"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.

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.

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