Monopoly Deal

My second son introduced us to Monopoly Deal today. For the uninitiated, this is the card version of the popular board game. My son played it with his school friends earlier this week and asked me to get it for him when we were at Toys R Us today. The box says "Play in 15 minutes". I thought about the time I could potentially save compared to playing the board game, not to mention the effort required to set up the board and to pack it up when we are done playing. No-brainer, I agreed to buy it.

Turns out that it is quite different from the board game and far more vicious. Based on cards that you pick from the draw pile, the first player that acquires 3 full set of properties wins the game. However, there are various Action Cards - the Sly Deal card allows you to steal a property from someone else, the Force Deal card allows you to swap properties with another player and the Deal Breaker allows you to take a full set of property from any player! If you possess a Just Say No card, which my daughter refers to as Say Just No, you can cancel the effect of the Action Cards. Wouldn't it be handy to have some Say Just No cards in life. 

Then there are these cards that allow you to extort money from other players. The Happy Birthday card requires each player to give you a $2M gift; the cost of having expensive friends. The Rent cards which require either one or all players to pay you exorbitant rent, based on a property bubble presumably. These have to be used with care to avoid unnecessary tears during the game. So if I have to use them, I would get my son to pay up the rent. However, there was one game where I asked my son twice in a row, and he asked me to direct the Rent card to my daughter instead. The 5 year old was okay to foot out the $3M rent. Right after that was my son's turn, and he served up a Debt Collector card to my daughter which meant that she had to dish out another $5M. The financial distress was too much for her to handle and she burst out in tears. Without my prompting, my son held her arm and told her that she did not have to pay him. My son wouldn't make a very good debt collector; he could have considered offering a loan restructuring instead. The sweet gesture pacified her and the game could continue.

I forgot that with card games, they usually make me play at least 3 rounds with them. 15 minutes x 3 would have been 15 minutes longer than the 30-minute rule than I impose on the board game version of Monopoly. I clearly got outsmarted.

The ups and downs of games time with the kids.