Pete's DIY Le Mans Board Is A Work of Art

Arriving in the slipstream of last month's official Le Mans Monopoly, this month we were treated to Pete's 25-year-old labour of love, his own Le Mans-themed Monopoly, Le Mans-opoly, based on his own experiences of attending the racing events over many decades.

Illustrated with a combination of pictures cut from magazines and his own photographs from the venue, the properties followed a lap of key locations around the track (of which more in a moment).

As a DIY work of art for his own usage, Pete was able to remove certain Monopoly constants to further emulate his subject, such as replacing "jail" with The Pits and "Go" with a picture of drivers racing to their cars.

Also Monopoly money was replaced with French francs (just to illustrate how long ago Pete actually made this set), which meant the value and cost of everything was increased by a factor of 10 (which made penalty fines seem astronomical in the moment).

Pete was the white car on the left, Clare was yellow, Rachel was red and I was blue

Our movement tokens were a Le Mans set of Micro Machine toy cars (I was delighted to end up with Steve McQueen's car from his legendary 1971 movie, Le Mans. McQueen is pictured in the central image of Pete's board and the site where he crashed in the film is one of the "property" squares).

These were all tiny replicas of real race cars from the 1950s and '60s, but I couldn't remember all the brands, so shall just refer to them by their "driver".

The only element that truly remained from the traditional iteration of Monopoly was the green and red houses to develop your property, although these were renamed "stands" and "hospitality" to check with the theme. 

Community Chest and Chance cards were replaced by two unique sets of cards, totally reworked to suit the racing event, called Village and Fair. All with either racing specific takes on the classic wording or simply humorous occurrences (several of a scatological bent, see below).

As well as printing out - and laminating - cards for all the properties, Pete had even printed his own Monopoly money for the set.

The lap counter

Possibly one of the most interesting innovations he brought to the game was the addition of a lap counter, complete with the rule that the game would end after 24 laps (to emulate the 24-hour nature of the real race).

This turned out to be rather optimistic, as you will see, but was still a really cool addition to the game.

Pete had even created a special rules pamphlet for the set:

While we all agreed beforehand that Le Mans-opoly wouldn't be subject to our usual end-of-night grading, as it didn't seem fair (even though it was leagues better than the official set we test drove last month), the race itself still counted for our Monopoly club league table.

Clare led the race element of the game almost from the start, after she overtook Pete, and also built up the biggest property empire while the rest of us were eating her dust.

Rachel, notorious for spending so much time in jail in previous games of Monopoly, instead decided to spend her time in the Pits this time out.

Despite the unfeasibly large amount of doubles being rolled by everyone, Rachel's car was puttering around the board like an old banger, to the extent that not only did it take her a full (real time) hour to complete her first lap but by then Clare was on her fifth!

Pete speeding away in the foreground, hoping to avoid being lapped (again) by Clare

Quite early on it became clear we were never going to get anywhere near to the 24-lap limit for the game for a couple of reasons: most of our finances wouldn't stretch that far and we have traditionally set an 11 o'clock cut-off for our games (which start around 8pm).

Also we were all enjoying the intricacies of Pete's homemade board that we weren't exactly hurrying through our turns. 

Ideas for tweaking the set were also discussed. These included a "leader flag" that could be Blu-tacked to the race leader, so that element was easier to keep track of, and asking Pete's brother, Steve, if he could 3D print some mini stands and hospitality pieces that could replace the standard red/green Monopoly houses.

My doomed, early, attempts to build a property portfolio

I was totally enthralled by it and thus totally failed to stick to any sort of game plan, meaning I was bankrupted first.

There was some strategic thinking by the other three when they ran out of the green houses (stands) for developing properties, whether it was worth trading in red houses (hospitality) to free up available units? I'm pretty certain they decided it wasn't. 

Surprisingly, Pete dropped out next as Clare and Rachel battled for the chequered flag. In the end, despite a bout of accelerated play in the closing minutes, the game was declared a draw.

With a third successive victory under her belt (albeit a tie with Clare), Rachel is now only a point behind me, while Clare has overtaken me and is now nipping at Pete's heels.

The next race will be crucial.

"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.