Monopoly

Lessons in fairness

I’ve mentioned several things I remember from childhood trips to France in previous posts (and if you’re really lucky I’ll even manage to squeeze another few dispatches out of them too), but I haven’t spoken about Monopoly yet.

When we were younger, my sister and I were what you might call aggressive players of the game. I’m not saying either of us would cheat, but we would certainly move heaven and earth to make sure we got the streets we wanted and then plonk the requisite number of houses/hotels on them as quickly as possible.

One evening, while we were on one of our regular trips to Dinan (a place I mentioned very recently in a post about a warning light on a car dashboard), we were challenged to a game of Monopoly by our hosts (or, more accurately, their children, who were the same ages as us). National honour was at stake, it was TeamGB v France, and so the two of us worked together, buying up properties as swiftly as we could and getting ourselves quickly into good positions.

In the background, Blondie’s Parallel Lines would have been playing on repeat, since the daughter of the house had just bought it in the UK (at the time, records tended to come out earlier on our side of the Channel, and they were cheaper too). It was a good album then and it’s still a good album now, and now I’ve remembered this particular fact, I’ve put it on. One Way or Another, I’ll need to get back to the story though, I don’t want to leave you Hanging on the Telephone, wondering what happened next.

Once the last street had been sold, proceedings were halted. We didn’t understand what was happening but were told that their family’s rules were predicated on fairness and that, now there were no more streets for sale, things would need to be redistributed to give everybody an equal chance. In practice, this meant that nobody could have a block of streets along a single side of the board, or more streets overall than any other player. Oh, and we each got one station.

The result of this extremely fair distribution was that the game became interminable. Since everybody had the same chances, in point of fact nobody could lose, but neither could anybody win. You just went round and round the board, handing money to somebody when you landed on their property, and then getting it back when they subsequently landed on yours. Ad infinitum.

I have no memory at all of how the game finished, and suspect that in a parallel universe I’m still there, pushing my little top hat round and round the board, and desperately trying to work out how to either get ahead, or get out of there.

There’s a vital lesson here, which is that if you want to make sure you don’t lose out, you have to change the rules to suit your agenda.

Remember that, and things will work out just fine.

Post illustrated with a random photo of a place that isn’t Dinan but isn’t that far away, further to the west, but still in the same département. I haven’t been to that specific part of Brittany since the days of film cameras, and looking at the photos I’ve got, none of them really cut the mustard as up to the job of illustrating this post.

So instead, here is this photo, which is of a place called Plougrescant, taken back in 1991 (using a Minolta X700 SLR, in case you’re interested). The photo is very much a product of the analogue age. It’s definitely not very sharp, and the graininess is a result of the way I scanned it a few years ago, fairly badly and at a resolution that could, or should, have been higher. I could scan it again, but in some ways I quite like the result and, since this is my post, that’s good enough for me.

Thank you for reading.