Family Monopoly
A few years ago, the people who make Monopoly came up with the genius idea of local editions. You could go round your home town buying up the cathedral, the local footie stadium and so on. It was also, of course, tremendous fun to see if your street was of a high, or low, value – congratulations, you live in a shit part of town and now everybody knows it.
You can even have a truly bespoke edition:
http://www.mymonopoly.com/home.php
Surely this is a fantastic idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can have a really, really local version. Live in a tiny village? The sort that only famous folk singers and homicidal maniacs ever come from? Well, why not have a village edition, with local landmarks like the war memorial, church and bus shelter. In fact since they closed down the post office, that’s it for local landmarks, so you have to get creative, ‘that spot where Darren shagged our Sally’, ‘Where Jon was sick after he drank all that scrumpy’ and so on.
But why are we restrained by geography? Monopoly comes out at family gatherings when the usual arguments have been exhausted and everyone needs some fresh material to bicker about. So how about some properties that have a special place in family history, ‘where Cousin Sadie had her first wedding’, ‘where cousin Sadie had her second wedding’, and have the second location cheaper than the first? Or the classic: ‘The house Tom’s bitch wife got in the divorce’?
Or moments or occasions, like your twelfth birthday party could be a low value square because you peed yourself with excitement in front of everyone when you opened your present and it was a Back to the Future toy car, oh the humiliation! Other low value squares: the time your cousin tried to touch you, the time you held a funeral for your pet dog (that wasn’t actually dead, you were just going through a morbid phase). High value squares could be ‘My first drink’, ‘passing my driving test’ or the ever popular ‘out and proud’ (adjacent to ‘dad makes full recovery from heart attack’).
(Best version to unwrap on Christmas morning: family secrets edition. But is ‘Tina’s little problem’ a high or low value square?)
Of course, the real benefit would be to use people, not places. Fed up with having to put up for years with Granma’s sadistic game of arranging family photographs in order of current preference? Then imagine her delight at finding that the least expensive property on the board is ‘Grannie’s Hovel’.
I predict a fist fight before the top hat makes it once round the board.
You can even have a truly bespoke edition:
http://www.mymonopoly.com/home.php
Surely this is a fantastic idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can have a really, really local version. Live in a tiny village? The sort that only famous folk singers and homicidal maniacs ever come from? Well, why not have a village edition, with local landmarks like the war memorial, church and bus shelter. In fact since they closed down the post office, that’s it for local landmarks, so you have to get creative, ‘that spot where Darren shagged our Sally’, ‘Where Jon was sick after he drank all that scrumpy’ and so on.
But why are we restrained by geography? Monopoly comes out at family gatherings when the usual arguments have been exhausted and everyone needs some fresh material to bicker about. So how about some properties that have a special place in family history, ‘where Cousin Sadie had her first wedding’, ‘where cousin Sadie had her second wedding’, and have the second location cheaper than the first? Or the classic: ‘The house Tom’s bitch wife got in the divorce’?
Or moments or occasions, like your twelfth birthday party could be a low value square because you peed yourself with excitement in front of everyone when you opened your present and it was a Back to the Future toy car, oh the humiliation! Other low value squares: the time your cousin tried to touch you, the time you held a funeral for your pet dog (that wasn’t actually dead, you were just going through a morbid phase). High value squares could be ‘My first drink’, ‘passing my driving test’ or the ever popular ‘out and proud’ (adjacent to ‘dad makes full recovery from heart attack’).
(Best version to unwrap on Christmas morning: family secrets edition. But is ‘Tina’s little problem’ a high or low value square?)
Of course, the real benefit would be to use people, not places. Fed up with having to put up for years with Granma’s sadistic game of arranging family photographs in order of current preference? Then imagine her delight at finding that the least expensive property on the board is ‘Grannie’s Hovel’.
I predict a fist fight before the top hat makes it once round the board.
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