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