Solo Monopoly
My kids got a Monopoly set for Christmas and they have been obsessed with it for the last few weeks. I thought it was too complicated for my 7 year old daughter E and 5 year old son C, but they proved me wrong. They are still going strong with it and it’s been having a mostly positive impact on them!
When they first started to play, my wife was the one that volunteered to play with E and C while I went upstairs to play with our 1 year old son L. We had to split up and it was nice playing upstairs and having a calm time since I thought it was going to be chaos downstairs. Turns out, it wasn’t chaos and my wife did a lot of math with E and C. They had a blast!
Afterwards, they wanted to play almost every day. They had it out in the kitchen and also upstairs in the playroom. Sometimes the pieces would get shuffled around or L would go Godzilla on the board, but it ended up fine since we just tried to sort through who had what. We had to cut one of the games sort for dinner one night and I ended up giving out superlative awards for who had the most money, most properties, most expensive rent, and cheapest rent. It was a way to try and make sure the kids had some type of angle where they felt like they won. It’s all about perspective!
C was the most obsessed with Monopoly. He would sometimes play solo and roll for other people while they were not there. He woke up some mornings to roll for me and play solo Monopoly. Of course he somehow ended up with lots of money and properties and I had to fight my way back. E took over for me that afternoon and somehow made a lot of money. They were doing so much math and getting along for the most part. It was so surprising!
The Monopoly run is slowly starting to fizzle out a bit since our dog got a hold of the property cards and chewed through them. L caught the dog doing that and kept saying no no no and taking it away. It was too late though and some were ruined. We packed the game up since we can’t leave it on the counter anymore or our dog would have snacks. All in all, it’s good to know we can break our Monopoly for a board game session and hopefully it’ll be as enjoyable as this run over the last few weeks!
