The thievery took place after dark. I had not long gone to bed to read – ironically, a book about terrible crimes – when a villain crept into the dining room and brazenly pilfered 200 of my hard-won dollars. She then quietly added this swag to her own small pile of cash before making her escape.
Monopoly really does bring out the worst in people. And when they are losing at this most cut-throat of board games, there is no knowing what they’re capable of.
That’s no longer true at Lush Places. I now know exactly what Michele is capable of when she’s behind in an unfinished game of Monopoly: she will wait until I’ve gone to bed and steal some of my money. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised: she had already ended up in Monopoly jail six times before her attempted burglary. She is, a bit like her father, a hopeless recidivist. Still, her confession the following morning means there’s hope for her yet.
We had not intended to play Monopoly at all on that particular Saturday. We had tickets to visit a historical homestead near Masterton, which was open to the public for a single afternoon during the Wellington Heritage Festival.
But when a raw southerly blew in overnight bringing lashing rain with it, the last thing we felt like doing was leaving the house. We decided instead to light the fire and have our first game of Monopoly in many, many years, using our brand-new Wairarapa edition of the famous Parker Brothers’ game.
Immunity to marketing tosh is one of my many super powers. But when the local trade association, Business Wairarapa, announced in February that it would be putting together a local edition of the game, I confess I was rather excited. Mainly because I very much fancied the idea of a Lush Places’ square on the board.
However, my reverie about people buying, selling and building houses and hotels on a Monopoly Lush Places went poof when it came into contact with reality.
It turned out it was charging a whopping $2000 per property and $2500 a go for the utility and transport squares. Even a mention on a property title card went for something like $750. This fool was not about to be parted from that sort of money.
When the Wairarapa edition finally went on sale last month, it wasn’t cheap, either. It was priced at $85, a whole 50 bucks more than you’d pay for the standard Hasbro edition at the Red Shed.
It did rather feel like someone, a bloody capitalist probably, was taking the piss. But I bought the Wairarapa edition anyway. My anti-marketing super power must be waning.
Many, many years ago, when I still had ambition and a full-time job, I entered the Auckland regional Monopoly championship for a joke, but also for a feature story for the Herald. At a Whitcoulls in Botany Downs, 20 of us spent a Sunday attempting to bankrupt each other so we might qualify for the New Zealand championship, the eventual winner of which would go to the world champs in Las Vegas, which had, I recall, some $35,000 in prize money.
For a wishy-washy anti-capitalist, I did all right in the Auckland regionals, finishing seventh. I even won the last game of the day, beating Auckland’s three best players, including a double New Zealand champ.
However, it turned out my great victory had been sneakily manufactured by a bloke who told me he was a risk management expert at a bank. In that final game, with him leading the tournament’s points table, he persuaded me into a property trade, which, I failed to work out, was a cunning manoeuvre by him to block the person coming second from beating him. I, it turned out, was his useful idiot.
All is fair over the board, I suppose. But it did rather prove I knew nothing about how to win at serious Monopoly. I still don’t. But this I do know: you don’t steal someone else’s money from the Monopoly table after he’s gone to bed.
