Mille Bornes doesn’t really have much in common with Monopoly. If anything, its social poison is more akin to that of Sorry!. Lots of board/card games have a strong “fuck you!” element, but when it’s earned only by luck it makes the smugness of the fucker altogether intolerable. You haven’t been outwitted or outmaneuvered or outplayed, your opponent just happened to draw better cards or roll better dice – yet he invariably acts as though it were a result of his amazing skill.
Everyone I knew in high school who played Mille Bornes also played Diplomacy. Suffice it to say they were the most hideously maladjusted nerds in an entire school full of nerds. The chess club dorks and us D&D protogoths and bathroom arsonists were cornfed bright-eyed strapping starting quarterbacks in comparison.
By the way, how come Monopoly and Risk take all this not-unwarranted shit for being drawn out positive-feedback runaways, but most 4X games are exactly the same way (with detailed in-game graphs to prove it!) yet no one ever calls out MOO or Civ or Neptune’s Pride shudder as being shitty in exactly the same way?
We had several house rules for Junta, but they helped to make it fun… There was always a round of applause at the ceremonial shelling of the presidential palance, and when the presedente was deposed, we reenacted the firing squad.
The one house rule that we play that I think makes the game better is to have properties go to auction immediately, with no option to buy just by landing.
It takes away the luck involved with purchasing properties, and makes every single property into a strategic calculation, which is something that is missing in many of the purchasing decisions otherwise. The game fairly quickly divides between people who chose to buy as many properties as possible, regardless of the price, and those who chose to be more conservative.
I believe the comparison he was making was to Monopoly Deal, not vanilla Monopoly. Agree that Milles Bornes played in a naively straight way is pretty crap but they do have that element of baiting the attack to gain advantage that can be interesting. If people know what they’re doing you get these double and triple bluff situations if you like that kind of thing. Monopoly Deal has this as well. I think it’s a valid comparison, even if not 1 to 1.
By far my least favorite “fuck you!” game is Munchkin.
Oh, ugh. Every time I’m at a convention of any sort and someone wants to play a game, they whip out Munchkin, and everyone groans. I’ve never enjoyed it. But it’s in that weird geek territory of Monty Python or Firefly where it’s considered universally acceptable, somehow.
If you’re the banker, it’s easy to have more money than you should.
Also easy to slip more houses onto properties than should be there.
Also, depending on the age, just blatantly doing things wrong and getting away with it, but you said it continued into High School, so I doubt that would be it. =o)
Yeah, I can tell you without a doubt she didn’t cheat. The whole thing was always designed as a learning experience, and she was (and still is) unbelievably honest.
Did I mention the 7-minute speed chess games where she also always kicked our butts? Another tale, for another day.
