Star Wars Monopoly…The festive season is now complete – or at least, the activity while hanging around indoors with people bit.
Following Dan’s brainwave for a present for his cousin, who at a tender age has embraced the excitement that is Star Wars, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a set for ourselves too.
So it was lovingly unwrapped and put to use yesterday, having a social for our church small group yesterday. We knew that one of the others was well set for board games, having seen her in action on our June holiday, but were waiting to see what happened for the other group member…who promptly walked off as the highroller of the evening.
Despite my more recent move to gameplaying interest, I feel I should give you an overview of what it’s like. You get nice little figures as pieces to move round the board, ie familiar characters from the films.
Dan noticed that there are five goodies to three baddies, but then I think that’s as it should be, really. You also get currency in credits (I think), rather than pounds, and instead of building houses or hotels, you build colonies (small space ship pieces), working up to star ports (larger space ships – in this case, a Millenium Falcon).
You also get to swap the familiar destinations of London for Star Wars ones. It doesn’t take a lot of thinking through to agree that Yoda’s swamp is the least attractive (or rather, cheapest) location on the board, with the heart of the Empire, Coruscant, as the most expensive.
A few elements of the board could have been jazzed up a little, in line with the theme – why not go to a penal colony, rather than jail? Or use a star ship motif, rather than a car, in Free Parking?
But aside from this, there is of course great opportunity to a) listen to Star Wars soundtracks while playing (check), b) swap Star Wars viewing stories (check), c) make noises like the characters when doing well or thwarted (no we didn’t do this, but I’m sure it should be mandatory from now on), etc.
And of course, you can mortgage all your properties, all too swiftly, in keeping with this year’s financial theme, sadly. But if you lose, hey, it’s all in a galaxy far far away…