Lenovo, EA, Intel unite to DESTROY our childhood memories Exactly why someone would want to play Monopoly on an all-in-one PC lying flat on the kitchen table, Intel didn't say, but a tableau vivant of a nuclear family doing just that was the centerpiece of a "Bringing Back Family Night" demo the company presented during a press event at CES 2013 on Monday. In the demo, introduced by …
The real reason for games is not to play them. You play them as an excuse for social interaction.
What's the chance of "helpfully" moving an opponent's piece an extra square along from a safe square to a chance to get assessed?. Where's the fun in arguing if the dice roll is valid because its half off the board?
Unless you're teaching programming you can probably take IT out of the classroom too, or at least, out of the student's hands. Sure you can produce great results with a computer, but where is the achievement in using clip-art over drawing freehand? I'm not interested in my child producing a perfectly presented project, I'm interested in them learning about the animals, not cut & pasting from Wikipedia.
Call me when I can flick pictures and diagrams from my enormous horizontal screen up into a hologram projection. I don't know what I'd do with it (apart from redesign the Death Star without ventilation shafts) but it would be cool.
swings/roundabouts.
Undoubtedly part of the appeal of monopoly for younger players is the tactile pieces and all the stuff. Undoubtedly a part of the lack of appeal for older players is the colossal faff involved in setting it all up and putting it all away again, not to mention lost pieces etc.
Looks like a winner for Lenovo to me on the grounds that if they sell one of these, they'll sell millions for the simple reason that nothing is as likely to cause rage-breakages as Monopoly.
Yup, Monopoly is child's play to set up compared to loads of board games. I enjoy Mansions of Madness, and that takes about an hour of careful prep, in secret, to get everything seeded and ready to play.
In Monopoly, you just hand out a bit of money and put a top hat in a corner.
Pfft!
Try Titan
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/103/titan
or if you can find a set of Second Edition rules with counters and book Star Fleet Battles
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/31684/star-fleet-battles-volume-ii
or better yet War in the Pacific and play the full war campaign
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22843/war-in-the-pacific-second-edition
Sadly, I can't remember the name of the Avalon Hill game that was the mother of all nightmares and was completely unplayable until it came out for the Mac II. You were colonizing and conquering worlds (sf game) but you couldn't play it because of all the bookkeeping for production and development of ships.
My mum used to throw the board and contents on the board at my dad, usually when she found him helping himself to the pile of money like a banker.
She refused to play after one such episode where my Gran was giving my dad unauthorised loans to keep him in the game. It is so much more tactile when you can throw objects at other players.....
I miss those days..
But if it were my iPad/Tablet flying through the air I might not see the funny side.
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Not to mention when playing with your kids you often have to tweak the rules to stop them loosing quickly (depending on their age). Special rules are part of the fun! It's one thing having the game on your phone for quick games but replacing the board game at home? not for me :)
Actually in my house it was the reverse. My mum and my sister used to steal thousands from the bank while I was working out how much rent they owed me.
As for free parking, we had a slightly more evil rule for that, any taxes etc were put into the middle of the board rather than the bank, land on free parking you get the taxes. Kinda like being a politician. We don't play monopoly anymore though, apparently it's not as much fun when I catch them stealing from the bank.
Rules? they do change!
We always used to play on my mother's old monopoly set which was from WWII vintage ... thus no frivolous waste of metal on playing pieces when there's spitfires to be built ... the pieces were card pictures in wooden stands ... and the houses and hotels were wooden + think the money is all denominated in £'s rather than the modern M$'s (also, £500 are red - orange is for £50). Anyway, the set had a additional printed slip in it with a "rule change" to allow games to take less time - each player gets dealt 2 property cards at the start which they have to immediately buy - and the reason for this ... to stop games taking too long when there was the possibility of having to abandon the game due to an air raid!
Actually, the reason most people think Monopoly sucks is that they DON'T play by the official rules. Play by them and the game will end, frequently in under 2 hours.
