Last updated 11:25, Monday, 24 November 2008

Plates of fish fingers and chips perched on the edge of a kitchen table, fighting for space with crisp piles of bank notes. The most important factor in the game seemed to be pure luck, unless I was winning in which case my success was clearly down to great skill. Monopoly, the board game that encourages brazen commercialism, was created to highlight the evils of capitalism.

Well, even ruthless capitalists have to eat.

My brother and me spent countless childhood hours pushing our pieces around the Monopoly board, interrupted only by our parents’ annoying attempts to feed us or send us to school.

Like a pair of trainee manic depressives, we tasted the sweetest highs and bitterest lows as our fortunes fluctuated with every throw of the dice.

The lows began even before the game did. We both wanted to be the car, obviously, but my brother would exercise his rights as the oldest and the biggest, leaving me to shuffle around with the boot, the Scottie dog or – the shame of it! – the iron.

Games could last quite a while, to put it mildly. Even Edward P Parker, a former president of Monopoly’s copyright owner Parker Brothers, said: “We always felt 45 minutes was about the right length for a game but Monopoly could go on for hours.

“A game was supposed to have a definite end somewhere. In Monopoly you kept going around and around.”

You certainly did. The longest officially recorded game lasted 10 weeks.

If the Guinness Book of Records had sent a representative to Mount Pleasant Road in the early 1980s they would have seen many games longer than that.

One epic, when I was nine and my brother 11, started just after school and finished when his wife and kids turned up.

And in all this time, all those endless car and iron-pushing hours, neither of us bothered to develop anything resembling a strategy.

There was a tactic and it was this: BUY EVERYTHING.

Whoever landed on any street, station or utility company would snap it up.

No matter that Halley’s Comet could be seen three times before you’d recoup your investment on the Electric Company – buy it!

Strategy, analysis, or any kind of thought were swept aside in the naked pursuit of money.

Is there a better metaphor for the world’s financial crisis?

Certain squares appeared magnetic to our little silver pieces while Lord Lucan could have hidden undisturbed on others.

Apparently Trafalgar Square and Vine Street are the most frequently landed-on properties while Old Kent Road and Whitechapel Road are the least visited, reflecting their modest price tags.

When friends visited my mother would sometimes suggest a game of Monopoly. She might as well have asked if anyone fancied World War Three.

These games soon descended into carnage, fuelled by the realisation that every group of players has their own rules. Some people start buying properties on their first journey around the board. Others have to go around once before buying.

Strangely, any alternative rules were only ever invoked to help a player’s cause. I have yet to hear anyone say: “Excuse me, but in MY rules I shouldn’t be allowed to take that money off you.”

As my brother will acknowledge, we didn’t need outsiders to turn a game of Monopoly into an argument.

Looking back I suppose it’s possible that my behaviour may have contributed to these arguments. I was a bad loser and an even worse winner.

Let’s say, for example, that my brother landed on Mayfair and I was fortunate enough to have a hotel on that lucrative square.

He wouldn’t be happy anyway, and his mood may not have been improved by me leaning into his face, adopting a squeaky voice, and saying: “Ooooh! You’ve landed on Mayfair! I’M GOING TO WIN!”

Unfortunately my dentist didn’t take Monopoly money.

There was no better feeling than reaching that tipping point where you have enough money and properties to swat away any minor setbacks and slowly drain an opponent’s lifeblood.

The slower the better. If my opponent was ready to walk away I would try to prolong the agony any way I could, bending the rules to let them avoid paying me, even lending them money. I’d have lent them my pocket money to keep the taste of victory alive.

Then there were the “unlucky” days when I was on the receiving end. The games when I would welcome a spell in jail as a respite from the ordeal, the games when pushing my iron down the home straight of expensive greens and purples was like playing hopscotch in a minefield.

It’s little wonder that Monopoly has lasted so long and remains so popular. All human life is here. The local versions are a good idea but the real appeal lies in the people not the places.

Joy. Despair. Anticipation. Frustration. Crushing friends and family underfoot.

If Monopoly taught us anything, we now know that it’s dog eat little silver Scottie dog out there.

The idea was first suggested in the USA in the early 1900s by a Quaker named Elizabeth Magie Phillips. Her invention, The Landlord’s Game, was supposed to illustrate the danger of concentrating land in private monopolies.

Various versions of the game were published, by Phillips and others, during three decades whose details have largely been lost.

The game in its present form was patented in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, by an unemployed American named Charles B Darrow, whose previous job was with a coal company.

Darrow built the first set in 1931. He sold a few to friends, and through Wanamaker's shop in Philadelphia. Games company Parker Brothers rejected Monopoly at first before changing its mind and buying it from Darrow.

The game was licenced in Britain by Waddingtons. Managing director Victor Watson felt that the American locations should be replaced so he and his secretary Marjory Phillips looked for suitable locations in London.

In recent years dozens of versions have been produced for various countries and cities, as well as sets based on Star Wars and The Simpsons.

An estimated 750 million people have played Monopoly, making it the most popular board game in the world. A world edition has just been released featuring international cities.

The Polish seaport of Gdynia is by far the smallest city featured, thanks to enthusiastic support from its citizens.