The Best Monopoly Game For Your Leftist In-Laws

“World Socialism will be achieved peaceably. Our military role is strictly defensive. Is that understood?” – Octopussy

A capitalist, a socialist, and a communist were meeting up.  The socialist was late.  “I’m sorry,” he explained, “I was standing in line for sausage.  The capitalist asked, “What’s a line?”  The communist asked, “What’s sausage?”

When I was a kid, say, younger than sixth grade, I loved to play Monopoly® at Thanksgiving.  It was great – it was simple to understand, and it involved buying properties to make money from the other players.  My Mom and Grandma would play along.  The fun part for young-me was that if you played the game right and got lucky roles you could reduce the other players to bankruptcy and evict them from your house.  I’ll miss Mom.

After a while Monopoly™ became not a game I looked forward to, but one I dreaded at Thanksgiving.  Why?  The game goes on forever, and the biggest determiner to who wins isn’t great playing ability – it’s luck.  It’s like playing Candyland© with houses.  So, I guess in that respect, it’s like owning real estate in California.  Also, at Thanksgiving I decided that eating enough tryptophan-drenched turkey to knock me on my sorry Thanksgiving butt was more fun, and the couch was as soft as the Cowboy™ defense.  But that was before Monopoly© Socialism™.

But is it a gluten and conflict-free toilet paper made in a sustainable carbon-neutral factory?

Through whatever mechanism that Amazon© uses to track my purchases, it decided that I might be interested in a copy of Monopoly™ Socialism® as well as the tree-free-vegan-bamboo toilet paper.  I’m sure the toilet paper is carbon neutral, but I was more interested in the game, but sadly, Monopoly© Socialism™ was out of stock.  Amazon™ assured me it would be back in stock soon enough.  Part of the charm for me were some of the (actual) questions that other purchasers asked on Amazon®:

• Do I have to wait in a long line for the privilege of purchasing this game, like a breadline in Venezuela?
• Is the board waterproof so Progressive tears won’t ruin it?
• Are there rolling blackouts? Do the players get to eat zoo animals?

With purchasers asking those questions, I knew I was in with my people.  I hit “add to cart” and it was on its way.  It arrived last Wednesday.

Before candles, what did socialists use for lighting?  Electricity.  Which might explain why there were no utilities on the board.

The box was smaller than the usual Monopoly© box – the reason being that instead of just folding up the game board into halves, it folded up into quarters.  No biggie.  I thought that we’d keep the board game on a shelf, and perhaps pull it out next month to Make Thanksgiving Uncomfortable Again©, but Pugsley saw it, and convinced The Mrs. that we should play it on Saturday night.  As it didn’t look like learning the rules wouldn’t require an advanced degree in game design nor require the Supreme Court to weigh in on disputes, I agreed.

I hear that after Ginsburg is gone, Leftists are worried that the decisions will be Ruth-less.

I have only one piece of advice when it comes to playing Monopoly® – do not allow The Mrs. to be the banker – she cheats.  I’m not making this up.  The Mrs. cheats gleefully and more-or-less openly (though she thinks she’s being sneaky) after a few glasses of wine.  It wasn’t three rolls into the game that I saw The Mrs. had been pilfering from the bank’s funds.  But The Mrs. obviously hadn’t been listening when I read the rules – the game is based on socialism, so you don’t win by having the most money.  You win by “helping” in the most projects, things like the “Rise Up” collective bakery.  If you help, you can put one of your Virtue Signal* tokens on the project while the community fund donates to the project.

*The game does not call these tokens Virtue Signal tokens, but the idea is to openly and publicly have other people pay for something that makes you look virtuous, so, to-may-to, to-mah-to.

A Marxist, a Socialist, and a Communist tried to get into a bar.  The bouncer kicked them out after checking their IDs – “Come on back when you’re 21, guys.”

