Do Not Pass Go: This is Family Game Night

“C’mon, the kids want you to play,” my brother says, smirking. His tone is oily. I recognize it from when we were kids and he tried to get me to ask Santa for Lego sets instead of Barbies.

“What about UNO?” I say. “We all like UNO.”

“But Auntie Sheila it’s STAR WARS Monopoly,” my nephew says as if this alone is enough to clinch it. He opens the box, unfolding the board. I peer in nervously like I’m looking down at a terrarium of tarantulas and scorpions. I see the slotted tray with the stacks of pastel-colored paper money-“the bank.” I see the plastic baggies of grey and black squares that serve as “houses” and “hotels” in the classic edition but are Star Wars-ified into “bases.” Likewise, the Atlantic City inspired properties from the original editions have been swapped out with places taken from one of the many Star Wars-related sagas. I squint the way you do when you’re trying to will a rising nausea to rise no further. In the last decade or more Hasboro (who owns the Monopoly rights, so, a monopoly on Monopoly if you will) has cranked out a dizzying amount of themed versions including: Lord of the Rings, Stranger Things, The Godfather, The Simpsons, National Parks, and even Bob Ross (take. my. damn. money.) The game has been Disney-fied (The Little Mermaid, Mickey Mouse Monopoly), bedazzled and cutsied with a “sparkle” edition featuring glittery tokens and pearlescent dice, and repackaged for “junior” players with dinosaurs and unicorns and bunnies. No, I think. Uh-uh. Because you can give it all the jazz hands and Tay Swift’s “XOXOs” and quirky pop culture dressing, but you cannot exorcise the demonic torment of a Monopoly family game night.

An innocent thimble? A cute Scottie dog? How DARE you, Monopoly? You fool no one.

*

It’s the 1980s. We are some version of middle-class Amish in a mid-sized town riddled with restaurants and car dealerships. In other words, we had electricity and cars that ran on gas and everything, but we were kind of a homebody family. If we had a front porch, we probably would have spent most nights out there with our whittling sticks and harmonicas. At the time, playing a board game on a Saturday night was far less a whole EVENT as some families make it these days as it was something to do before cable came into our lives.

We had two family games: Clue and Monopoly. My experience as a Clue player will give you some insight into my existential dread of Monopoly. A refresher: Clue is a whodunnit murder mystery game that takes place inside a mansion. Each player must try and determine the murderer, the murder weapon, and where the murder took place. The game play itself involves keeping a checklist of these variables—characters, weapons (rope, lead pipe, knife etc.), and rooms in the house (Kitchen, Conservatory etc.) We started to play this game before I could read. The game that revolves around READING the names of characters, weapons, and rooms was the one my family decided would be the “fun for all” Saturday night thing. Clue requires a minimum of three players. My parents didn’t want to leave me out, not because this would damage my psyche, but because someone would still have to figure out what to do with me while they all played. My parents apparently could not drive our gas powered car to the K-mart 2 miles from our house and purchase another appropriate game. Maybe we were Amish. Who do I talk to about getting in a mid-life rumspringa?

While I think my parents’ hearts were in the right place, Clue game night really didn’t do anyone any favors. Before we could start the game I had to take my cards into another room where I would spread them out on the floor. Then I would spend the next 10 or 15 minutes painstakingly matching up each letter on each card to the word on the printed “detective notebook” checklist slips that came with the game. Honestly, we should have just invented cable and been done with it.

When I got just a little bit older (and could READ), the game became more fun. But initially, I didn’t enjoy playing. It was sort of slow and boring and I didn’t care about winning so for me the stakes were low to non-existent. In order to win the game you had to correctly guess the murderer, weapon, and location. You did this by waiting for your turn and using it to ACCUSE! It was all very exciting and definitely the most dramatic moment of the entire game. If you were incorrect, you lost. You were out of the game, but you still had to show your “clue” cards around to the remaining players. Recognizing what I saw as a fantastic loophole, I exploited it as much as possible. After one or two turns I would make a baldly false accusation, get expelled, and spend the rest of the night sipping my root beer and shoveling potato chips into my face. I am not Seal Team 6 material.  

Maybe you didn’t crack open a Monopoly board until college, thereby making it Drinking Monopoly. You probably have funny, silly, hazy memories of that evening and are still finding little plastic hotels around your apartment in odd places like the refrigerator or the fish tank. Or maybe you’re thinking “I don’t know what she’s talking about. We had awesome game nights where we played Yahtzee and Pictionary and ate ice cream sundaes while the credits rolled over our happy family time to a theme song written by Alan Thicke.” To all of you in either camp I applaud with admiration and envy. Consider yourselves unscathed. But if you were like me, a sensitive 7-year old book worm who preferred trading stickers and doing paint-by-numbers to haggling over faux real estate, then the ruthless world of Monopoly was not a kind or gentle place to spend a Saturday night with people who went from the Bradys to the Lannisters with a roll of the dice.

Monopoly is about amassing all the wealth by buying and developing properties, controlling utilities and railroad lines, and collecting rent from players that land on said properties. Bankrupting a fellow player is enthusiastically championed. In our house this feat was celebrated like that scene with the apes in the beginning of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the one where they are all yelping and hopping and tossing out bones as if they were Mardi Gras beads.

