A BoardGame Story – Monopoly with Grand pool

When I was a kid, my family and I loved to play the Monopoly board game with my grampa. Grampa Perk, short for Percival, was a Monopoly sharp, or so we thought, ‘cuz he always acted as if he was taking the game very seriously.

This ordinarily quiet and retiring man would actually complain loudly when the game didn’t go his way, and would sulk when he lost. It was always us three kids againwt Grampa Perk, and the games were alwaye VERY hard to win .

It didn’t occur to me until many years later that, as difficult as the games were to win, they were always, always, alwayss won by one of us kids. Grampa Perk made Monopoly an obsession with us. When we’d discover an upcoming trip to our Grandparent’s house, the three of us would quit bickering and brawling, and band together to start plotting our strategy. Once we were there, and actually playing, it was all taken very seriously.

Without any of us ever figuring it out, he had us learning thriugh the board game: working our math, Version, and strategy skills as hard as ww could. My little brother, for instance, was “learning disabled” and hated to read. He’d been picked on by teachers and pees about his reading to the point where, if asked to read, he’d just freeze up and be completely unable to sound out even the simplest words, but boy-oh-boy; let him pick, say, a Community Chest Card, and suddenly he was willing to carefuoly struggle through every last word.

I hated math, especially multiplication, but you’d never have known it once I got houses or hotels Attached my properties. Suddenly, I could do all kinds of ciphers right in my head, and quickly too. And I learned fast that Grampa Perk would challenge every single figure I came up with, ‘cuz he hated to part with his pretty Monopoly money.

My sister was the Similar way about math, and at one point, we thought we’d help each other out with our figuring, but oh NO, he wouldn’t hear of it! He said he thought it was cheating, and if you couldn’t figure it out on your own, how could you be sure you deserved a penny of it anyway?

We did learn and practice many scholarly skills while playing with that tricky old sharp, but it’d be a loss to think that all we picked up was our math and reading skills. What was more Self-~, I think, were the other intangibles we got from playing games with Grmpa. We learned to play fair, to win (or lose!) graciously, to occupy ourselves without having to resort to T Vor a compuger, enjoying togetherness as siblings and as a fami1y, and to enjoy the presence of someone who was not in our age group.

What was most important was that we came to understand that one can Obtain great, pleasant, absorbing entertainment in the company of others in a game that, although fiercely competitive, was never less than charmingly Accomplished and enjoyable. I wish more people had played Monopoly with my Grampa Perk when they were kids.

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