"When You're Playing Monopoly, It's Life"

After an unscheduled three-month break, we were back to Monopoly this week, playing Pete's recently purchased Le Mans-themed set.

Pete has been attending the world-famous endurance racing event for donkey's years and actually acquired this slick-looking Monopoly set at the race track earlier this year.

The properties for sale around the board were key locations on and off the track, from the fun fair and media centre via the Dunlop bridge and certain turns on the track through to the finish line and podium.

House and hotels were renamed "garages" and "lounges" (even though the little plastic buildings remained the classic Monopoly design and colour), but "chance" and "community chest" remained unaltered. Although the names stayed the same, the cards were nicely reframed as racing-related occurrences to reward or penalise you.  

Everything was labelled in both French and English, which was a really cool touch, but as the warm evening wore on I have to confess that I started to get them muddled up - but that was all on dopey me.

In fact, the warmth - even though we had the rear louvre doors of the house open - meant I was quite befuddled for most of the evening!

Pete was the race car; I was the running driver; Clare was the flags; and Rachel the helmet

The game started quickly... for most of us.

Pete, due to a succession of unfortunate dice rolls ended up plodding along behind the rest of us as we scooped up property after property, and he kept missing out.

Once we completed buying up everything that was available it looked at first as though Pete was actually the most 'cash rich' out of all of us, but that got whittled down quickly by parking fines until he went bankrupt.

Rachel only had a small property portfolio, but it included the two most costly locations on the board - the podium and the finish line - and she secured her hold on them with a couple of lounges.

I thought I was doing well with the biggest collection of properties I think I've ever owned in the three years of Monopoly Club.

Through some horse trading I ended up with three complete sets, but my downfall came because I'd carelessly splashed my cash indiscriminately and had little left to pay the cost of landing on anyone else's properties.

That's why I was the next to go out.

Clare, as ever, built up a solid collection of properties while maintaining a good bank balance, but it still wasn't enough to defeat Rachel - who was on fire last night. 

With Clare out, Rachel was declared the victor... again.

However, even with back-to-back victories Rachel remains at the bottom of the league, due to an earlier propensity for finishing in third or fourth place.

Nevertheless, the gap between us all is closing up. Even Pete's previously unassailable lead at the top of the table is starting to look less daunting.

It you want to do the maths: it's five points for a win; three for second; two for third; and one for fourth. If two people tie for first then they get four points each.

This means it's still going to take several more games of Monopoly to topple our current champion, but with every game we play it's looking more and more feasible.

Next time we're looking at playing a second Le Mans themed board, but this was designed by our Monopoly expert Pete himself, years before he purchased the set we played this week. 

When it came to rating the quality of this week's set, we settled on a 7.5, putting it on a par with James Bond and Disney. The general feeling was that it was good, but nothing special.

For instance, there were no special rules and no effort to remould the houses and hotels in garages and lounges. The dual language on the cards was good, but it did mean the writing got very small in a lot of places and, also, there was no room for pictures on them.

"Dice, uh... Find A Way"

Let's not bury the lede here: this week's Dinosaur-themed game of Monopoly saw Rachel scoring her first solo victory in the three years we've been playing through Pete's ever-expanding collection of 'novelty' Monopoly sets.

Clearly the wine she has consumed earlier in the evening at an online works' leaving do helped!

Due to various issues, we haven't played Monopoly since Halloween last year, but hopefully - like the Tuesday Knights bouncing back from last year's six-plus month break from roleplaying games because of my back problems - we'll now be able to get back into the swing of regular game's nights.

As an Easter treat, Pete turned up bearing Monopoly-themed chocolates, along with his brane new, still sealed, Dinosaur game. The chocolates were a nice surprise (another 'cheat day' on my diet then).

Tasty Monopoly chocolate

As head of entertainment, Rachel was in charge of the atmospheric playlists on Spotify that mainly mixed children's songs about dinosaurs with the imagined sounds of dinosaurs and multiple repetitions of the theme tune to Jurassic Park.

For the Dinosaur-themed Monopoly, "Chance and Community Chest" card were replaced with "laboratory and dig site" cards, and the usual "house and hotel" tokens were replaced with novel "tent and jeep" plastic tokens.

The cash was still marked as Monopoly dollars, but we took to calling them "bones", as it seemed more fitting for our teams of imaginary paleontologists to be bartering with.

The movement counters were lovely little dinosaurs - although not in scale to each other as that would have been ridiculous!

Pete was the triceratops, Clare the diplodocus, Rachel the stegosaur, and I was the tyrannosaurus rex. 

If there was a fictional narrative to the set, I believe we were accumulating fossil skeletons of the various named dinosaurs from our dig sites around the world (hence the need for tents and jeeps).

But whether you considered that or not, we all set off with great gusto, buying up pretty much everything we landed on before plunging into the deal making part of the game.

There was one brief instant where I owned all the green and blue cards - the most expensive, and costly to land on, side of the board - and even had tents on them.

Short-lived moment of glory

However, our reckless spending meant that most of us were property rich and cash poor, which resulted in our dinosaur empires rearing up briefly and then folding the moment we landed on someone else's properties and had to fork out massive rents.

Conversely, by the bad luck of the dice, Rachel didn't get to spend as much as the rest of us in those early turns, meaning she remained flush with cash while everyone else was scrapping together small denomination notes to pay their bills.

This wasn't a particularly long game by our standards, but there was a point towards the end where Rachel appeared to have more money in her "personal account" than the bank!

Rachel's personal bank account

Normally there's quite a gap between players being bankrupted out of the game, but Clare went first and I went soon after, and then Pete didn't really hang on for much longer.

Even with her crushing victory, Rachel remains in fourth place in our ongoing league table (see below) but is closing the gap on Clare (who has a game in hand).

However, if we count Nick's single appearance, as Clare's surrogate, as part of his wife's tally, then Clare is actually level with me on points.

Pete, with this week's second place remains the top of the league with a commanding six-point lead.

At the end of the evening, we felt that while the Dinosaurs Monopoly set looked good - and we appreciated the little touches like the "tents" and "jeeps", which a surprising amount of themed sets don't bother with - it was, ultimately, nothing out of the ordinary.

We've really started to enjoy the variety that "special rules" (pertinent to the theme) add to the game and thus we miss them when they're not included.

The tongue-twister names of some of the dinosaurs also became a bit of a stumbling block, so, as the evening wore on we abbreviated many of them or simply gave them nicknames.

Dinosaurs Monopoly earned itself a score of eight out of ten, which places it (currently) eleventh equal with - appropriately - Jaws.