“Hello,” James says to her, when she steps out of the kitchen to greet everyone. And everyone kind of freezes, like they’re watching to see how each of them reacts, but it doesn’t last long, and they have a sort of half-hearted embrace.
“Hello James,” Lily says. “It’s nice to see you.”
“It’s nice to see you too. You look well.”
“Is your new girlfriend not here?” I ask, because I remember that Lily said she would invite her, and then I regret saying it, because it’s – well it’s not the right thing to say, is it? But I’ve said it now. “Brooke isn’t it?”
James turns to me, and his smile is a bit forced at first, but then he relaxes again, and almost laughs. He shakes his head.
“I wouldn’t say she was a new girlfriend, Billy,” he replies. “We went on a couple of dates, but it wasn’t really working.” There’s a silence, but James keeps on, and breaks it. “But hey, no need to talk about that. Let’s keep things happy. I hear we’re here to play a games marathon, and I intend to destroy you all.”
“I don’t think so,” Oscar interrupts, and they’re both being playful, and Lily has to stop them by saying we have to eat first.
Dinner is delicious. Lily has really made an effort, and I learn a bunch of new Italian words like ‘bruschetta’, which is a kind of toast with garlic and tomatoes and olive oil, and ‘crostini’, which is sort of the same thing, only with smoked salmon and watercress – but either way they both taste amazing, and there’s these little goat’s cheese tarts that I can’t stop eating. And everyone compliments her on how good everything is, which she seems to like. James sort of dominates the conversation, but not in a bad way. He’s actually much funnier than I ever thought before. He tells us a story about how he found a goat in his dorm rooms, which sounds bizarre, but it turns out it belonged to a friend of his who was trying to get into one of the ‘final’ clubs they have at Harvard university. I didn’t know anything about them, but James explained, they’re these private society clubs that are really exclusive, and even if you get invited into them you have to do an initiation test. And for James’ friend he had to keep a goat for a week, only he left his door open and it wandered off. They all had to search the whole building for it, and only when they’d all given up did James come back to his room, and find it was in his bathroom, eating the shower mat. Everyone laughs at this, except for Eric, because for some reason he’s not in a very good mood.
After dinner is cleared away we get the games out. There’s a mini argument about what to play, Oscar says we should play Risk, but James wants to play Monopoly, so the pair of them end up having a vote. I vote for Risk but neither Jennifer nor Lily know how to play Risk though, so we decide on Monopoly.
I read an article on Monopoly in Science magazine. About how odd it is that it’s become a cultural institution, even though it’s essentially just a game of chance. You can only move to the place where the dice tell you, and then the only choice you have is whether to buy that property or not, and only then if you happen to be the first one to land there. You might as well just take it in turns to roll the dice a dozen times and see who has the highest score at the end. It would be quicker, and there’d be fewer arguments too.
It’s funny how it sucks you in though. I follow the only tactic that makes sense – to buy everything I can at the start, and hope I get lucky. Which is pretty much what everyone else does too. So after a while all the properties have been bought, but no one has a full set, which you need in order to build houses or hotels, and push the rents really high – I’m sure you know the rules. So then the bargaining starts. Eric has gone for the stations (which is a very poor tactic by the way) and practically bankrupts himself getting Lily to sell him the last one. She’s then got the money to buy from Jennifer and James and get two full sets. I have two of the yellow properties and one red one, and James has the opposite, so we do a deal. And meanwhile Oscar gets a set of the dark yellow properties, after doing a deal with Jennifer, who gets the light blue. Then we all start building houses. Pretty soon we’re split into three different levels of power. There’s Lily and Oscar, who are both the most powerful with two sets each. Statistically speaking, it’s almost certain that one of them is going to win. Then there’s Eric and Jennifer. Eric only has the stations, and Jennifer only has one low value set, so it’s just a matter of time before they both get wiped out. And then there’s James and I, who are sort in the middle – we’ve each got one, mid-value set. We’re unlikely to win, but we’ve got enough money and other property to stay in the game for ages.
At this point you could make a mathematical model of the game, using a random number generator as the dice. You could run it a few thousand times, and work out the exact percentage chance we’d each have of winning. Of course it wouldn’t give the exact same outcome every time,
