“Playing Monopoly with Putin”
My friends warned me that it would be unlike any game I had ever played but I had heard so much about Putin that I wanted to play him. I was, after all, the best Monopoly player in the world.
The first thing I did was make sure that he had read the rules and agreed to play by them.
“Of course,” he said, “as long as you do.”
We went around the board a few times, buying properties and charging rents; he had the luck to land on, and buy, both Water Works and the Electric Company.
The next time I landed on the Electric Company, he said, “You owe me $500.”
“The rules say I owe you ten times the roll of the dice. I rolled a 4. I owe you $40.”
“I own all the utilities. I can charge whatever I want,” he said. “That’s not what the rules say.”
“I have a monopoly. I can do whatever I want with my power plants. The rules are in the name of the game. Do you not know how a monopoly works?”
“Yes, but ...”
“It is much like an autocratic state. But since you are still learning, I will only charge you half of what you owe me – $250.”
I gave him $40. Which is what I owed him. He smirked and rolled the dice. He landed on one of my properties.
“You owe me $20,” I said.
His smirk got bigger, “No,” he said, “now you owe me $190.”
The next time I landed on one of his properties he said I owed him triple the stated rent, claiming that it was interest on the $190 I still owed him. When I told him that there was nothing in the rules about doing that, he replied, “If there is nothing in the rules about doing it, then you can do it.”
Then he rapped his knuckles on the board and said that I was not following the rules because I was not paying him the money I owed him, that I was out to get him, and that the next time he landed on one of my properties he would just take it from me because I owed him money. He pointed his finger at me during that last line.
I thought he was kidding. Then he rolled the dice, moved his battleship token onto one of my properties, and took its deed from my stack.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“I just did,” he said, “your turn.”
I thought for a moment. If this continued, we would soon get into a physical fight. I looked down at the board and saw my “Get Out of Jail Free” card which I’d kept from a previous turn.
I picked up the card and looked at him, “According to you – since this isn’t in the rules – I can do it. I declare that this card is a “Sanctions” card, and, as I play it ...” I snapped the card down in the middle of the board, “It makes all of your money worthless. And the bank can’t loan you any more money. So you’re going to go broke. Eventually, and inevitably, you will lose.”
He frowned in pain, looking like a weasel who had caught its paw in a trap. Then he composed himself, looked straight at me across the board and said, “I knew you would do that. That just proves my point. You are out to get me.”
Then he picked up his deeds and his money, tore them up into little pieces, tossed them on the board, and left the room.
A sudden and profound sense of melancholy came over me as I realized that I would’t be able to play Monopoly anymore.
He had destroyed the game.
Rick Doehring
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