Monopoly Madness

I recently purchased Monopoly after a tour of all the charity shops in town, I finally found it , its an old version but still the same as the modern day version. I played it with me and four friends; only the iron was left, after we were a good way through the game (a few houses here and there but no hotels yet) a friend landed on one of my properties; he couldn't afford the rent, so instead of selling houses and mortgaging properties (like in the rules) he did a deal with another player, to loan him a few hundred to pay the bills in return for a 'free' pass giving immunity to his properties. Despite mine and others outrage at this, there was nothing we could do, (without it turning into a physical fight) so instead we decided to also, totally ignore the rules and team up as three and pool our resources together, which also helped to complete some broken sets of properties. We ended up helping each other out of payments, and buying each other houses, eliminated one player from the enemy team, leaving just one. There was also an argument at that point about the properties being donated to their team mate, even though they were out because of my/our properties, this issue was soon resolved, we then owned about 75% of the board, and the demise of the remaining player was inevitable, although he survived for quite a while, thanks to us landing on his property, although we owned a good part of the board, we were only waiting for one player to pass, whereas he had a smaller part of the board but the traffic going past was 3 times of ours. Anyway our team soon won and the game finally ended.

In conclusion; although that the game rules went completely out of the window, playing as a team was actually quite enjoyable as you had someone else to help you out of situations, and could build a bigger empire. Monopoly is a ruthless game but playing in teams made an interesting twist. We agreed we would play again in teams, from the start but only with all player positions filled.

On a side note the free parking rule, where fines can be won when that space is landed on, was also in play, which helped to prolong the game even further.