It was Miss Scarlet in the Library with the Lead Piping...

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, I spent the last weekend playing board games.

Contrary to what the title might suggest, we did NOT play Cluedo (or Clue, as it's known in America), because apparently, Cluedo doesn't work with 2 people. I've thought a great deal into this, and I can't think of a single reason why it wouldn't work.

My brother was off hosting some awards ceremony for his university (don't ask), so Mum suggested that me and Dad play a board game.

Let's rewind about two weeks.

Dad has been clearing the loft and has just located Colditz (the board game, not the castle turned PoW camp). The aim of the game is to escape from Colditz within the 3 1/2 weeks allocated for play (includes time spent figuring out the approximately one metric thousand rules).

Dad suggested we play because he and his brother used to play it when they were younger. 3 hours later, we realized that there's a reason he hasn't played in the better part of 40 years (it's probably because of the complicated rules, but given how little I understood them I could even be wrong about that).

The game requires the player to escape all of their pieces (between 6 and 15 of them). Given that me and my brother (14 pieces between us) didn't manage to escape a single piece in 3 hours, I don't know how long the game is actually supposed to take (Wikipedia says 90 mins - 3 hours - LIARS).

So Colditz has now been exiled to the loft again, and this brings us nicely back to the present.

Skip forward to last Saturday (ok, not the PRESENT present), and we have a number of options open to us:
Cluedo: "Doesn't work with two people" Evidence Inconclusive - Ruled out.

Colditz: Possibly the most complicated game ever created (I've never played Risk and this game isn't real) - Ruled out.

Monopoly: Takes a ridiculously long time to play and I've only ever known one game to ever be completed, and even then only because two of his friends teamed up and pooled their resources against my brother (they're lovely people, normally, but this was a special occasion) - Plausible.

And herein lies the problem - Monopoly in its true state doesn't exist anymore. We own 3 versions, Simpsons Monopoly; Jersey Monopoly and Monopoly: Here and Now. (And yes, that was the correct way to use a semicolon).

I had forgotten Here and Now, so I suggested Simpsons or Jersey. Dad said because I knew The Simpsons better, I would have an advantage (pretty sure he was joking but could go either way). Nevertheless, we decided to play Jersey, so I went upstairs to get the box down.

I could see Simpsons Monopoly, but I couldn't see Jersey Monopoly. I could see another box which might have been it, but I couldn't tell because it was on the highest shelf and I am only 5'4" (welcome to The View From Lower Down).

Not for the first time finding myself sans periscope in my hour of need, I did what any right-minded person would do and took a picture so I could see what the label said (picture attached). As you can probably see from the picture, this particular version was in a very shiny box (WHY HASBRO WHY?!) so the flash on my phone made the text completely illegible.

Fortunately, by now Dad had joined me and he could see that it was the Here and Now edition. That's the version with credit cards, which is why my brother likes it so much (but he was still off hosting an awards ceremony so his preference wasn't relevant).

Anyway, we decided to stick with Simpsons, and that was our evening.

You probably know the rules of Monopoly already so I won't bore you with those. Instead, I'll explain our respective strategies and their merits, plus how I worked out who won.

It occurs to me at this stage that this post is already ridiculously long and nothing's really happened yet. If you want to find out about a different, unusual game that we played on Sunday, skip below to the heading OUTRAGE.

Back to Monopoly. There are several "house rules" involved in the game and they aren't limited to the instructions that nobody has ever read. One such rule is the rule that no one can buy property on their first go round the board.

So we ignored that rule and allowed prominent property purchase on the primary perambulation of the place.

There are three other unusual rules that we referenced during our game. Note that I didn't say 'house rules'. The rules were as follows:

1. The auction rule - Not everyone realizes this, but this is an actual rule in Monopoly (READ THE BOOK!), not just a House Rule. If a player lands on a property but does not want to buy it, the property is put up for auction, and all players (including the initial 'refuser') are allowed to bid on it. if you do this right, you can trick your opponent into paying over the asking price for the property.

