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Monopoly Memories
I have very fond memories of family get-togethers in a summer lodge up in the Adirondack Mountains where four, six or sometimes eight of us would sit around a Monopoly board on rainy evenings and spend hours playing one of the most entertaining board games ever invented.
Monopoly can also be put into the category of strategy games because the players must learn how to strategize their properties to the best advantage of profitability.
We would keep at the game for hours at a time until all the players would be bankrupt except one (the winner), or we would set a time limit on the game - say two hours - at the end of which time the winner was the player with the most assets. Assets included properties, plus any houses or hotels on them, and cash money.
The younger members of the family who played learned how to handle money; what it means to mortgage property and also to redeem the mortgage; when it is profitable to invest in housing or hotel developments, and when it is a good time to sell properties and cut your losses. This was really educational in addition to teaching the young ones how to approach strategy games.
We laughed a lot when someone landed in jail. We hurrahed when we passed "Go" and collected our $200, and we moaned and groaned at some of the punishments handed out in "Chance" and "Community Chest".
The King of Strategy Board Games: Monopoly History
This king of strategy games was actually invented during the Great Depression of the 1930's by one Charles Darrow. Unemployed, and with a great deal of time on his hands, Darrow drew a sketch on his kitchen table of some of the streets of Atlantic City where he and his family had spent summer holidays in better times. Little by little the sketch developed into a "board" with the addition of railroads and utilities. He then colored the various street properties, fashioned hotels and houses out of paper and slowly developed a game in his mind.
He added property "titles", colored buttons for playing tokens, lots of play money and a pair of dice. The Game, as it was called, was first played in his family, then together with friends. After a while, his friends wanted sets of their own, and in no time, Darrow began marketing his game to department stores.
The interesting part of this history is that when Darrow approached Parker Brothers, who had already been in the business of developing and selling games for many years, they looked at his game, studied it, and rejected it all together.
It was only when F.A.O. Schwartz began selling Darrow's homemade games successfully did Parker Bros. realize that here was something really profitable, and it was then that they contracted with Darrow to buy the Monopoly game outright and give him royalties on all the sets sold.
Today one cannot imagine Parker Brothers without the game of Monopoly!
Summary of How to Play Monopoly
The Monopoly board shows sets of properties all around with one corner square as "Go", another as "Jail", a third as "Go to Jail", and the fourth corner as "Free Parking". Instead of buttons we have tokens in all sorts of designs: sometimes cars, boats, hats, railroad engines, etc.
Each player picks a token and places it on "Go". One player is designated as the banker, and he passes out the first monies to each player. They all begin with the same amount, designated before the start of the game. During the course of Monopoly, the banker takes care of all the money transactions. Then the player to go first roles the dice and moves his token accordingly. If he rolls doubles, he takes a second turn.
According to where his token lands, the player can buy the property (if it is not owned), he must pay rent to the owner if it already belongs to someone, and so on. After a player has gained all the properties of one color (this is called a Monopoly), he may purchases houses for the property which immediately raises the rent. And after he has four houses on one property, he may buy a hotel, which raises the rent even more. And so on, and so on, until someone is bankrupted, or, if playing with a time limit, until the time is up.
Monopoly is one of the greatest family board games and every family should own a set.
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