Liking This Makes You An Idiot No.1: Monopoly

It is, I think, a fundamental rule of the universe that you shouldn’t create board games based around professions. You cannot make a board game that is more interesting than the occupation it’s based upon. Can’t be done. Not without a fairly extensive degree of tarting up, at least. Archaeology got a lot more attractive once Lost Valley Of The Dinosaurs threw erupting volcanoes and easily disturbed swamp monsters into the mix, for example. A game in which players complete to be the first to secure the right to dig in Giza, then roll dice to discover exactly which pieces of Third Dynasty pottery are sifted from the sand is unlikely to be a hot-seller. Similarly, Escape From Atlantis was a hit because sea monsters were forever ruining your shit, not because the logistics of evacuating an island population are particularly gripping.

Still, if you are hell-bent on representing an occupation through the medium of plastic counters without having the common courtesy to chuck in rampaging lizards, you at least have to make that occupation of passing interest in itself. Cluedo just about gets by on the fact that generations of exposure to Agatha Christie has left us intrigued by murder mystery at the genetic level. Risk works fine because it simulates the invasion of France without all the myriad difficulties such an act would require in the real world (how do you scrape together the money to get you, four mates, and your butter knives on the Eurostar to Paris?). I still wouldn’t object to either game including zombie hordes or alien space-fleets (“Overlord Zog in the Torment Zone with the Quartellian Doom Ray”), but all that death and violence and discussions in ballrooms is just about sufficient to hold my attention.

But how did 750 million people get suckered into thinking landlords are a good basis for a board game? As an actual career it must be bad enough, the constant cycle of buy house, spruce up house, lend out house, repair house seems so mind-numbingly tedious that treating your tenants as barely hominid lab experiments is probably the only upside. Certainly all of my landlords have taken this approach, and yet it is baffling excluded from Monopoly. Instead your greatest triumph comes from discovering that the game has arbitrarily decided it’s your birthday. This sudden revelation of your own date of birth is the single high-point of the entire experience, unless you get a strange kick out of a “justice” system that comes straight from Franco’s Spain: arrested at whim, then randomly either allowed to leave or forced to bribe the officials. Kafka would be proud, although he might never got any writing done at all if he’d happen to land on the wrong square and forced to sit out eternity waiting to roll a double.

All of which is fine, in theory. Board games are often played due to a sense of duty rather than an expectation of enjoyment (every Christmas my family resolves to grind through Pictionary in the certain knowledge that my brother will accuse everyone of cheating and that my father will be too drunk to hold a pencil, though not to drunk to call all and sundry a bunch of pricks). Monopoly might not be quite so bad if there was any ever suggestion that the damn thing might end. I have never finished a game of Monopoly once. Not ever (well, once, but only because I was banker and deliberately funnelling spare funds to one player in order to expedite his crushing victory; I didn‘t get invited back again). We always just essentially gave up when enough people had quit the board in order to return to their lives. Victory was inevitably claimed by whomever happened to be the last one at the table, which makes the game at least tangentially related to Russian Roulette, though if De Niro and Walken had been forced into rounds of Monopoly in that POW camp they would all have been desperate to get into the underwater cage just so that they could escape the wretched game (though in fairness if the VC had replaced the “Get Out Of Jail Free” cards with “Rot Here Forever, Filthy Americans”, it would finally squash the idea that the Commies didn’t have a sense of humour). Even when someone finally began to skirt the edge of bankruptcy, some generous colleague would swoop in with extra dough, purely to “keep the game going”. It was like watching Estragon and Vladimir decide that it would take Godot even longer to find them if they were to hide in a goddamn tree. I would have thought it fairly axiomatic that any activity, no matter how pleasant, has to end at some point. If that’s true of awesome films or energetic sex, then surely it must be the case for pretending to own a hotel on Old Kent Road. In other words, not only is the game unrelentingly dull and of potential use as an alternative to water-boarding, but the people it attracts are idiots unable to grasp even the most basic elements of human psychology. When I’m finally sent screaming to Hell, it will be to find Satan himself waiting for me with a Monopoly board and an infinite pile of childish fake money, grinning like a loon as we play and shouting out "Also known as your mother" each time I have to take a Community Chest card.

I bet he won’t even let me be the car.