"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. 

MONOPOLIES ARE GO!!!

Special Edition board marking the 50th Anniversary of Thunderbirds

It was a warm, muggy night as we gathered yesterday for the latest meeting of the Monopoly Club. 

The theme of the board was Thunderbirds (chosen by Clare), and Rachel found a suitable Thunderbirds playlist on Spotify to add a music bed to the game via the kitchen's Alexa speaker.

The theming of the board was nicely done, with the properties being actual locations from the 1960's Gerry Anderson "Supermarionation" show. 

Our only quibble was the design choice to make the printing of the board's outer ring seemingly low-res, meaning the the tiny white type under the name of each location, which told you the episode where it was featured, was often barely legible.

Picking from the pool of available metal tokens, I took the role of Lady Penelope's Rolls Royce, Pete was Thunderbird 5 (the space station), Rachel was Thunderbird 1 (the rocket), and Clare chose the submersible Thunderbird 4.

The oppressive atmosphere meant that none of us were exactly bringing our A-game to the table, but we still had a blast.

From the get-go, Pete and Clare were off like gangbusters, while I lagged behind as usual.

However, Rachel's "you don't have to buy everything" approach - and her prolonged, early stay in jail - had the unusual outcome that by the time she finished her first lap there were only three properties left available and she owned none.

And soon after that those were snapped up... just not by Rachel!

Of course, this did mean she was financially very well off and soon gathering properties from the rest of us when we started to experience money troubles or simply wanted to do a deal.

Rachel's ingenious 'cash rich/property poor' approach almost won the day for her

Very quickly though it became clear that Pete's property portfolio was becoming the dominant force on the board, with rows of houses and then hotels popping up in annoyingly inconvenient (and expensive) places.

Pete's Atalante Café in Paris - with a hotel on - did for both Clare and I, with Clare going out first soon followed by me.

The same locale almost finished Rachel off as well, but she hung in for a while longer before being finally forced into bankruptcy, leaving Pete with a very definitive victory.

Alice was Pete's lucky mascot for the evening

This saw him leap to the top of the leaderboard (see below), just nudging me off the top spot due to the fact that he has more second placings.

Clare has slipped to third place, but is nipping at my heels and has the technical advantage in "ties" of having played less games (as Nick subbed in for her one week).

Now with a second place on her docket, Rachel is gaining momentum but still sitting in fourth place, ahead of Nick, who has only played once.

As we've all chosen a board theme now, it's back to Pete to pick what flavour of Monopoly we play next.

We await his announcement with bated breath...

SCORING: Win: 5pts; Second: 3pts; Third: 2pts; Fourth: 1pt

When You Wish Upon A Die Roll...

While real life continues to scupper our roleplaying sessions (The Tuesday Knights have been on hiatus since March), that hasn't stopped Monopoly Club.

Clare, Pete, Rachel and I gathered last night to test drive another of Pete's extensive collection of "themed" Monopoly sets, with Rachel having chosen Disney from the list of available options.

Clearly a lot of thought (and money) has been put into this design, with large, gorgeous pewter avatars; a lovely shiny board; Disney Dollars (featuring Scrooge McDuck); and well-branded properties (you were buying classic animated films from the Disney archive, but each property card then listed them as a specific place within the world of that movie).

"Houses" were cottages and "hotels" were castles, and the set came with chunkier, more legible dice, making up for the slight debacle with my almost unreadable Scooby dice last time.

We all gather on the starting line

Everybody picked their pawn: I chose Alice as my character for obvious reasons, Rachel was Dumbo, Clare picked Peter Pan, and Pete was Mowgli (from The Jungle Book). 

I had such hopes for my property empire

With a mix of Disney music playing on Alexa, the game started quite light-heartedly, with plenty of discussion of "favourite Disney movies", animation versus live-action, memorable tunes etc but eventually it became clear that no matter how well we thought we were doing Clare was doing better.

Stealthily and without great fanfare she was building up an imposing property portfolio, while the rest of us were skating along, often cash poor and terrified of landing on high rent space. 

Pete scrapes together the Disney Dollars to pay rent to Clare for 'visiting' one of her castles

Rachel was the first to go bankrupt and I soon followed. Then, to no one's great surprise, Pete's luck ran out and Clare was declared victor for the second time.

