Monopoly The Game
I think most of us at least know what Monopoly is. Personally, I never had my own Monopoly game at home because my mother could not afford such expensive boardgames most of the times, we had a few cheaper ones and Scrabble, which was fine by me. I always liked playing Monopoly as a child but living just with my mother, it was a bit less fun than playing with 3 or 4 people in total anyway. So whenever we had family Sunday's at my grandmother, we could play it with a few other family members or just us kids because she had the game at home or my nieces brought it, I don't remember exactly.
Being sportive
I remember that quite often my older cousin would play false, and my little niece always fell for it when he tried to cheat her in the game. I was the middle kid of the bunch and I was just happy that I could play it sometimes because I didn't have another side of the family like they did. I don't recall being such a cry baby when losing as my niece was, and it always annoyed me when it happened, lol. It was a long road for everyone to make her understand that "you win some, you lose some" and it's just a game so not worth fighting over.
It's exactly this which we're dealing with now too with our 7 year old daughter. She has no experience in playing Monopoly and definitely not learning how to be a good sport. We knew whenever we'd enter the Monopoly field with her, there would be some drama at first. Today was the day this happened.
Rewind to Christmas
For Christmas one of the gifts was a Monopoly set from Carrefour, as they lay there in the shelves for just 5 euros and I thought this would be a nice (and cheap) way to test the game if it's worth buying the real deal later. I didn't want to buy it already if it would end up in the closet for a few more years. Sadly, when we wanted to play it, I discovered that we needed 36 more cards to play the game, a memo that I fully missed, damn it!
Packs of cards
Apparently, they handed out these packs with 4 cards by every 30 euros spent on groceries, you know how it goes. It's a freebie and you end up with doubles which you can trade with others who have doubles. We have never received these, I think this must have been before we started shopping at Carrefour because with a Monopoly promotion, I'd surely have checked what the promo was about as we've talked about buying this game for a few years now.
Anyway, a lot of people received a lot of cards during the promotion period, so then it's a cool way to collect all 36 of them. If you have to buy them for 2 euros a pack to gather them, it will cost you at least 9x2= 18 euros. That's the absolute minimum if you get them all right at once (which would never happen, clearly) so the cheapest way to get this full set complete would be 18+5 euros= 23 euros for the boardgame. And then you have quite cheap money and paper community and property cards.
If I'd known this, I would have probably just bought the regular Monopoly, but again, I missed the memo, lol.
Second hand market
Thankfully for me, when I discovered that I needed these extra cards, I went online at the second hand market and found a lot of people offering these cards. Most of them offered the card numbered and a set price per card, but a few of them offered a full set. I found a complete set of 36 for 5 euros. On top would be some shipping as well as payment protection, meaning if anything goes wrong or it won't be delivered, I get a refund.
It's a good thing that I had this because something went wrong in the system with our house number and it could not be delivered. At first, it didn't seem like a huge issue because I could edit the address OR choose to pick it up the next business day. I picked the later, to avoid even more delivery issues.
They messed up
Instead of having my order at the post office to be picked up for 14 days or so, they made an error by attempting to deliver it again, which clearly didn't work because the label was incorrect. When I found out they were trying this again, hours later it turned out they already made a new label to return it to the sender and with that I contacted the seller. She was very kind and told me not to worry and that she'd let me know once they're back so she can send it again.
It took a bit longer for us to finally have the cards, the second time I made sure to pick a delivery point instead of house address, just in case the system would mess up again. The cards arrived two days ago and we picked them up yesterday.
Monopoly time, or not?
Today it was finally time to live up to my promise to play Monopoly with her. I told her it's been decades since I played it, and I also have to translate it to English now because this is a special Carrefour edition, different from the original version. Thankfully, my boyfriend said he'd join and play with us so we could figure it out together.
I was the banker and I grabbed a cup of coffee to enjoy while playing. When I finished counting the money for every player, I wanted to put the box on the side and there it went: my coffee over all the property cards and table.
NOOOOOO!!
After all this effort getting these stupid property cards, they were ruined even before we could play them. These are just cardboard cards, not really thick or anything and the full mug of coffee was poured on top. I ran to the kitchen to quickly rinse them with water and instantly dry them with a cloth, hoping they'd be still ok to play at least today. I felt stupid for not covering them with plastic or anything, sigh.
My daughter was angry, lol, I can understand though. I was like let us do some damage control and don't stress. My boyfriend took care of the table and everything else on the table covered with coffee, while I tired saving the cards one by one.
Only a few were really affected, but still readable thankfully, the others had some stains and or wet edges but were still ok. We put them on the desk in singles so that they could dry instead of stick together. We said we will play it today with these cards and then instead of paying another 9 euros to get a new set, I will just buy the real Monopoly with the Carrefour savings cheque that should be due somewhere in the next week or so.
I mean, buying these cards once for 5 euros and shipping is ok, but I'm not going to buy another badge of this low quality stuff waiting for another drink to be poured on top, ruining the whole game, lol.
Three hours in
And the little one clearly doesn't know yet how to be a good sport. My head is pounding from the attitude of her during the game, while we are far from being done, and know there needs to be a final round to finish it. Probably tomorrow, because during the week this is definitely not convenient.
She just landed in bed, at 10 PM, and I'm glad she did because I was ready to call it quits for sure. I'm not even winning man! My boyfriend has most streets and even houses on them, I constantly throw the numbers to make him richer than he is, and I was almost out of money! Gosh! I guess I soon need to get mortgages.. OR make sure they land on the most expensive street in the game, which is btw owned by yours truly :)
There is still hope I guess, especially because the most expensive street I have also has a house on it. It broke my bank but I had to try to make a come back in the game.
On the left you see the properties and money my boyfriend has gained, on the right, my poor little stash.
Wish me luck tomorrow :)
Wishing you a good Saturday night!
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