Money comes from the collective.  The game starts with 1848 dollars in the community fund, since the Communist Manifesto™ was published in 1848.  There is absolutely no reason to use one dollar bills in the game, so they tossed them in just for that joke so you can have 1848 dollars.  Nice touch.

I said the game starts with that much money in the community fund.  Every individual player starts with an socialist approved equal amount of zero dollars, so it was easy to see that The Mrs. was in a full on cheat when I saw she had a little pile of currency snuck back.  How does the game go if players don’t have money?  Easy.  If you don’t have money to buy property start a project or pay a fine, it comes from that initial pile of 1848 dollars, which gets replenished when you pass “Go” and get your living wage of 50 dollars, and you put in five for the community.

It’s not like that happened.  We didn’t make it all the way back to Go.  None of us even made it all the way around to Go.

The game ends either when a single player wins by playing all of their Virtue Signal tokens.  The game also ends when all of the 1848 dollars of community money is gone.  And if you run out of the 1848 dollars?  You lose.  Heck, everyone loses.

1848 dollars doesn’t last long.  And we’re not good socialists, so we all lost.

That loss, I think, is the underlying message of the game.  In socialism, pretty soon you run out of other people’s money to spend and everyone loses.  The game cost me $19.99, and it will be worth it to bring it out during Thanksgiving to be slightly more interesting than whatever snoozefest is going on in Detroit®.  It’s not like we wanted to talk to the Leftist side of the family anyway, right?

I think if there Batman©-type Virtue Signal™?  It would have Justin Trudeau’s face.  I mean, without makeup.

But you can’t buy the game for $19.99.  It seems like Hasbro® has stopped making it.  Why?  I don’t know, and it’s useless to speculate if it sold out or if Hasbro™ folded to political pressure.  If you want to buy it on Amazon™ now, it’s selling for (cheapest price with free shipping) about $45, though it looked to be a bit cheaper elsewhere.  After playing the game, I certainly can’t recommend it at that price, unless you really want to trigger your Leftist neighbor/friend/relative.

Maybe we should start calling Facebook™ and Twitter© Socialist media?

The reviews by purchasers at Amazon© are very positive, and they’re by verified purchasers.  The negative reviews, however, aren’t by verified purchasers, and one of them is obviously by someone who never even bought the game.

The reviews by websites on the Internet weren’t really reviews.  They were a listing of complaints that Monopoly® Socialism© didn’t accurately portray socialism.  I’m thinking that the talent of these people has been wasted – where were they when they could have been complaining that Marvel® movies don’t accurately portray superpowers or that Breaking Bad© isn’t a realistic view of teacher insurance policies in the Albuquerque Public School System?

It was as if this minor and humorous critique of socialism in the form of a board game had to be beaten back because the one thing that Leftism cannot stand is . . . being made fun of.  My favorite line from a review was this one where the reviewer almost (but not quite) achieves self-awareness:

Reading between the lines, the game’s designers are saying that with no incentive to work nothing gets done.

Somehow, that was intended as a dig against the game designers.  But it turns out that it’s an accurate representation of reality.  If there is no incentive to work, nothing gets done.  Period.

The simplest version of that statement is, “if you don’t’ work, you don’t eat.”  I’m pretty sure the reviewer (who has written thousands of posts for a clickbait site) would probably not show back up to work if they stopped paying him – he wouldn’t keep writing what the boss said if he couldn’t pay the rent or buy soy milk and chicken tendies.

Socialism looks great on paper.  Unless that paper is in a history book.

It’s clear this game isn’t a real take on socialism, because the end of the game doesn’t feature a failed government, a population in near-starvation, shattered lives, and a blasted economy that will take a generation or more to heal.  In our house, the game ended up with a second bottle of wine, a different game, and a nice evening.

The one negative review that’s correct is this one, and it’s mine:  Socialism is a silly basis for a game, because everyone always loses.  And that’s why Monopoly® Socialism™ caused so many Leftist panties to twist:  because it got it 100% right.