"Hey, Doctor Jones, No Time For Love!"

The gorgeous board for the Indiana Jones Monopoly set

Last night's Monopoly Club session saw the four of us - Pete, Clare, Rachel and I - let loose on the deluxe Indiana Jones-themed set that I had had my heart set on playing since we formed our little group a year ago.

The set (pictured above) came in a wooden crate (pictured below).

The magnificent crate!!!

The properties were grouped and themed by film location (the set covers the first four Indiana Jones films from Raiders through to Crystal Skull), the currency was "reputation points" rather than cash (which actually worked really well in my mind), Chance and Community Chest cards were - of course - Fortune and Glory, homes and hotels were Fertility Idols and Arks of the Covenant, and the player tokens were iconic objects (rather than people) from the franchise.

The Fortune and Glory cards even had film quotes and photographs on them

There were also optional rules, if you rolled doubles, with varying effects ranging from swinging to any space on the board and pulling ("whipping") other characters towards you, to fighting for control of another player's property.

As it had been my turn to pick which board theme we'd be playing, I also got to pick which token I wanted first as well, and so I chose the fedora. Rachel was the minecart, Clare the Grail diary, and Pete the bullwhip.

Our tokens

Pete was the first to go out, with Rachel following. Both had fallen foul of huge rental payments to Clare, but their bank balances had been sucked dry by my Raiders-themed trilogy of locations from the Tanis dig for the Ark (The Map Room, Cairo marketplace, and The Well of Souls).

I was then fearful that Clare would load up all her properties with Idols and Arks as she staged an impressive comeback, having scooped up all the mortgaged properties of the players she'd driven into bankruptcy. 

While I only had the set mentioned above and the first pair of ultra cheap properties past Go: The (Rope) Bridge and The Temple of Doom.

My secret weapon: Alice hopped up to give me a few pointers

After a long head-to-head battle (I'm sure we didn't finish until well after 11pm), I came out on top when Clare eventually conceded that it was unlikely she'd be able to beat me (Pete - as the Banker - checked my account and I had eleven 500 Reputation Point notes as well as a ton of other notes).

Before the game, Pete had revealed that the latest addition to hiss fast-expanding Monopoly collection was a novelty silver, stuffed toy "top hat", which will now be handed to the winner of each game to hold until the next session.

While it isn't actually a hat, I still wore it with pride...

To The Winner: the silver top hat!

In retrospect, I realised the moment I "accidentally" sabotaged both Rachel and Pete: early in the game Pete had secured the high value, blue property right by Go (Akator Temple), then a little while later Rachel landed on the other square of the pair (Chauchilla Cemetery).

She was hesitant about buying it, but I pointed out it would be a great "spoiler" for Pete's progress and so she splashed the cash and took that property.

This resulted in those two squares being an on-going source of tension between Pete and Rachel (including several fruitless "dice-off battles", from the set's optional rules), with neither able to get hold of the other's property and secure a profitable and dangerous corner of the board.

Luckily, my wife is quite easy-going when it comes to boardgames as this wasn't the only time I risked marital ructions.

Later in the game I used the "whipping" optional rule to pull Rachel's token towards mine, depositing her on one of my EXTREMELY high rent properties (by this late stage in the game, both my sets of properties were loaded up with Arks), severely draining her resources.

Tallying up our on-going points total, this victory puts me tied with Pete at the top of the league (although, he has more second placings than I, so technically he's still the leading player).

As to our feelings on the Indiana Jones set itself: it could so easily have been a "10 out of 10", being so beautiful, well illustrated, and thematically on-point, except for the fact that more than a few of the property cards had the wrong details printed on the back for mortgage purposes. This meant things got a bit confusing when you were looking at the card backs for whatever reason.

Such a production blunder is a real disappointment when clearly a lot of love and attention has gone into the development of this deluxe set.