It is Monday morning and I’m catching up. Had one hell of a stressful week followed by another one in a row. Right now I’m half awake and holding on tightly for whatever is going to come today. We had a party for my sister and my niece and nephew yesterday. 40+ people here. Not the time for a stomach to give out and decide that it was going to be on a rampage for the rest of the evening. Thankfully, I tend to avoid interacting at these things. I prefer to hide out under the guise of having computer work to do. Sadly, I kept having to make trips to the downstairs “off limits” bathroom so it was pretty apparent there was something wrong.
Finally found some peppermints and calmed my stomach a bit LATE last night. I wanted to do the other trick of relaxing in a warm bath for a while but my sister and the kids are currently living in Seattle. By the time they would have been settled and asleep, it would have been 3 AM. So I was up early, stomach a little better since I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.
Thankfully the Monopoly addiction that set in last night has passed. Yes, I got some “E” rated games on Xbox for the kids to play. One of them was something called “Party Monopoly” that has different boards and rules. I’ve never been one for Monopoly. When we used to play as kids it would go on forever because no one would ever trade and it would ultimately end when someone stole from the bank or the cat jumped on the board. Come to think of it, we never played it as a family, just once or twice with kids. I now know why.
You HAVE to trade and you have to be ruthless. My whole strategy is to buy every property I land on just to screw over the other players and keep rents down. “Oh, you need this one to complete your holdings? Sorry. Not for sale.” I caught on quickly that whenever a computer initiates a trade, you’ll be screwed. They promptly put 4 houses and a hotel on each property and you lose more each time you land on it than what you paid for it. In all versions I like grabbing the back right corner. While it’s not Park Place or Boardwalk, there’s enough spots there and they’re worth enough that someone is going to hit them eventually and that’ll be that. However, I’ve won games where all I had was the couple of cheap properties nearest to GO. Good rolls kept me from making fatal mistakes.
I eventually started playing the version where you get dealt a couple of properties before you begin and you can’t buy new properties until you’ve passed GO the first time. If chance is on your side you can grab a couple of nice holdings and be in position to turn those into profit later on. I also play with the “equal housing” rule turned on. So when you build a house in a collection you can’t build another one until all the properties in the collection have them. It makes it harder to play (since they go property crazy), but when everyone of your lots has 4 houses and a hotel on it, you’re going to roll in the money.
I’m scaring myself too here. 6 hours of monopoly last night did that to me.
Going back to daily strips one of these days. That’s a long story for another time and I’m out of here.
k9