We spent half the night playing Monopoly. We haven’t enjoyed the board game in quite a while and last night’s game was boisterous and full of asaran.
We would have started playing after lunch but Sam didn’t get up until around 2.00 p.m. (she spends her nights watching DVDs). Then, it was time to prepare the evening meal and the game got postponed again. After dinner, we finally laid out the board on our bed, turned on the aircon and started playing.
You may need to have a working knowledge of the rules of the game to understand this entry but I’ll try my best to make it comprehensible even for those who have never played Monopoly.
The object of this very capitalist game is to accumulate as much properties as you can, build houses or hotels, if you can manage it. Each player starts with equal amounts of cash. The dice are rolled and the player has the option of buying the property where the dice land or open it for bidding. The prices of the properties differ according to their locations. Hence, one player may be able to buy more lower-valued properties or less higher-valued properties. It all depends on the player’s strategy.
If a player lands on a property already owned by another, he has to pay rent.
Once a player has bought all the properties in a block, he can start buying houses. The more houses on a property, the higher the rent. When a player has accumulated four houses on any given property, he may opt to buy a hotel with the four houses plus cash. A hotel jacks up the rent dramatically.
My strategy was to go for the mid-priced properties. Once I have bought all the properties in a block, I started buying houses. I was able to buy up two mid-priced blocks and one low-priced block.
Speedy’s strategy was to go for the highest-priced properties. Alex was buying up the utilities. I didn’t know what Sam’s strategy was. Well, except that she participated in each and every bidding — not really buying but only to jack up the prices so that the winner would end up paying more than necessary.
So, it came to a point where I had three hotels and more than a dozen houses. What can I say? I was relentless; I always play to win, games or real life. Every time they landed on any of my hotels, they had to pay a thousand dollars rent. Pretty soon, Alex and Sam were bankrupt. Since they could no longer pay rent, I started to accept payment in kind. They paid with their property deeds.
Then, we reached a point when they were running out of properties. I started giving them my deeds. I gave Sam the deeds to three properties (that’s an entire block and all the properties had two houses each). Alex owed me 950 dollars in rent and couldn’t pay so I loaned her two utilities — the electric and water companies — and told her to use the rent to raise cash and she could pay me when she had enough profits.
See, I realized that you can own all the properties and still come out the loser. If everyone else was bankrupt, what would I do with all the properties when no one could afford the rent? No one could transact with me anymore. In short, the game would have ended unless I started bailing them out so they could have a second wind.
That was when Speedy started exhibiting those long looks. He wasn’t happy. So, I gave him a free jail pass worth 50 dollars. I mean he owned the most expensive property; I figured he would survive the game.
Then, everyone felt hungry. It was almost midnight and we didn’t have bread. Speedy drove to Pan de Manila while the girls and I prepared everything we’d need to make sandwiches. After the midnight snack, that was when Speedy blurted out, “Madaya ka; may favoritism ka!”
We never finished the game. Maybe we’ll play again tonight.
Everything I learned about business I learned from Monopoly (come up to Baguio and check out my 2 sets of Limited Editions of Star Wars (yung hotels, skyscrapers na!, Nico and I get deadly serious when we play):
1. Don’t spread yourself too thin (too much property, too little cash)
2. To stay in the game, you have to play nice and fair
3. Transportation costs a lot, especially when one owns all the railroads (like Victory Liner can charge Php50-Php200 higher than all the small bus lines for a Baguio trip)
4. The mid-priced properties a la middle class developments or medium capital businesses (purple, orange, red, yellow) earn more because they’re between the go to jail and get out of jail sections).
5. Speedy will lose in the end kasi “Filipino-style One Time Big Time” aspirations ang green and blue, but if he has mid-priced properties properties, he would be able to hedge.
6. The squatter areas (violet & cyan) do not enough make money
7. If you have to “rush sale” your house to buy something else or pay a debt, you only get back half what you paid.
8. Banks can be brutal as lenders (to mortgage a property, the they never give you the full value and to redeem a property you do have to pay high interest).
9. Real Estate taxes can kill you.
10. You can change the rules if everyone agrees (like lending properties out, going on joint ventures if one has property-no cash and the other has cash-no property, straight swaps)
11. If you want to continue playing, you can’t kill all the competition.
Maybe Alex was targeting all the utilities kasi she can see that in Philippine real life, the Lopezes are rich because they control light and water. In the American setting, it’s not really a monopoly which is why utilities pay low.
If Monopoly were to update the Philippine edition, they would have to change the game to include telephone and tv companies as major players.
Star Wars edition, Lisa? Wow. A Philippine edition with telcos and network companies sounds very realistic.
We were planning another game tonight pero snoring away na si Speedy eh.
We will go to Baguio before the summer break is over.
Yes, I agree with Lisa. Monopoly has to be updated to make it more realistic.
Nice training ground for wannabe capitalists.
Bakit sinabi ni Speedy na may favoritism ka? Sino? Ang cute ninyong family, playing board games. I think fewer families are doing that now.
rhodora, i wish nga we can play more often.
re favoritism: kasi daw i was generously giving away properties to the girls pero sa kanya wala hahahaha
Hahaha… poor Speedy!