"That's mine and that's mine; oh, and that's mine... and so is that!"

As we've now played three games of Monopoly in recent months, Pete suggested I compile some statistics. So here we go:

I created an arbitrary points rating system, where a win gets you five points; second place, three points; third place, two points; and fourth place, one point.

Clare gets to pick what Monopoly theme we play next time.

Meddling In Monopoly's Property Market...

Pete's Scooby-Doo-themed Monopoly board

I'm not going to beat about the bush here: I won our Monopoly game last night, quite comprehensively I like to think.

I'm not bragging though because it was way more luck than judgement. I could lie and say my bumbling, dice-misreading, rule-forgetting persona was some deep level Keyser Söze-style Machiavellian misdirection to keep my "foes" off balance... but the honest truth is that's just me.

For the second gathering of The Monopoly Club, a spin-off from The Tuesday Knights, we plumped for the Scooby-Doo-themed iteration of Monopoly, from Pete's huge archive of 'novelty' Monopoly variants.

It was my choice and everyone agreed.

We were originally supposed to have played this last month, but my bout of food poisoning put paid to that.

In lieu of Clare (who was off skiing), Nick joined Pete, Rachel, and I for the evening.

I selected the Velma token (because why wouldn't I? She is the best), Rachel played Scooby-Doo, Nick was Shaggy, and Pete was The Mystery Machine.

My contribution to the game was the donation of a pair of my Scooby-Doo dice, which while thematically appropriate were a bugger to read (especially for someone with dodgy eyesight like myself) because of the tiny numbers on each face.

Unlike a lot of these "branded" Monopoly sets I've checked out over the years, clearly a lot of thought had gone into the design of the Scooby-Doo set, ensuring that not only were the properties "properties" (and not people, monsters, bits of equipment etc) but they were also grouped like 'real' Monopoly locations. 

Unfortunately, the font chosen for the location names on the cards made them often quite difficult to read, especially where they overlapped with the graphic below.

This, and the dice, thus - while accenting the Scooby-Doo mood (along with Rachel's Scooby-Doo playlist on Spotify) - contributed to my bumbling style of play, and almost certainly helped prolong the game.

Velma, Shaggy, Scooby, and The Mystery Machine ready for an adventure

As last time, we used Pete's "house rules" to speed things up (such as the official bonus Monopoly die) and, once again I got off to slow start with everyone else scooping up properties all round the board in their opening few turns.

The modest start of my property empire

My not-so-secret weapons: two restaurants on the most valuable sites

However, I concentrated on the two most valuable sites on the board - rather than initially spreading my portfolio - and then used what money I had left to quickly build-up "snack shacks" (ie. 'houses'), then restaurants (ie. 'hotels'), on those squares.

Somehow, I think from Rachel's mocking of my cookery skills, these became "up-market fish-finger sandwich" restaurants.

My fellow players may have laughed... but it was these that bankrupted first Rachel and finally Peter, with Nick crumbling under the costs of stopping at another of sea food restaurants on a different edge of the board.

Nick plotting strategy

For the longest time, I'd really thought I was going to be the first to go out and that Nick was on course to trounce us all (as he has a real head for boardgames and rules minutiae).

Therefore, I was as genuinely surprised as anyone to realise, in the closing stages of the game, that I was in with a very good chance of winning.

Given that I still don't quite grok a good proportion of the game's mechanics (there's a reason I never 'mortgaged' any of my properties) and was basically winging it according to the dice rolls and "roleplaying out" events in my head.

Much merriment, for example, was made of the moment when Rachel asked how much I wanted for a property I owned and she needed to complete a set, and - without hesitation - I replied: "A thousand dollars."

That then became a running gag for the rest of the evening.

I think Alfred Pennyworth summarised my approach to Monopoly best in 2008's The Dark Knight:

" ...some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."

I'm certainly not arrogant enough to think I will ever win another game of Monopoly with this crowd, but I was delighted that the one I did win was my choice, Scooby-Doo.

For our next meeting, Pete's going to send over a spreadsheet (or just a list) of his Monopoly collection and Rachel will be picking what board theme we will be tackling.

Pete utterly bamboozled by my random play style

Alice wasn't happy that we were still gaming way past her bedtime and made sure we knew it!