Lets play a game

The kids were going through the cupboards the other day and found this.....

They wanted to know what it was then wanted to play it of course.  I tried a few excuses to fob them off as it's a bit old for them but in the end I decided the best way was to have a game and when they soon lost interest, we could put it away again.

First we had to choose our characters.  Was it to be Aragorn, Frodo, Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf or Galadriel?

Then we made our way around Middle Earth instead of London so it's all the way from Bag End to Mount Doom in this version of Monopoly.

It's now a few days since the game was unearthed from the cupboard and the interest hasn't waned.  I'd say it's probably increased in fact but then that could be because my six year old daughter is whipping my butt in most of the games we play.  The shame!

She keeps landing on and buying the Horses and Staff's (rail stations and utilities in the original version).  After she's bought them I seem to do nothing but land on them and so have been going broke quickly.

At least the Lord of the Rings version has a twist if you wish to use it.  It has The One Ring which moves around the board on all the Middle Earth Territories each time the Eye of Sauron is rolled on the dice. 

One of the dice has a red eye on it instead of a number 1 as you can see in the below picture.  There's a few other rules for when the ring is on a space which you land on but the most important for us lately is that when the ring finally lands on Mount Doom, the game is over.

This helps make it go a bit quicker for the kids and we don't get fully into all the bartering and mortgaging you can get into with a LONG game of Monopoly. 

As for Master M, he loves it too but that's mainly so he can roll the dice.  That's all he likes doing so we give him a token but no money.  He just moves his token about the board when it's his turn and doesn't buy anything or have to pay rent etc.

When he gets bored and runs off, we leave his token there and he then keeps going from where he was when he decides he wants to play again. (If he rolls the eye then we do move the ring.. he likes that bit too).

Hope you're all having a fantastic week.

xx Susan