I used to love to play Monopoly… but I’m always pikon and I’m always going to jail.
If there’s any chance you haven’t enjoyed Monopoly because you’ve played it TO DEATH, you might consider what are arguably some better titles out there now. As it happens, the top rated game among afficianados is also economically themed. It’s called Puerto Rico and has been a smash hit both in Europe and in North America. For my own part, you couldn’t get me to sit down to a game of Monopoly anymore. Sure, it’s got sentimental value, but I find the new European games to be more engaging and rewarding for the time you spend playing.
The irony about Monopoly is that that’s more or less the marketing model of the game! In the past 15 years, literally hundreds of games from Europe have been made available in the US. But for the most part, you have to go to a specialty store or online because Monopoly is used now to sell TV and movies and therefore get preferential deals with the big distributors. In case you haven’t been by a Toys ‘R Us or Wal-Mart lately, you would find that Monopoly comes in scores of flavors like “Pirates of the Caribbean”. But underneath the theme, it’s still Monopoly.
There’s a large community of people trying to revitalize enjoying boardgames. The web site is http://www.boardgamegeek.com. The title is maybe self-deprecating (or chic, depending on your point of view), but people put a lot of time into carefully considering what they are playing, whether it’s suitable for families or “serious gamers”, and so on. Here’s a link to the entry for Puerto Rico:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/3076
You might just drop by an online game store and pick up a copy. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If Monopoly isn’t your style anyway, a few standout popular titles are Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. Again, both great games.
Enjoy!
Shannon
By the way , as a follow up to the post above on Puerto Rico:
one of the complaints about the game comes not from the quality of play (which is quite good), but that the underlying theme is colonialism. This may not play well in the philippines! Essentially, you are carting goods back and forth between Puerto Rico and Spain. So to be sure, consider your group before whipping the game out. The theme isn’t deep enough to be considered re-enactment, but that may make no difference to the group. Some take offence at this aspect and some don’t. It’s a judgement call.
To be sure, there are still scores of games that would be good without this particular aspect of the game being a possible issue.
ang galing naman ng insights ni lisa. so true…. anyway, i remember when we were younger we played monopoly a lot and other board games. we so enjoy playing board games. unlike today, my kid would rather stay hooked on the computer playing games (dad included and pasimuno!..sigh!)off topic…i enjoy lisa’s go baguio site, is atenara accessible even if you don’t have a car with you? thanks!
Toe, we played another game last night and HE WON! LOL We all had to concede.
Thanks for the info, Shannon. We’ve been a Scrabble family prior to buying Monopoly a couple of years ago. It might be a good idea to start checking out other board games.
Hi elit. We’re all computer addicts (1:1 ratio hehehe) but we always enjoy a good board game time permitting. Thing with playing Monopoly is that four hours are too short.
Re Atenara House. It’s just a few short meters from Leonard Wood so it’s very accessible by public transpo.
Nice bonding time you got there. My younger kids (almost-6yo boy and 4yo girl) enjoy playing with board games. Of course, not as serious as a game of Monopoly. Sometimes when my boy wants to play and no one wants to play with him, he plays alone, with each of those small colored towers that are being moved, represented by each of us. I don’t know how he does it but he always wins (LOL)
Hubby said he is considering getting a Game of the Generals one of these days.
julie, maybe he will like chess too? Alex loves chess but no one wants to play with her because she beats everyone in the house hehehehe
Thanks for the Atenara info
You’re welcome Connie. There’s some great stuff out there if know where to look. My wife has become a big fan of the game Palazzo. Plays in about 30 minutes and is challenging without being a brain burner. It’s good social time we can squeeze in on a work night after we’ve put the kids to bed.
Sorry, one more comment: for little kids (4 years old), I’d recommend Gulo Gulo. This game I play with my daughter all the time and she BEATS me at it routinely. It’s a dexterity game where you have to fish out these little tiny eggs from a wooden bowl without knocking over the flag placed among the colorful wooden eggs. Her little fingers can get in and pick these little eggs up without difficulty. I’m not so small, or so lucky
Here’s a link to Gulo Gulo. If you look at the picture gallery, you’ll see what I mean:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/6351
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/fullimage/161875
Hi Shannon. You know, most of the board games there are not locally available. BUT my brother-in-law will be visiting from Chicago in July. I’ll just give him the names of the board games and reimburse him when he gets here hehehe
Makes sense to me. Just remember that getting the new games requires going to a game store that carries them. He won’t be able to just pop into the mall and expect a store to carry them. That said, there are plenty of shops in the Chicago area that carry them. The easiest way is to use this database. Just put in the zip code he’s staying in and the names of game stores likely to carry the titles will pop out. This is much more reliable than trying to find a store in the Yellow Pages because the stores in this database are known to be stores that carry the new games:
http://www.gamestoredb.com/
Good luck and have fun! Feel free to contact me by email for any suggestions or questions.