I picked up the EA game for the PC a while back and can regularly win the game on all levels, usually in under 45 minutes.
its so responsive how the pieces always move to where you put them and not..... where some algorithm wants.
board games are shit. nuclear families are shit. and table top PCs are the thin turd chain that joins them together in the supermax society. does the table pc spy on you and sell you novelty bumper stickers and soft drinks as well? Let me guess there is an obnoxious shop to buy table pc board games so that you can pay your money for something thats like a real object but not real!!!!! fuck computers.
My parents UK set (1960s vintage?) was:
£1 = yellow
£5 = blue
£10 = light grey
£20 = green
£50 = pink
£100 = orange
£500 = red
I'm surprised how widespread the 'fines go in the middle, pick them up if you land on Free Parking' house rule is. IIRC it was introduced to our house by a Finn.
Just because we can doesn't mean we should! I agree totally with the article author. I'm 50, btw, and yes, I can confirm in the UK they are £ notes. We bend, twist, distort and utterly destroy the rules in our house. Especially when nobody is looking. I have a set of original pieces that we use occasionally. You can't properly play these games on a computer though. It just doesn't work. Computers are ok for some things but not everything should be digitised and are best left analogue. Music, for example. And board games.
When I looked at that image, the first thing that went through my head was that it cried out to be painted by a 21st century Norman Rockwell and put on a Saturday Evening Post cover.
Both are long gone.
For those of you whose memories don't stretch back to the '50s or '60s, Google is your friend.
Icon as The Glumms, Goons, etc were much the same era.
The computer version is awful though... effing annoying animations everywhere for absolutely no reason and AI players that cheat like buggers. Kids get a lot out of playing the board game, tedious as it often is... there's all the counting skills involved and the very basic tactics so it's quite an accessible game.
Also, don't play "through the ages"... play "Civilisation" or "History of the World" (preferably the tea-towel edition) instead.
"effing annoying animations"
Oh, I don't know. Some can be quite funny. I recall playing the PSX version once, and one of the "For Sale" animations (St. James Place, I think) had the bird actually crash into the "For Sale" sign (sadly, same bird flew through once it was gone). Made that property a local favorite.
"Technology's gone robot-happy. Any job has to have a robot, or the engineer in charge feels cheated. You want a doorstop; buy a robot with a thick foot." - one of Asimov's robot stories.
The tech industry has been criticised for decades for its emphasis on punting tech over solving problems. Unfortunately they're still at it.
Not often I say this, but no computer required for family fun.
Sure the Wii is good and the 360 have more family games available now (if you have enough space to set up Kinnect), but what is wrong with sitting round table with friends and family and just having fun.
My kids have developed a healthy taste for games and understand that not everyone wins someone has to lose every single time!
My 3yr old loves Candyland (counting game, sort of like snakes and ladders), Hungry Hippos (new version feels flimsy compared to original), and Yahtzee.
My 7yr old loves Yahtzee, Risk (transformers version naturally lol), First past the post (horse racing gambling/counting game) and Escape from Alcatraz.
We have a games cupboard which has everything from Murder Mysteries (which have the story and plot on a cassette tape (must get them digitized soon hmm!!)) to card games. The shelf above has the Xbox and Wii games. Teaching kids to win and lose is as essential as teaching them to read and count, so many children are growing up with an unbalanced sense of fair play in which they believe they are all winners and they dont have to earn anything to get something.
"so many children are growing up with an unbalanced sense of fair play in which they believe they are all winners and they dont have to earn anything to get something."
Looking at my own I'm sadly so moved to upvote and agree with you! Need to dig out those (unplayed) board games asap...
I got curious with Risk and noticed all the different variations. Each themed game had its own gimmick variation, so I came up with a variation of my own which you can use if you don't use all the colors. I came up with the idea for making a "Gang Wars" version of the game, but I guess you could call it a "Peacekeeper" variant. The variation is that, at the end of each turn, you placed a piece of the unused color on one of the borders or routes (and it had to be one in contest), and that border is now blockaded for the rest of the game; you can't move anything across that border or along that route. Eventually, the blockades prevent any more war, and the game ends with a headcount.
I think the trouble is not the coddling itself (for very young children, games that are more fun than anything help to keep up their spirits) but rather learning when to wean them off onto more serious games. For me, I started with Chutes and Ladders, moved up to Sorry! and then to Monopoly, and we then had more fun from there with other games like Go For Broke!
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