Ghettopoly

At the Summer SAT extension camp (yes, I haven't blogged about the camp proper yet), we have a set time for some recreational activities -- typically fitness and games.

At the moment, I don't have funds to buy some games. So, I did what any enterprising office worker would do, given office access: I printed with extreme prejudice.

Initially, I had the vision of printing a complete set of Monopoly. How grand it would be to play with paper cards, paper property, a large, oversized paper board, and perhaps even paper houses and hotels. Paper money is too 20th century -- a spreadsheet would do.

It took quite a bit of time to track down even a board of decent resolution. And I was unable to track down cards. I ended up printing a list of property card values, and also a list of community chest/chance cards.

So I printed a stack of papers, and headed to the designated room. At some point on that journey, I realized that I didn't have any dice.

The class was divided into two groups -- those who could play games, and those who were serving detention for the first hour. Spying my board, some of the potential players murmured that detention was looking a bit more promising.

I "assembled" the board, placed the pieces (various bits of change from different countries, including a RMB 5 note from a China layover) on it, and proceeded to explain the state of Monopoly.

At this point, I dropped all pretense, and decided to rename the game Ghettopoly.

Fortunately, someone downloaded a dice app. We used that for rolls. Whenever a person landed on chance or community chest, I used a random number generator to pick the appropriate card text from the list.

Initially, Inwook, a student at the camp, offered to help by being a designated banker. I thought he would have the sense to update totals. Instead, he logged every transaction in the excel workbook.

Needless to say, he burned out after a while, and I took over.

The game itself went relatively quickly, though people flitted in and out. At one point, a Korean student studying in Uganda took over a team by default, as the others were enjoying their pillows, food, and generally enjoying life not playing a shitty paper version of an arguably boring game.

There were some highlights. One player-team (Elly and her brother David) ended up in jail at least 7 times. Granted, this was partially a product of the random-number generated chance/community chest cards -- in a real game, they would not have been sent to jail by community chest three times in a game. But it still cracked me up.

After a while, everyone got confused about who owned what. (I had been keeping track of the property ownership on a printout.) So I decided to just write it on the board. When a trade happened, we'd cross it out, and write the new owner. After a while, mortgages were handled this way, too. We solved the housing and hotel problem the same way.

I won (via Baltic and Mediterranean, and eventually a set of trades that left me with St. James/Tennessee/New York)! 

It was the best game ever!