So I had a great time visiting family this weekend, and it's official; my niece is now 9. It's kind of scary to think in a way. When we moved back, she was 6. Should I start singing Sunrise/Sunset or The Circle of Life? Eh, either way I still come off as an aging queen. I am exhausted though. Seriously, two days, and we're still not back to any sort of regular rhythm. Not going to bed before 1 in the morning for almost a week straight, may have something to do with that. Also, stuffing myself didn't hurt.
My niece is at that age before it's uncool to play games, and in particular, she's all about pokémon. So she and the husband are deep in to Black and White right now. They've even figured out now how to trade internationally. I had enough time to update Ubuntu before the computer was needed for repeated trades and after, the fun of the Pokémon Dream World began.
Somehow, husband and niece had exhausted their options in game, and I finally had the chance to update Ubuntu, which meant that we were actually all free at the same time. By convenience, so was my older niece who was also home at the time. Since there were four of us, we thought it would be more fun to play something together. We had talked about playing Monopoly before but we didn't have time the day before. We did watch X-Men: First Class though. Did I mention I love Michael Fassbender?
Now I had played Monopoly before, well....never a whole game. When I did play, it always ended up the same way: my oldest sister never wanted to play, and it was with my older sister and brother. My little brother would be enthusiastic about starting, but he always ended up getting upset about it. After all, he was all of 5 or 6. Usually the board ended up overturned, and my little brother running out of the room crying. He'd run to Mom and she'd declare my little brother the winner. It's why I stopped playing board games for a long time. After that, I pretty much swore off board games.
I wasn't exactly sure what to expect in this game as I had never played with my oldest niece. She's usually pretty level headed about things, but I didn't know what to expect. I already knew that my little niece would be a horrible loser, but also a horrible winner. I had seen controllers thrown when she was upset, but also I'd seen now she rejoices in her victory over others. She's still young enough where it's cute sometimes, but I knew where she stood at least. The husband, well....it's not that he's a horrible loser, but he gets upset when things don't go his way. So this would be interesting. (I'll admit that I myself, also have the same problem, although losing a video game pisses me off more than losing a board game. They call it rage quit for a reason!)
Now this was not a newer version of the game, so it was in francs.For some reason I don't remember any of the money amounts being higher than 500 in the American version. In francs, the highest denomination was 50, 000. That seems like an insane amount to have normally. Of course, considering that it takes about 7 francs to make a euro and 6 to make a dollar, you see why the prices are so much different. Buying the most expensive lots in the game are also rather ridiculous. The most expensive property in the French version is Avenue Champs-Élysée at 32, 000 Francs! I couldn't imagine spending that much for Boardwalk. In the French game, you start out with 150, 000 francs, so it's deceptive how much you have. I did buy 6 properties though: two reds, two yellows, a light blue and a dark blue.
I have a real problem with money, in that when I have a lot of it, I don't think about how much of it I'm spending, until it's too late. I think I spent about 120, 000 francs on property. I was a bit worried about having enough money to make it through from one round to the next. However; getting two thousand francs instead of two hundred dollars helped. I finally started getting some revenue back when people started landing on places that got me between a thousand to three thousand francs when someone landed on them. I dunno if I just never played it correctly, but it was pretty good.
We ended up doing pretty well, until we started doing the auctioning off of the properties. We only had one, and I had no idea what I was doing. I kind of just got confused, and after it was explained, I ended up offering 50, 000 francs. Funny enough, my little niece ended up taking it, at 100, 000 francs. I was kind of glad that at that point we stopped. Leave it to the husband to have a crisis at that point, so we were done.
Later that night, we had originally talked about watching a movie but we were all together, and we decided to play this game called "le jeu de bac." So I'm thinking, wait, what, so this is going to be like a general knowledge questions type thing? But no, it works slightly different. You pick a certain number of categories, boy's names, girl's names, fruits or vegetables, things like that, and then you think of a word that starts with the letter that someone calls out. So let's say you have the categories that I listed before, and someone says the letter R. So then you would need to write down something for every category. If you have the same response as someone else, you don't get a point, but if you are the only person with that response, then you get a point. The object is to think about something that no one else would.
It's more fun just to watch what other people think of. Like the joke is to have something like careers, and see what people put down. We had C for example, and some people had couvrer, chanteur, chimiste, etc. It's an interesting to hear the responses that people come up with, and even better when people mess up. There was a section to name a city and after a country. Some people would put one in the other or two cities or states. A few people also had issues with not playing entirely within the rules, like when some people would cross the idea out and write something else in, but not be very subtle about it. it was a good time, and definitely more convivial than a video game.
So just a couple of the games I never knew but I had a good time playing.