Another interesting aspect of Monopoly that I believe also accounts for its longevity (Parker Brothers published the first game resembling modern Monopoly in 1935) is the way players have customized its rules and game play over the years. If you compare notes with someone else who played the game with their family you’ll probably find they had a bunch of their own types of rules like getting an extra $50 if you land squarely on GO or even getting “fined” for a janky dice roll that knocks over houses and hotels (that’s some harsh barley right there). Hacking and transposing the official rules is another thing done in the name of “making the game more fun,” but is in reality just a way to give players new ways to satiate their economic blood lust unleashed by an 80-year old board game. For us it was what my father referred to with audible glee as “wheeling and dealing!”

And so the game began under a certain, though completely dubious, atmosphere of equanimity. We moved our tokens around the spaces, buying up the different kinds of real estate, joking, laughing, a regular Norman Rockwell painting come to life. Even my mild-mannered mother would enjoy ribbing my brother to “fork over” twenty bucks for landing on her railroad. Then the real estate thinned. Shadows lengthened. Claws sharpened. The shift in the room was palpable like the change in the sky just before a tornado appears on the horizon. My brother would lean across the board and purr like Kaa from The Jungle Book: “You give me New York Avenue and I’ll give you $200 plus my utility.” Or:

“I’ll give you $300 and a free stop on both railroads for your St. James Place.”

“I’ll give you two free trips around the board for Baltic Avenue.”

“I’ll give you a pass on one of my properties with hotels you pick, my Get out of Jail Free card, and $100 for Kentucky and Illinois Avenue.”

My brother and father were relentless with this shell game within the game. It became clear that they were the two actual competitors in the ring. While my mother and I randomly picked up property, my brother and dad were buying with the mindsets of Grandmaster chess players: tracking who owned what, how much cash everyone had, and most importantly, what it would take to manipulate and break their fellow players. All of this psychological and strategic maneuvering passed over me like the floofy tufts from a dandelion.

Sometimes I made it as far as building houses, but both my father and brother preyed on my nature molded by the gentle lessons I absorbed from watching hours of Sesame Street about sharing and compromise and inclusion. Soon enough I had agreed to so many terrible deals that went against my own interests (but, hey, look how happy that made you!) that I was practically paying them to land on my property. Eventually I deployed a modified version of my Clue loophole where I mortgaged the four things I had managed to keep, gave my remaining fifteen bucks to the bank, and crawled inside my Muppet-glad brain to wait out what inevitably happened next.

What began as lighthearted father-son rivalry became a scene from Succession with my father and brother determined to crush the other to claim total Monopoly supremacy. Furious paper and pencil calculations to work out the math. A threat in the form of “let’s see what the rules actually say.” Voices rising. A fist lands on the table in a gesture of emphasis, sending our remaining game pieces skittering off the board. My mother getting up from the table, clearing away cups, yawning; she is so done with us. Who can blame her? Her husband and son are fighting over something that’s supposed to be “only a game,” which in this scenario might as well be like saying the Grand Canyon is only a hole in the ground. I would slip away to brush my teeth and get ready for bed. At some point my dad and brother would reach an uneasy stalemate. They would pack up the paper currency and dogeared cards along with the pretense that there were no singed feelings, no bruised egos, nothing important changed between them. I guess there was a price for all those free trips and bargain deals after all.  

*

We choose our play pieces. The nephews are “bad guys:” Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper. They tell me I can be Leia because she’s the girl piece. Sigh. So much to teach them have I.

“I’ll be Han,” I say, “the scruffiest nerfherder in the galaxy who is going to kick. your. butt!” They laugh. Challenge accepted! But my brother knows I don’t mean it. I’m just playing along.  

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Lens Zen!

Benches are back, baby! If you’ve been here for a while you might recall that I have a crush on benches. Functional, beautiful, art, did I mention functional? Related: I am so tired. So. tired. Anyway, an object that invites rest, repair, and presentness, but that also may be used for clandestine meetings between two super spies is worth celebrating. Here are a few from the Spring Bench Series (thing I just made up!)

“Natasha, we meet at bench under dogwoods. So lovely this time of year. Tell no one. Yours, Boris” ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

“Boris, there are many dogwoods with many benches. Did you mean west side entrance or side near little pond with cute ducks? Why ducks are so cute? Is it their little feets? We should get. I let you name. Tell no one. Yours, Natasha” ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

“Natasha, my allergies are not good! I wait for you at pink bench. Please bring the papers and peanut butter sandwich. I did not have breakfast. We will discuss naming of little duckling. But where to keep? In bathtub? You know I like taking the bubble on Sunday nights! Tell no one. Yours, Boris” ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

“Boris, I now wait at super secrety bench location at park across town. I have papers, half peanut butter sandwich (it was long walk), and little duckling named Boris Jr. and also, maybe, possibly, sister duckling and, well, okay, cousin squirrel and, also, I think, auntie chipmunk. We will get extra tub-okay! Tell no one! Yours, Natasha” ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography