Yesterday was Kelsey’s birthday party - 8 screaming boys all ages 6-9 (plus a tagalong 2yo) going full-force for two hours. Wow… whodathunk that it would have tired us all out so much? The boys all fell straight asleep the instant they got home, without even complaining that it was time to go to bed. I fell asleep within ten minutes of my head hitting the pillow - amazing enough in itself - and then slept for 11 hours. Double wow!
So anyhow, today we just kinda vegged out. I did get a bunch of dishes done and some laundry and cleaned the science experiments out of the fridge, but other than that we just vegged.
One of Kel’s birthday presents he received yesterday was Monopoly - Here & Now. I’ve been looking forward to cracking this open, as I used to love the original edition. The older 4 of us played it (Alex kept trying to help, much to our dismay) and we had fun… but it really did last too long. Brendon quit after 2 1/2 hours, Kelsey and I were ready to quit at 4 hours and convinced Mike to pack it up. He wanted to keep everything set as it was so we could continue the play later. His words - “but I like it when somebody actually WINS!” - meaning him of course, LOL.
Next time, we’ll play the “short game” way: agree before starting on an end time, deal each player 2 properties right off the bat that they must pay for, and whoever is worth the most (cash and properties) at the ending time wins. Period.
I have 3 complaints:
The game needs more $1million value bills. The Bank was constantly having to buy back those bills from players, exchanging them for $5million bills. With 2 people this wouldn’t be a problem, but with the 4 of us playing it really was. They’re not making extra money packs for this edition yet, grrr. (The extra money pack for the original won’t work since the money values in the H&N set are so much higher.)
The board is now a quad-fold board. Ew. I hate those.
The black “trays” included with the game make no sense. Okay, so the money tray does make sense, but it doesn’t work very well. The money is sorted but easily slips into the adjacent tray. There isn’t a big enough separation between the denominations for the banker to quickly grab the bills s/he needs - you’ll end up just pulling from the center of that stack’s color or pulling the whole stack out and counting out the number of bills you need. Not to mention that it’s so tall that with the money placed into it, the box won’t close all the way (unless you like squishing your money). The second tray included, supposedly for the property cards, makes no sense AT ALL. There are 5 spaces; the one in the middle is larger than the other 4 and it’s the only one big enough to actually hold the property cards. So if the property cards go there, what goes in the other 4 spots? Surely it’s not the houses, hotels, Chance and Community Chest cards… because this tray is completely open on one side. That’s right… tip it a bit and everything comes sliding out. It’s really cheap, flimsy plastic too. Accidentally lean on these trays a bit and they’re permanently bent/crushed.
If you’re considering getting this for your family and have kids ages 10 and under, I’d really go for the original version. There’s no benefit to this version besides more “hip” or “cool” tokens, and those aren’t worth $30 on their own. Monopoly has always been such a great educational game because it taught kids realistically about money in a fantasy setting; with real dollar amounts that kids could really put their hands on ($1, $5, $10, etc). Here And Now takes the “realistic” angle out of it completely by using money amounts of 10k, 50k, 100k, 200k, 500k, 1million, 5million. The entire game becomes fantasy, nothing to care about; just a game… and the thought of having REAL money and doing this for REAL just flies out the window. Stick with the original.
Despite those problems though, we had fun. It was nice having a family game going that wasn’t a video game, and I’d like to find a way to make it a weekly ritual. Shorter games, though!
Ones I’d like to get that I remember from childhood are: TriOminos, Uno, Skip-Bo, Boggle. I’m also planning on getting Blokus for Brendon for his birthday in May (he really wanted it for Christmas but it didn’t fit into our budget), and I’m thinking about getting Set as well.
If you’ve got any suggestions for COOPERATIVE games that are fun for families, please, lemme hear ‘em! (Okay, even Xbox 360 games, sigh… lol.)
What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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