Game #5: Monopoly (1991)

I was 10 when this came out, and the Kula siblings waited for this one with bated breath. Our mom’s closet and a small room in our house dubbed “the office” held two separate stashes of board games that we only played when it either rained or our collective boredom was at extreme levels. One of our most beloved board games was Monopoly, only we used mom’s 25^th anniversary edition, special because it had wooden houses and hotels and gold tokens that included the ship and the ultra-rare locomotive. I was always the locomotive because I was older and thus, way cooler.

However, terminal boredom was still not enough reason to keep us attached to a marathon game of Monopoly, as the games ran indefinitely long. Also, my sister was five, so trying to keep her doing anything for over ten minutes was a fruitless endeavor. Trying to keep a five year old playing Monopoly at all is perhaps the MOST fruitless endeavor.

Because the Nintendo was the end-all be all technological advancement, any board game that is released for it is automatically the only way to play. Gone are analog board games. Othello? Who needs it? And don’t even get me started on Pictionary.

That said, “Monopoly” was the sleek streamlined version of the tiresome game that we’d been waiting for. I never owned it, but my sister and I pooled our sad-kid-eye resources and rented this a lot of times. For all the times we rented it, we probably could have bought it outright. Unfortunately, parents don’t think like that.

We were enthralled by the extras crammed into the game: the animated hammer building the houses, the cash register and Capitol building that ate your money, the auction system (which we didn’t care enough to do in the analog version), and the ability to name your character. I usually picked “M U N Y” and thought it was really clever at the time, even though it never stood for anything.

“Monopoly” ushered an era of solidarity in the Kula ranks that lasted for most of my childhood, and to think that it took a video adaptation of an old fuddy-duddy board game to do it only speaks to the timelessness of the lazy video game weekend and the unbreakable bond between brother and sister.