Just
got off the phone with the message, “thanks for making the time to play
Monopoly.” Two friends spent the
night with us here out in the burbs.
We were up rather late, one needed a ride to the airport rather early,
and the rest of the morning was a bit disjointed. Our second guest had some hours before him and when he rose,
shone and finished his breakfast, he was corralled into a game of Monopoly by
my younger daughter.
You realize, sitting down to undertake such a thing, that
we, certainly I, don’t play them much any more. Most adults don’t, of course. My parents no doubt had no more
time for board games as busy adults than I do. But I can only imagine the degree of pull from kids is less
than it was. And I wrote about a game of Clue, not long ago, so it isn’t
absolute. But there I
believe are a broader range of things available to allow you to sit and
entertain yourself, than there ever were; rather than how many games have you
got in the closet, it is how many apps can you download and learn from a nearly
infinite pool. Sitting down, my
friend commented “ah, it’s good you’ve girls. My boys were always off with video games," but there is more going on than gender.
I am and always have been the wheelbarrow. I don’t know why. Auspiciously I got the highest
roll and went first. And it all
comes back, rather immediately.
You don’t need to count to know that a seven will advance you from this
rail station to Chance. You don’t
need to actually read the card Community Chest card with the little capitalist man holding a hammer to know this dread card later in the game forcing you to make
improvements on your properties is irrelevant this early on. And with every turn you set about your
land grab.
Besides me is my wife, from Shandong. Obvious, but perhaps worth mentioning
nonetheless that if her family were to have had let alone played this
particular celebration of capitalist rough and tumble when she was my
daughter’s age it would have been a capital crime. She is excited that she has got the “Electric Company.” A neophyte, she doesn’t "get it" that this will
be utterly and entirely irrelevant in about forty minutes. Property love, it’s all about
property.
The only thing off about this particular set is that we
bought it in Hong Kong. And so,
Boardwalk, is “Victoria Peak” and Pacific Place is “Causeway Bay.” The currency is Hong Kong dollars and
so everything has a zero added to it.
It is way too late to change it all now. My children, I confess, will forever think that Reading
Railroad is “Tsing Yi Station” and I’m not sure how I feel about this. Will there be a moment at a friend’s
house when they are laughed at?
Will there be a definitive moment on a game show when someone references
“Hotels on Boardwalk” and they are clueless? I’m sure I will one day pay for this.
Now, back to game.
It is interesting how important it was and is, to win. Sometimes I wonder if I really have it
in me to actually “sell” software or anything for that matter, all the
time. A good game of Monopoly disabuses one of such fears and taps
straight into your ruthless nine-year-old sense of conquest. Someone else’s gain is your loss. Focus on the objective: 赶尽杀绝[1] Secure
property at all cost, ignore other assets, money is secondary, bide your time
and then, when it is clear who has what set about making your deals, so you can
overbuild and force other players into bankruptcy, one by one. Lovely little game.
The good part, which Parker Brother’s or whoever owns it
now, would certainly promote is that it reinforces teaching things like math,
“so if it is 40 times the roll of the dice, what does momma owe you?” and the
cards are in Chinese and English so there’s a language component. But really, its about being a hard
boiled property trader, who makes and disposes of friends quickly, so you are
never a sucker.
Music was in order.
I had on something unassuming to start. The African Virtuoses were an all guitar group from
Guinea. I got their disc last year
in the days before Rdio and it is lovely because it is vaguely Latin and yet
anchored somehow there in the bulge of Africa. Recorded Abidjan in the Ivory Coast in 1983, it is a lovely
unique sound. But I wondered if it
was all a bit gentle for what was at play. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10617-the-classic-guinean-guitar-group/
We moved on to the Beatles. I always love the story that John apparently played a game
of Monopoly once and was, at least at this early invocation, despite all his
“imagine”-ing of later years, a rank son-of-a-bitch who played for keeps and
delighted in stomping others. We
started with “Rubber Soul”, made our “The White Album” and “The Beatles For
Sale” before by the time we we’d done our swapping and started building hotels.
And in the end it was pretty evenly matched with three of
the parties that remained. I’d
tear down hotels to pay off someone else’s exorbitant hotel fees. But then someone would land on
something else of mine and I’d bilk them back. This carried on for a while before we decided, in a manner
Andrew Carnegie would no doubt have disapproved, that we’d all won, and it was high time to move on.
Whatever it takes to get the family to sit down together and
enjoy some time as one, listen to the Beatles and drive each other into the
poor house.
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