We normally have a House Rule to not play the auction rule, because my brother abuses it, claiming he doesn't want a property then bidding $1 for it, followed by wondering why we accuse him of cheating. Yes, we know it's TECHNICALLY allowed, but that doesn't make it ok!

However, without him there, it was safe to use that rule, although we implemented a house rule that it couldn't go for less than half the asking price so things didn't get too ridiculous.

2. The Free Parking rule - The reverse is true of this rule. Although most people play it, this is not an official rule, nor is it even one of the suggested House Rules.

Put simply, all fines (anything that has to be paid because of a Community Chest/Chance card, $50 to get out of jail, money from either of the tax squares) are paid to Free Parking, and all those notes are placed under the corner square, where they are inherited by whoever next lands there. This might not sound like much, but when we finished, there was $815 there.

Side note: some people think that this is not possible with the Here and Now (credit card) edition, due to the lack of physical money under there. The simplest way around this is by putting another card under there. Reset the card to $0 at the start of the game and make all the relevant transactions as you would normally.

3. The Double Go rule - This is a cool rule which says that if you land ON the Go square instead of going past it, instead of the normal $200, you receive $400 from the bank. Word of advice though: decide this rule BEFORE someone lands there, otherwise cheating accusations may ensue. Shockingly, this is what happened when I tried to bring it up when I landed on the Go square, even though Dad also landed there on the next go round the board.

Dad's strategy was to buy as many properties as early as possible, which makes sense to just make a profit through rent. My strategy was to only buy the most important properties. I define important as "orange onwards". I remember one occasion when I was very willing to swap a yellow property for a dark blue property because the rent is much higher on the dark blue properties. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that there are two dark blue properties and three yellows. 

Therefore, I was constantly landing on his properties but I don't believe he landed on mine once.

Since that incident, I have learned from my mistake and instead focus on the orange, red, yellow and green properties. The reason for focussing on the orange properties is because of one of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures I saw once mentioned that the most commonly landed on properties are the oranges.

Apart from that, my main strategy was trying to stop him from getting any full sets. This meant that I ended up with at least one of each set of properties.

Interestingly, the most commonly landed on properties in our game were Tire Yard (Old Kent Road, Brown) and Disco Stu's (Northumberland Avenue, Pink). Cue the following conversation:

Dad: Shouldn't it be Stu's Disco?
Me: No, because it's named after the character, Disco Stu. Liking Disco is his one defining trait! (shout out to the one person in the world who got that reference)
(As Disco Stu): Disco Stu likes Disco Music!
(I do a lot of Simpsons impressions, especially Hank Azaria's characters)

As is usually the case, the game ended due to time constraints rather than bankruptcy. Therefore, it fell to me to calculate who had won. Cue my patented liquidisation technique:

1. Do all the following steps for only one player at a time to avoid running out of cash.
Part I - Liquidation
2. Convert all properties into cash:
a. Exchange all properties for their face value as indicated on the board.
b. If any properties are mortgaged, exchange them for their mortgage value (1/2 the face value indicated on the board, also printed on the back of the card)

c. Houses and hotels are worth the asking price on the corresponding property
d. Get Out Of Jail Free cards are worth $50

Part II - Liquidisation
3. Exchange smaller currencies for larger currencies where possible, starting at the lowest denomination
e.g.
a. 5x$1 = 1x$5
b. 2x$5 = 1x$10
c. 1x$10+2x$20 = 1x$50
c. 2x$50 = 1x$100
d. 5x$100 = 1x$500
4. Repeat until no longer possible. Sometimes there will be remainders, e.g. 18x$1 can only be liquidised to 1x$10+1x$5+3x$1

Once I had totalled the scores for each of us, I did the same for the money under Free Parking. The end totals were:

Dad: $5441

Me: $4326

Free Parking: $815

OUTRAGE

The next day we played a relatively unknown game called Outrage. Like most uncommon games, the rules were near incomprehensible and I'm still not 100% sure we were doing it right