"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.

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.