Monopoly

I've pretty much burned myself out trying to beat Anna in Scrabble. So today we played Monopoly instead. This is a game that I normally do very well in. I lost.

So, tonight, we played again. The game started beautifully. I collected Baltic and Mediteranian and secured St. Charles, Virginia, and States within the first several turns. Great! Two sets! Then I secured almost one of every other color on the board. But I didn't get any railroads. This turned out to be tragic for me.

Because, even though Anna had no complete sets, and therefore, no houses or hotels, she had all 4 railroads. I landed on at least one railroad nearly every time around the board!

Eventually, I built my properties up to having hotels. I knew for sure that soon the game would be over and I'd be victorious. Well, Anna never really landed on my properties and kept hitting the Free Parking space and taking all of the money out of the pot (House Rules).

Even though I wasn't going bankrupt, I wasn't doing all that well and she was amasing a pile of cash that would have made Warren Buffet and Bill Gates proud. Things started to turn around for me later in the game, but I wasn't really draining Anna's cash. Finally, about 1:30 AM, the bank ran out of 500s, 100s, and 50s. We were tired. So, we decided to end the game.

Here's a photo of our board: (Anna's on the left and I'm on the bottom - By all accounts, she actually won, even though we decided it was a draw. She's being nice to me. I think she wants me to play Scrabble with her tomorrow. Besides, she knows that losing twice in the same day on a game I'm supposed to be good at would be hard on my fragile ego.)



What's the moral of the story? Given enough time and money, men and women can figure out a way to coexist peacefully.