Friday, December 16, 2005

Monopoly = One person rules or recipe for divorce?

My favorite sister, Stef, sent me my birthday present. Since I'll be spending a good portion of my birthday, the 24th, in airports, I opened it early. It's "Canada-opoly", a Canadianized version of Monopoly. Which looks cool, all the properties are Canadian, you can own the CN Tower, instead of getting sent to jail, you get snowed in, a bunch of hockey references, all very Canadian. What made me laugh the hardest was that in the middle of the board, in tiny type, it says "Manufactured in Cincinnati, Ohio." I'm glad to know that we, as Canadians, couldn't even produce the thing ourselves. Beeeauuuttti, eh? Sue comment was, "I hope we can play this without getting a divorce."

Why is this a recipe for divorce? When I moved to Windsor, before we were married, Sue had a terrible, low paying job and I was a student working part time. We didn't have any money. While we're now married and our jobs have changed, we still don't have any money...

Since we were never able to go out, we decided to buy a board game and entertain ourselves that way. We got Monopoly and played it all the time. There were some really terrific battles, once I even took a picture of the board because pretty much everything had been built up and there was no way either of us could lose. But, you might be saying, that is hardly the point of Monopoly. And this is where the battle left the game board and came into real life.

My understanding of the game Monopoly is that everyone is trying to monopolize the property to put the others players out of business. Hence, MONOpoly. It's a game, there is one winner and everyone else loses. During the game in question, I had the upper hand and was looking to MONOpolize the property and put Sue on skid row. She was trying to stay alive, but I wouldn't accept the deals she was offering. She took that personally and we got into a huge domestic about how, "if you're going to treat me like this in a game, then you're going to treat me like this in life." We never finished that game. I left that night and the game stayed set up on the only table Sue had in her apartment. We didn't speak about it until T H R E E days later, when we decided that it would be good to take a break from Monopoly for a while. A few years later, Sue's brother Brian was in town, so we figured that it would safe to try it with a third person. But once again things did not exactly go well. For the record, I have yet to put Sue out of business in real life.

We'll give this version a shot at some point (I also have the Star Wars version, with cool little pewter figurines as the players), but let the records show that if things get ugly, it's all Stef's fault.

3 comments:

Sue Matthews said...

For the record, when the first game was played, I had just read an article in one of those ridiculous bridal magazines that said that you should play a game with your fiance. It said that the attitudes he showed in the game would reflect his attitudes in real life. And Nick was trying to rip me off. Big time!

I ate my meals on the couch for three days until we got the game cleared off the table.

Lynette Adams said...

Big surprise, I too have a story about when Monopoly got too personal.

I played Monopoly with 4 friends once. The four friends consisted of a couple and a soon-to-be couple. Somewhere in the middle of the game, the two girls "married" their respective guys, who proceeded to slaughter ME and then got down and dirty with each other while the girls looked on like gangster molls and I did the dishes.

Unknown said...

Huh - if I had had any idea a game could be so controversial, I may have thought twice before buying it ... who knew?!