Interesting experience: Monopoly

Wow, I just had a weird and eye-opening experience. I played Monopoly. That's right, the old Parker Brothers (or is it Milton Bradley) board game where you guy Boardwalk and you get Community Chest cards and you make hotels and you go 'round the board in the car or the scottie terrier.

I kinda liked it. I can't remember ever having played it as an adult. I was asked over to a pals house, and this and that the other factor played into the fact that we agreed we'd have to wait around for about four hours or call it a night, so three of us played Monopoly. I think the other people were surprised I didn't actually know the "real" rules. When we were kids, we just ran the cars around the board and took out money from a big pile whenever we needed it.

So, I wasn't familiar with mortgaging your property if you need cash, or with the fact that the utilities and railroads have variable rents on them. The other folks had "strategies" designed to maximize their chances against the randomness of the dice -- they knew which three properties were most likely to be landed upon, and I noticed right away that they both shot straight for getting one property of as many various colors as possible. It didn't take me long to figure out, that they were doing this to block their opponents' chances of monopolizing that color and therefore getting the right (also something new to me) to put up houses and hotels there.

I guess what I'm saying here, is, it's kinda fun. You have to keep a lot of things in your head, but there's no time pressure at all. You can stop and say, "Wait, what IS 10% of that, anyway? Someone got a calculator?" so it isn't a pressurized, difficult thing at all. Not like playing Pogs. I really liked it.

One thing I really thought about as we went around and around, was the fact that there seemed to be an infinite potential range of maximizing strategies. You could shoot for one or two monopolies and ignore the rest of the board; you could scatter-shot your properties all across the board; you could try to out-bargain people when it came time for them to trade; you could keep information secret by putting all your title deeds under your hands and always changing all your money to $1s and $5s ...

It was a lot like working your way through a strip club. Which girls do you want to spend time with, which ones do you want to figure out how to avoid, which ones are worth a risk. It's always a three-variable problem -- money out, asset in, likelihood of return on the asset -- where you've only got two of them easily determined at any given time. I thought maybe I could figure out a way to make Tit-opoly ... the properties become different dancers, the "rent" becomes their hourly or single-dance rates, and collecting a monopoly means you can give them a tit job or supply them with nicer outfits so other people have to pay more for them.

The parallels kinda break down because you're buying an item which can then be services out to others, in regular Monopoly; but you're just servicing out a person in Tit-opoly.

Fun, nevertheless. I had no idea the game was so complicated. Why does Parker Brothers always show a picture of a happy family with twelve year old kids and six year old kids playing Monopoly? It's for teenagers and older, really. I can't imagine a ten year old "getting" it at all. Maybe ten earliest; definitely not six.

I had no innate talent at this game. At some level, I was instinctively extremely defensive. I liked the idea of getting one red, one blue, one green so nobody else could monopolize those color sets. Other than that, I just wanted cash in hand and I prayed for big rolls to get around the board as fast as possible. It was like all I knew how to do was build a great big wall. In Tit-opoly I would simply run straight to the restroom, the back to the front bar, without ever interacting with any of the girls. What's the point of going to the strip club if THAT's how you're going to organize your evening.

So I tried to branch out. I got a bit adventurous and tried to snag up this or that set of properties, and then I figured something out -- there's really no penalty for spending ALL your cash as soon as you have it. If you find yourself with a cash-flow problem on the next turn, with a mandatory expense that your cash can't cover, then you just mortgage something that you're holding, and pay, and then un-mortgage as soon as you can. Though you lose a few points, because of the nature of the game this is simply part of your "cost of doing business." It seemed almost impossible to go wrong by simply buying as many properties as you could as fast as possible right at the outset.

This got me thinking about the cultural context in which this thing developed. In Atlantic City in the Depression. People dreamed of having enough cash to just buy buy buy, and the issues of whether or not a purchase was "sound" or not hardly occurred to them. Houses don't decay, hotels don't fall down or get burnt by rival gang members in Monopoly. If you have the cash, the game encourages you to invest it in the Great American Experiment. There's really little reason not to just get as many titles as you can, because they inherently give you return. No re-roofing, or getting the Coca-Cola bottles bottles out of the toilet when your idiot renter from Ethiopia doesn't know how to work the thing.

Anyone want to play? Can you get it on line?