Make It Work Wednesday

Tucker is a Monopoly wunderkind. We have regular Monopoly and Monopoly Millionaire. I prefer Monopoly Millionaire about a million times over regular Monopoly. There are several really good reasons for this:

1. Monopoly takes FOREVER to play. Even if you use the fast track version with the extra red die. And when it comes to board games, I get bored after about 30 minutes.

2. Monopoly messes with my sense of organization. It's impossible to keep the money neat and it bugs me when it's not all turned the same way. (I blame my past life as a teller for that last one.) And when my kids have this huge pile of money and property all tossed together, I find myself actually resisting the urge to straighten it out when they look away. Plus, if you get to the point where you can actually add houses/hotels, they don't fit neatly on the board and they are always getting pushed out of place. Drives me nuts! In addition, my kids have played with other kids who have been allowed to cheat, and that doesn't fly in our house, so tears and anger are almost always included. No fun!

3. Since Robert and I insist we play by the written rules included in the game, gone are the days of the chance of landing on Free Parking and scoring a huge pile o'Monopoly money collected from taxes, fees, and such. I'm probably just bitter about that because I seem to land on Free Parking a lot. Also I land on Go To Jail a lot, but with all the hotels and houses Tucker scatters across the board, sometimes that's way more of a blessing than a curse.

So, with this edition of Make It Work Wednesday in mind, I not only agreed to play Monopoly with Tucker (we started a game yesterday but had to leave for Meet the Teacher day), but I actually was the one who suggested it.

We played the fast track game. He annihilated me. He was willing to trade me 3 of the 4 railroad properties for Boardwalk. That only worked to his advantage though, because he ended up with 3 houses on Boardwalk and did not once land on a railroad after we traded. Not once. And my two house Oriental Avenue rent of $30 didn't really hold up against his $700 rent for his 3 house Kentucky Avenue. How many times did I land on Kentucky Avenue? About 7. How many times did he land on any of my properties with houses? About 3.

But what I DO love about Monopoly is that Tucker practices a lot of adding and subtracting and he learns about managing money (even if it's sort of abstract). When I looked at it as the Daily Dose of Dahl version of the Cosby Show episode where Cliff teaches Theo about money, well, it became a lot more fun.