something. I am just not made for hours on end on the floor.