Hours of boredom and animosity guaranteed — why I can never look at a Monopoly board without a shudder

ONE of the most impenetrable mysteries of our age is the enduring popularity of the board game Monopoly. As everyone who has suffered it will surely testify, it goes on for far too long, pulling off the remarkable double act of inducing numbing boredom and internecine family strife in equal measure.

Indeed, while our four boys were growing up, the game would almost invariably end with one of them hurling the board across the room in a fury, scattering houses, hotels, banknotes, dice, the iron, the boot, the dog, the racing car, Chance and Community Chest cards all over the floor.

And though it’s years since we last played, the odd green plastic house or red hotel will still turn up behind a radiator or beneath the fridge.

Yet for the umpteenth year, Monopoly has emerged once against this week as the nation’s Christmas favourite.

A survey of 2,000 people by Coral Casino finds that, even in this age of the internet and the Xbox, 84 per cent of Britons will play a board game of some sort during the festivities, with Monopoly bagging the number one slot, named by 32 per cent as their choice.

Miserable

Remarkably, the game in its classic and updated versions (did you know you could get a collectors’ edition themed on the TV show Game Of Thrones?) also occupies three of the top five places on Amazon’s list of its best- selling board games over the past 12 months — though it’s beaten to the gold medal position this year by Articulate, ‘ the fast- talking description game’.

Why on earth do people go on buying and playing Monopoly, well over a century after it was invented in America in 1903? ( It was originally called The Landlord’s Game, intended as an educational tool to illustrate the wickedness of concentrating property in too few hands, though it didn’t catch on in a big way until the Thirties.)

Have they forgotten the hours of tedium and animosity they endured when they played it in their own childhoods? Or do they feel there’s something characterbuilding about the experience — a form of suffering that must be passed on from generation to reluctant generation, like forcing the young to eat up their greens?

Whatever the truth, Monopoly will always be associated in my mind with the most miserable family holiday of my life, which the six of us spent in a converted church hall on the Isle of Arran, when our boys’ ages ranged from eight to 16.

I feel terribly ungrateful describing it as miserable, since the accommodation in question had been lent to us, with huge generosity, by a colleague’s parents, whose holiday home it was.

It wasn’t their fault that we had packed nothing but T-shirts and shorts for our August holiday by the sea — or that it rained, and rained, and rained from the moment of our arrival to the afternoon of our departure.

Nor could they help it that our visit happened to coincide with the appearance of an enormous hole in the ceiling of the master bedroom, open to the incessant rain, which meant my wife and I had to sleep on the floor.

Indeed, if only the sun had peeped occasionally from behind the clouds, this could have been a wonderful holiday — and the former church hall, in a beautiful position just yards from the sea, would have been a perfect base for it.

But honesty compels me to say that as a prison for four fractious boys and their tetchy, sleep- deprived parents, shivering in damp summer clothes that we had no means of drying, it left something to be desired.

For one thing, the only windows in the building were 15 feet high up the walls, which meant we couldn’t even pass the time staring out moodily at what would have been a fine, if somewhat grey, sea-view.

For another, the very kind couple who had lent us the house hadn’t visited for a long while, so everything in it reeked of damp and neglect — from rock-hard sugar and salt to mouse droppings on the floor.

Maniac

But worst of all, having envisaged ten days of swimming, rock-pooling and sunbathing (how little I knew Arran in high summer!), we had idiotically failed to pack anything to entertain the boys.

And the only entertainment to be found on the premises was a shelf of yellowing Agatha Christie books, a pack of 47 playing cards and — you’ve guessed it — a cruelly complete set of Monopoly.

So there we sat, for hours on end in the damp and gloom of that hall, playing game after endless game and hating each other more with every throw of the dice.

I felt like Evelyn Waugh’s Tony Last in A Handful Of Dust, held prisoner by an illiterate maniac in the Brazilian jungle, condemned to live out his days reading and re-reading aloud to his captor the complete works of Dickens.

By day four on Arran, when we could stand the game no more, I suggested the family should venture out into the rain to climb Goat Fell, the highest point on the island, so that we’d have at least one achievement to show for our holiday.

We were halfway up its 2,866 feet, ankledeep in mud and bitten raw by midges impervious to the rain, when I had one of the greatest brainwaves of my life.

I put it to my wife and the boys: ‘Should we press on to the top, and then go back to the church hall for another game of Monopoly? Or should we go back down right now, pack our bags, call off the rest of the holiday and drive home to London?’

The latter suggestion carried unanimously. We were on the next ferry to the mainland, heading back to the telly and the warm, dry beds of home. Since then, I’ve never been able to look at that familiar board without a shudder of horror.

To be fair, I should acknowledge that many people clearly love Monopoly, approaching every game in the ruthlessly competitive spirit of the Wolf Of Wall Street and taking it far more seriously than I’d imagined possible.

Only yesterday, I had a drink with a mathematically minded bloke whose eyes lit up when I told him my subject for the week. Before I could stop him, he was waxing lyrical about the subtleties of the game, explaining strategies for winning based on probability theory.

Tantrums

As readers may be aware, though I wasn’t, the total most likely to be scored with one throw of two dice is seven, with six and eight in joint second place, and nine and five in third. The most costeffective properties to buy on a Monopoly board, therefore, are the orange set which includes Vine Street.

This is because it occupies the squares your competitors are most likely to land on when they come out of jail — the sixth, eighth and ninth. Indeed, my friend assures me that the probability of being able to sting a rival for rent is as high as 38.9 per cent.

Meanwhile, Vine Street has the added advantage of being three spaces behind the Chance square — which means its owner can cash in on anyone unlucky enough to draw the Chance card: ‘Go back three spaces...’

But I must stop. If you don’t know what the devil I’m talking about, because you’ve never played Monopoly, then all I can say is that you’re an extremely fortunate rarity.

As for the Utleys, who will be 16 for lunch on Christmas Day, I’ve no doubt we’ll be playing a board game of some kind in the afternoon, because we always do. But I can assure them right now that our ancient Monopoly set, missing a few pieces after countless boyhood tantrums, will be staying firmly in its box.

With that, I wish every one of you a very happy and — need I say it? — Monopolyfree Christmas.