Monopoly Whore!!! May 8, 2008

Nerd Alert: My husband and I love Monopoly. Actually, we just like board games…any edition of Monopoly (we own the O.G. edition, the Here & Now edition, and the Harley-Davidson edition), Scrabble, Scattergories, MTV Trivia, Trivial Pursuit - 20th Century Edition, and Yahtzee! Yes, you have to add the exclamation point after Yahtzee! because it’s in the name. It’s only proper.

So Rob & I have been together for nearly seven years now and in that time, I have never beat him at Monopoly. Oh, I try, but I’ve never figured out the key to kicking his ass. The game usually ends with a bitter look on my face, winging money at him every time I have to pay rent, and my eventual announcement that, “This sucks. I’m in the hole, everything’s mortgaged or sold, and I can’t afford to pass Go at this point. Game’s over.”

You might say I’m a sore loser. This is a lifelong problem. As a young child, before I was too cool for him, my dad and I played a lot of checkers - mainly because it’s the one game I knew how to play - and Rummy. I found out about eight or nine years ago that my dad used to let me win occasionally, not just to keep me interested but to avoid the eventual temper tantrum that would ensue if I kept losing.

I digress, we had some kid-free time tonight and decided to test our real estate saavy one more time (this is the third time this week that we’ve played). The last time we played, he very casually mentioned - and so casually that when I brought it up tonight as we were putting the game away, he didn’t remember saying it at all - that the key to winning is to buy up properties on the corners of the board, because everytime someone comes up one side, they will inevitably end up on a corner. I know what you’re thinking: all the properties are corners. True, for monopolies, they are. But you shouldn’t waste your money on railroads or utilities. There are fewer and more spaced out, plus you can’t build on them. What good is a stagnant property?

It stuck in my head and tonight, I led a quiet ambush. First I bought the orange properties, then the red, then the dark purple, and finally the regular purple. Then I put up houses and hotels like it was the thing to do. And he went down in a blaze of glory!!! I got the giggles every time he mortgaged a property, or got that deadpan look on his face when he had to cough up $450.00. I’m pretty sure that this was the highlight of my week, sadly enough!

But what came later was even funnier: As I reminded him that it was his tip that pointed me in the right direction, I burst out with, “Look at me, workin’ the corners!!!!”

Oh wait…