I used to love Monopoly. I played it with my best friend and the game went on for weeks. We made up characters for all the locations (sleazy landlord; beautiful heiress; debonair man-about-town; brilliant scientist; that sort of thing) and placed them on levels depending on how often a player visited that square - the winner was the one who got to level 10 (on a bookcase and other furniture in my firend's family room). The game was not about the players but about the locations themselves. I had the American version and she had the British version. We made our own of our home town - of course the streets on which we lived had prime position.
When we played it as children with my father, we let each other off the rent if we landed on a property one of us 'owned', but we always made him pay. And we also gave each other interest free loans if we happened to land on his and couldn't afford to pay up (hence being eliminated from the game). It was him rather than us who perpetrated the board flip complaining, "How on earth did I raise such socialist children?"
In light of all that, I enjoyed this cross stitch kit from Spruce Craft, although I did change the words on the first and last designs.
