Happy Halloween from the Monopoly Man

Halloween is a big deal in New Orleans. Everyone dresses up, regardless of whether they are trick-or-treating with children. People deck out their yards with awesome decorations. Law firms shut down early so folks can get to parties. Like everything else in New Orleans, we treat Halloween as one massive party.

This year, I am dressing up as the most property-related item I could think of: a house. And not just any house. I will be going as a house from the board game Monopoly. This goes along with our amazing Monopoly-themed family costume: our eight-year-old is the “In Jail / Just Visiting” space; my best friend is the race car; and my husband is Rich Uncle Moneybags (aka the Monopoly Man). Our costumes are complete with specialized trick-or-treat bags, too: a “get out of jail free card” bag for the munchkin, a series of property deeds for me, Monopoly money for my husband, and dice for the race car game piece. We are all in for a rockin’ and (dice) rollin’ good time this Halloween.

The theme for our family costume was inspired by the absurd amount my family plays Monopoly. In September, we had a month-long game going in which we played for 45 minutes before bed time e-v-e-r-y n-i-g-h-t. I had to make more money because the bank ran out. It was nuts.

Monopoly is a game filled with lessons about property and property law. (Obviously there are lessons about why we need antitrust law, too, but those are pretty apparent given that the name of the game is monopoly.) Some properties are more profitable to own than others, and the most profitable are not always the most expensive. Take Mediterranean and Baltic. Cheapest board spots to buy, but even if you get a hotel built on them, it will only cost $450. Or take Boardwalk or Park Place. Sure, they are the most expensive and it will cost $2,000 in rent once there’s a hotel on Boardwalk, which is almost always enough to knock someone out of the game. But it also costs $200 per house, which means you have to fork out $1,000 before you get a hotel and most people don’t have that type of dough laying around in the game.

No, the best properties to get are the pink (St. Charles, States, Virginia), orange (St. James, Tennessee, New York), red (Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois), and yellow (Atlantic, Ventnor, Marvin Gardens) properties. These are all affordable themselves, and putting houses on them won’t break the bank. But if someone lands on them once they are developed, it starts to seriously deplete your opponent’s cash supply. Hit them more than once and you are staring defeat in the eyes.

The same is true for real property (“real” as in actual property, not imaginary property). Buy the most expensive house on the block in the most expensive neighborhood and you may not see the return you want. Buy the cheapest house in the least expensive neighborhood and the same result may occur. Everyone wants to hit the sweet spot—the house that costs the least but had the most value to give back.  

Monopoly also teaches about the value of developing property. Sure, it’s nice to own a bunch of random pieces of property around the board, but you don’t see serious cash flow until you start developing your properties with houses and hotels.

Remember the Community Chest and Chance cards? Those are filled with property lessons. We have explained the concept of taxes to our eight-year-old more times than I’m guessing most parents have, simply because she wants to know why she is being assessed $115 per hotel for street repairs. In a city like New Orleans where pot holes can swallow your car, it’s not that hard to convince the little one that street repairs are important, but how street repairs get funded was a dinner time conversation all because of Monopoly.

Sure, Monopoly pushes the capitalist ideology hard (and then pushes it a little more), so the Bernie Sanders’ followers may not enjoy the game quite as much. And, yes, Monopoly doesn’t exactly highlight the nuance of bankruptcy law. You either have money and win or you are bankrupt and lose; there’s no second chance or bankruptcy laws to take advantage of, so maybe it’s not played in Donald Trump’s house either. But it has helped our daughter understand some basic principles of buying and selling property, investing in property, developing property, etc. And it’s provided us with hours of family game time entertainment, not to mention, some pretty stellar, homemade Halloween costumes.