On my last day at HSC, one of my students suggested a game of Monopoly. I of course encouraged this idea, because I love Monopoly. I ended up playing with two students, whom I’ll call Karen and David, who are a couple. Karen hadn’t played Monopoly in a long time, if ever, so she needed a reminder of how the game was played. I figured this wouldn’t be much of a game, but maybe I could teach them some strategies.

David however needed to learn something entirely different: adding dice. For whatever reason, every time the dice rolled a five and a six, he read it as a total of nine. This probably happened about half a dozen times, which was a little ridiculous. On the third or fourth time I started openly mocking him for it, which isn’t something I normally do to students, but we were all really flabbergasted that he couldn’t figure out that five and six made eleven, not nine.

As the game went on, I ended up with two of the light blues and two of the oranges, and Karen had the third of each set. I let her pick which of the two she wanted, even though normally I would absolutely want the oranges. I figured that she was a novice anyway, and I got some cash out of the deal to try to even it out. I quickly built a handful of houses and eventually hotels, and got lucky enough to pick up Boardwalk at auction and Park Place by landing on it. I used my money from the light blues to build houses on Boardwalk and Park Place, and when I bankrupted David I picked up the yellows too, with plenty of cash on hand to develop those, and got them up to three houses each.

Then things started going awry. Karen had three houses on St James and Tennessee, and four houses on New York. No big deal, I thought, I have hotels on my light blues and dark blues, and plenty of houses on my yellows. I got this all stitched up; just a matter of time. But she kept missing my houses and hotels, and I kept hitting hers. I know that the oranges are landed on more frequently than each of the property groups I had developed, but this was absurd. At one point she had over $3000. I had to sell all of my yellow group houses to pay for the multiple times I landed on her orange color group. She hit my light blues a couple of times, with plenty of cash left over after paying, but never hit my yellows while they had houses, and when I unmortgaged the three railroads I got from David, she then proceeded to never land on them again.

I was in clear danger of losing to a student who had maybe never played the game before, but fortunately I had large enough assets to survive the bad luck long enough until she finally hit Boardwalk with a hotel on it. She was still able to pay it in cash without selling or mortgaging, but her luck had run out, and she hit it again, finally being forced to sell off her houses.