Life-Poker-Monopoly

Last Thursday I flew down to Huntsville, Alabama with my mom. I hadn’t seen my grandmother in a couple of years, not to mention my young cousins and also my aunt and uncle. It didn’t work out for us to do a whole family trip with my sister Sonia and my dad (who had a fishing trip scheduled in the 1000 Islands this same weekend) prior to my departure for China, so we initially thought that we would do a family trip around Christmas. However, since I was hoping to start a tour of Southeast Asia after Christmas and there were ideal trips starting around 12/27 and 12/29 (run by Intrepid Travel and departing from Bangkok), it really didn’t seem like I could squeeze a trip to Huntsville into the time I would be back in the U.S. following the time in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

As a family we usually drive the trip down to Huntsville, which takes about 16.5 hours, or longer in a motorhome. The rare times we flew in the past, we would take three-leg flights from Binghamton that stopped in Pittsburgh/Philadelphia and Charlotte before landing in Huntsville. This was usually the option presented when my dad made reservations using his Dividend miles over the phone. However, I thought that maybe we could buy pretty cheap tickets by looking around, and the research paid off. Syracuse is only an hour north of Binghamton, a pretty easy drive, and I was able to find fares even cheaper than flights from NYC down to Huntsville by going from Syracuse instead. And they made only one stop at Washington-Reagan.

Now to Life-Poker-Monopoly. Both my cousins, Orest who just started ninth grade and Oksana who just started sixth grade, are quite bright and quick learners. So after playing Life, Poker, and Monopoly separately, we decided that a fun grand finale would be to combine all the games. For those of you looking for a new twist on old family fun, here’s how we did it, with the modifications we eventually came up with.

Playing with Monopoly money, we distributed somewhat more money than one usually starts with Monopoly; however, you can probably just start with the same amount because with everything together it is much easier to earn money in the hybrid game, faster.

We played a round of poker to determine the order we would start the game. Then, every property for sale that we landed on, rather than giving the player the option to buy it outright or give it up for auction, we left it to a hand of poker. The ante for all players interested in obtaining the property was equal to the price of the property, meaning the cost was divided between us. Then we played out the hand of poker and the winner received both the bet money and the property.

After discovering that Oksana had an uncanny ability to win poker hands, we eventually (but too late) instituted a new rule that if a player is behind the others in property ownership (perhaps say that any one player has over 5 fewer properties than the player with the next-least number of properties, then that player would get a buy option on any property landed by any player in the game. Obviously in Monopoly it is crucial to own property to stay viable in the game, so to keep the game competitive for all players this rule worked out rather well.

“Free Parking” money, non-standard in Monopoly play but I think a common phenomenon, would also be decided by a poker hand when any player landed on the space.

Be sure to also integrate poker when you want to exchange properties or other cards (see Life integration instructions, below), since it adds to the excitement of the game. And leads to compulsive gambling Better sell a Monopoly title deed than your actual house!

Integrating Life into the picture was a little more complicated but fun nonetheless. The first way we thought of doing this was having each player pick a career out of three cards, and then pick a salary card, also choosing three like in Life. The salary chosen would be added to the normal $200 salary after passing Go, but divided by 1,000. (For instance, a player with a Life salary of $80,000 would get $280 Monopoly whenever they passed Go.)

However, since in the game of Life there are opportunities to switch salary cards, we also came up with the following. If a player rolls a pair of 6’s then they could take one of two options. They could switch their salary with another player, or they could keep their current salary but choose a new salary card and keep whichever they wished from those two choices. This was a good way to try to get that $100,000 salary card into play. The reason we chose the pair of 6’s for this honor relates to how we dealt with stocks (below). And although we didn’t quite get there, we figured that the graduated income tax level shown on the salary cards could be tied into the Monopoly income tax amount, meaning that the highest-earning players also pay the highest amount of money in taxes. (For related discussion, see section on the career cards.)

We liked the idea of Life stocks. We decided that we could buy stocks for $100 (but only one per turn) and then we would receive $20 each time a player rolled that number. For the “1” stock card, the payout occurred upon rolling 11. We didn’t have any stock number associated with rolling 12, so we chose that number for the salary-switch privilege. Note that using this method, the “7” stock card was the best deal because there are 6 of 36 ways to roll it. Next best are the 6 and 8 cards, and so forth. The worst stock to own, of course, is the number 2. (Of course, all of these can be traded by a mutually agreed-upon hand of poker.)

Going back to the career cards, we liked the idea that each career came with its perks. For instance, what we ended up doing was that the Accountant would receive the taxes that any other player would have to pay. The computer technician would receive a set amount of money if any die would land off or on the edge of the board when thrown. The police officer received a payment whenever someone rolled a 10 (“speeding”).

In terms of receiving little “LIFE” blocks, we decided that whenever someone landed on a Chance or Community Chest space and received any cash from the card, then they would also receive a “LIFE” block to tally up later (or to trade in a poker hand).

I think there would be plenty of other creative ways to tie together Life with Monopoly. Maybe buying homeowner insurance would reduce the cost of repairs (making it worthwhile to make the insurance investment whenever a player started developing multiple properties). Perhaps taking a college loan, and repaying it with interest, would allow limits to which players could have which careers and salaries, or maybe taken in the middle of the game it could increase the salary of a player by a certain percentage. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to play the games together.

Of course, with so many modifications, some caveats are in order. The game can get pretty busy and it’s challenging (and fun!) to keep track of what’s going on as each player rolls the dice and takes his or her turn. Also, adding in all these modified payment transfers should be done carefully so that any one player doesn’t get a huge advantage over the others (the “tax goes to the accountant” rule comes to mind, because this happens pretty often whereas other modifications might not). In the end, though, we found that the amount of money that flows into the game is generally pretty high compared with regular Monopoly (where each player passing Go infuses just $200 into the total wealth available in the game), and this can make for quicker play. While this may be a rule in regular Monopoly, we found it pretty help to limit house-building to one house per turn so that no one player goes from riches to bankruptcy just by being behind on building. Maybe provisions could also be make to force players who have the holdout card for a color group to put it up for a hand of poker so that another player can develop the property (if other negotiations fail).

All in all, this was a ton of fun! And my sister has a challenge to learn all the above rules when she comes to visit my cousins while I’m away overseas. I would love to read your comments, suggestions, and stories as comments to this post.