|
Monopoly rules for the current climate
Does Monopoly still work? We are indebted to Stephen Sacks of Wallace Sacks for his amusing & highly contemporary update on the rules of the classic game of Monopoly....
And we quote:
Over the Christmas break I enjoyed playing Monopoly with the kids. I was struck however with how irrelevent the game has become since its introduction in 1935.
In order to add a bit of realism I made a few changes to the rules that we used. Firstly there is far to little money that comes with the standard Monopoly set so I decided in order to make things more interesting that the bank should be allowed to lend at least ten times what it has in actual cash to the players. Then I got bored as we all went round accumulating assets randomly at the beginning of the game so I decided to allow all the players to buy all of the assets at the begining of the game by borrowing and mortgaging the assets for much more than they were really worth in highly leveraged deals.
Finally I gave some of the players different roles so I became a retailer and used the top hat and my daughter Juliette became an insolvency practitioner (sports car).
As the retailer I always went for the green properties first and built flagship stores on Regent Street, Oxford Street and Bond Street. The other players occupied houses they couldn't really afford everywhere else. Amelia (iron) bought the utilities and decided to double her prices overnight.
This is where it all started going wrong for me because the other players started landing less often on my properties and I could no longer keep up my repayments with Georgia (battleship) at the bank so she threatened to foreclose on me and this on Christmas day too!
Not to worry as I did a deal with Juliette the games insolvency practitioner(sports car)where I was able to use a special chance card I invented called "Get out of insolvency for £1." This was a brilliant idea of mine because it allowed me to continue much as before but free of all the debt I accumulated earlier in the game. The great thing was that I could reuse this card as often as I liked.
The only problem I found with this was that in the end the rest of the family lost interest in the game and instead wanted to go out for a walk to the park.
One night after we played Monopoly I was reading Josie (thimble) a bedtime story when she said to me,"Daddy its not fair that you kept getting out of insolvency for £1 you should really have gone to jail!" Gone to jail I laughed,don't be silly darling don't you remember I bought the jail at the beginning of the game and demolished it to build a shopping centre with free parking! Good night.
|
