Halifax September 2017 +4.0% YoY +0.8% MoM

westernpromise

About 12, 14 years ago I had a Motorola clamshell phone that came with Monopoly installed on it for free. The AI didn't play the game very well and refused to bid for many properties. So before long I owned several sets, and one each from most of the others, so the AI couldn't build on any of them. Meanwhile, I could, so I put hotels everywhere and typically wiped out the last AI player at a point when I had about £6000 cash.

Getting bored of this, I once played a game where once I'd bought up a few sets I didn't develop any of them. In this way the AI players, going around collecting £200, sometimes getting an extra £45 via Community Chest, and sometimes getting £4 off me when I landed on Old Kent Road, had juuust about enough to pay me when they landed on one of my property groups (double rent, see). As a result, they stayed in the game indefinitely and I simply "farmed" the three or four AI players for the £700 or £1000 a year that their collective income added up to. Whenever their money crept up a bit I put houses on one or two property groups and took it off them.When they were skint again I removed the houses.

I let one such game run on for months and by the time I'd got bored and bankrupted the AI players, I had amassed about £50,000 (I was trying to find out if the game would run out of money - I don't recall that it did).

What I never foresaw, back in 2004, was that there were actual people in the world who with open eyes consent to and indeed insist on being farmed in exactly the same way, while insisting that I was the mug.

It is as though the turkeys think Bernard Matthews is stupid.

Malthusian

I'd rather sell my house, get divorced and live alone in a bedsit for the rest of my 70 years of life than spend one single minute playing Monopoly ever again. It is the worst game in existence.

It takes six hours to play and for four of those hours the winner is already clear. While in chess you can resign a hopelessly lost position and start a new game, in Monopoly resigning from the board and going off to read a book or play something good is considered "anti-social", so everyone has to wait while the winner steamrollers to the inevitable conclusion with their gigantic pile of cash.

No-one should ever be advised to play Monopoly to learn how any aspect of finance works, because nothing is more likely to turn them into a Communist convinced that money is a Zionist conspiracy. Which means they end up spending all their money and blaming the Tories for the fact that they're still renting in their 50s.

I love Westernpromise's analogy though.

chucknorris

Malthusian wrote: »

I'd rather sell my house, get divorced and live alone in a bedsit for the rest of my 70 years of life than spend one single minute playing Monopoly ever again. It is the worst game in existence.

I wonder if that's what happened to Crashy, did he simply get fed up with playing Monopoly?

HPC_Ghuol_Hunter

I'm guessing that Financial Planner would be the banker.