"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.

"Let The Wookie Win!"

With several Star Wars playlists blasting on Spotify, and a barrage of film quotes in our arsenal, this month's Monopoly contest used a Star Wars board that drew just on the Original Trilogy.

As it was Clare's choice, she got to pick her counter first and chose Princess Leia, Rachel took R2-D2. Pete was Boba Fett, and I was Luke.

Left to Right: Boba Fett, R2-D2, Leia, and Luke

Although the temperatures weren't quite Tatooine levels, it was still hot and sticky when we sat down to game - even with the back doors wide open - leading to a fractious (but good natured) contest of cut-throat commercialism. 

Pete pretty much led from the off, if such a thing is possible in Monopoly, while I dragged along behind the others. Everyone else had almost completed a couple of laps of the board before Luke finally limped back to the Go square for the first time.

It was quite a development-heavy game, with more hotels (space ports) and houses (colonies) seemingly popping up than usual, which meant three of us were pretty much 'cash poor' for the majority of the game.

Conversely, Pete somehow engineered an enormous property portfolio empire and a personal fortune that rivalled (if not exceeded by the end of the game) that of The Bank.

The underused 1,000 credit coin - more Monopoly themes should employ coins!

My only moment of financial "happiness" was trading in a couple of 500 credit notes for the 1,000 credit coin... which I then promptly used to purchase two-thirds of Endor off of Rachel.

Rachel's collection of property, around the game's mid-point

The start of Pete's empire: space ports on Dagobah

The rebels strike back: I build space ports on Hoth...

... for all the good it did!

Clare went out first, when I somehow bankrupted her, but then the rest of us fell in quick succession to Pete's impressive array of Imperial space ports on high value sites.

I was next out and then Rachel, pleased with her second place, which has helped her slightly in the overall rankings.

With his victory in this game, Emperor Pete pulls ahead at the top of the Monopoly Club league table, while at the tail end Rachel is clawing her towards Clare's third place spot (although we have to remember Clare has a game in hand, as Nick subbed in for her during one of our early games).

The Star Wars board had some nice theming touches, starting with the counters being divided into Light Side and Dark Side, which then determined which style of colony (houses) and space ports (hotels) a player could build.

A particularly welcome touch, and seemingly rare in the games we've played, was having sets of properties united by their in-universe locations (e.g. there were three green properties all on Endor; two dark blues on Coruscant; two slightly different shades of blue on Dagobah etc).

Chance and Community Chest were labelled Rebel and Imperial, with their all-important text themed to the Star Wars universe, and accompanied by appropriate clip art.

The miniature movers were sculpted after Star Wars characters from the Original Trilogy, and reminded me an awful lot of old school RPG minis produced for the legendary West End Games d6 roleplaying game from the late '80s and '90s.

Unfortunately, I found the figures occasionally difficult to identify, especially against the darker squares, and developed a tendency to move the wrong one (usually Clare's Princess Leia) instead of my own. Much to the amusement of my fellow gamers! 

It's Pete's choice which of his many, many themed Monopoly boards we play next time, and so we'll have to wait and see which he chooses (Ghostbusters and Game of Thrones were mentioned, but he has a lot to pick from).

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!

The First Rule of Monopoly Club...

The Dungeons & Dragons-themed board

It turns out that another geeky hobby of Pete's (besides roleplaying games) is collecting variant sets of Monopoly, but from the sound of it his family aren't as keen about playing as he is.

And so, yesterday, he and Clare joined Rachel and I for the inaugural meeting of our "Monopoly Club", utilising the new games table.

We then proceeded to play a lengthy game of Dungeons & Dragons Monopoly (the properties are monsters, the stations are classic dungeons etc), sped up with the addition of the official Monopoly die (a bonus six-sider that either adds to your movement score or has other special effects for your turn).

Straight out the gate, Pete stormed ahead collecting a ton of property, while Rachel seemed to have an uncanny ability to end up in jail, and Clare stealthily plotted her eventual victory.

After it became obvious the dice gods were against me as I plodded slowly behind everyone else (including getting lapped), I hatched a cunning plan to become a "kingmaker", and try to hold on to key properties that would prove to be powerful bargaining chips.

Unfortunately, I dithered on an early deal with Clare, missing out on a game-changing property, and before we knew it Clare was controlling huge tracts of land in the most expensive corner of the board.

Pete ended up going out first, followed some time later by Rachel, then me almost immediately afterwards, leaving Clare the worthy winner of our first game.

Great fun was had by all and there was immediate talk of future meet-ups (I'm keen to play Pete's Scooby-Doo Monopoly and Clare mentioned Carcassonne - which I'd conflated, in my head, with Settlers of Catan).

Following my games of Labyrinth with Nick and Alec the other week, it's brilliant to see our new table being used for other games as well as the monthly RPG meetings of the Tuesday Knights.

Pete begins to suspect that just because it's his game doesn't mean he'll automatically win

My meagre property portfolio early in the game

Clare celebrates her victory with wads of cash and a massive collection of properties