Actually, Monopoly is a great game, and what you listed sounds like some incel sci-fi stuff (I did Google, and they're at least board games, credit for that). Your generation would have benefited from playing outdoors more often. You're all going to be fat and slovenly by the time you're 40 (if you're not already) because you don't know what exercise feels like.
We played Monopoly, Sorry, checkers & other board games on picnic tables outdoors at recreation in the summers. But most of the time it was bball, tons of Wiffle ball and tackle football. I never see the local yoots playing tackle in front of elementary schools nowadays. Everything has to be organized. AND GET OFFA MY LAWN!
I've seen kid-organized games twice in the last five years (well, not counting basketball): orthodox Jewish kids playing baseball with a tenns ball at their school on a Sunday, and Indian kids playing cricket with a tennis ball and milk crates for wickets. That's it. I'm surprised no one called the cops in either case.
We played a combined sort of game that while you were in the street it was touch but if you went on a wide pattern out into the grass on either side of the street you could be tackled.
Nerf footballs in the street, 2 manholes for a TD. Watch for cars & kids on bikes darting out. 5 Mississippi rush & one blitz per set of downs. Skitching around town was popular when it snowed. Haven't seen someone do that in decades. When school was canceled because of snow we'd spend all day sledding and building snow forts & tunnels in the big piles of snow the plows made at the bottom of the street. It was a blast.
Monopoly is a shit game. Good games are ones where: 1) You don't know who is winning up until the end. 2) Every player has a decent shot to win until the end. 3) Decisions, not luck, drive the outcome. 4) Play lengths are constant, not variable. Monopoly is terrible because you know who is winning, players get knocked out, pure luck drives the game, and it can take thirty minutes or TWO DAYS to finish. Also I'm running a half marathon in three weeks.
It's not, though. Gloomhaven streamlines the experience so that your DM doesn't need a masters in creative writing to keep things interesting.
Wilson's ETTD has some good material on the genesis of Trump within the Conservatism Host - especially the role of idiots like Matt Schlapp in bringing the likes of Trump into CPAC - essentially encouraging the cray. By the time of the primaries Wilson's infamous email to key donors urged them to kill Trump off, it being far cheaper to do it earlier than later. The donor class was concerned that Trump would self fund - escalating costs for everyone (not realising he probably had no cash to do this), or worse run as an independent in the election, killing the GOP candidate. So it played out that the rivalries between establishment factions who hoped to use Trump to kill off their rivals opened the door for him to defeat then in detail (i.e. one at a time) Reince capped off the capitulation by making Trump "promise" to run as GOP This view seems Trumpism as Frankenstein's experiment that the GOP brewed for years via wingnut media and rhetoric and then lost control of it and it infected the host Personally I think with hindsight the result was somewhat inevitable given the pure cray that was cynically mainlined into the general whitelandia population
The masters in creative writing is what made the game so brilliant. If you have a great group, there really are no limits to where it can go
Part of where it goes is down to the accidents of history IMO For example in NZ, we were staring down the barrel of 3 more years of austerity and corporate capture. Then Jacinda became leader 7 weeks before the election and swept to power on a wave of youth, personality and excitement. The poor of NZ are just lucky she emerged on the left - because before she became leader, Labour were polling record lows. IMO at least in NZ, the public aren't terribly attached to conservatism. We have more of a Zeitgeist were people will vote status quo until there is a rising angst that we are on the wrong path What I do think is critical is that the power of women as voters is emerging. We don't want old white guys the whole time.
Well, there goes chess. And Risk. And Mousetrap! You doing it doesn't impress me (tho it's a positive). What would impress me is you getting seven or eight of your fat HS classmates to stumble out of the craft breweries for a day and run it with you. Decisions is Gran Turismo. Luck is Sizzlers. These 30somethings needed to set up some Fat Track and just let the damn cars roll. But they weren't forced to learn the ways of the sages, and I guess that's our fault.
Chess is its own thing. But Risk and Mousetrap are terrible, TERRIBLE games. I mean, the race I'm in has over 25,000 participants, so...
Used to play Risk in college. One night, a guy from my dorm floor invited a couple of friends to play. They were real assholes and ruined the fun. My friend and I basicaly took a dive and got ourselves routed early. We went downtown, knocked back two or three pitchers, came back around midnight. The game was still going, and it was pretty chippy. I go to bed. Not long after I fall asleep, there is a huge noise. A fight has broken out. One of the guys from my dorm, pissed about the inevitable outcome, went to his closet and grabbed his bowling ball*. He returned, declaring nuclear war, and smashed the board, the card table it was on, etc. with said bowling ball. That was the last time I played Risk. *yes, when I went to college some students actually owned bowling balls. None if us had racoon-fur coats, nor did we wear beanies, however.
I owned one in HS (my team won a friend's church league title twice in a row), but didn't take it to college with me. I wasn't great at it or anything. Bowling alleys doubled as video game arcades BITD, as you know. It's the "baby on board" stickers that get me. Folks, nobody is going to be able to avoid an accident because they saw your sticker at the last second.
I saw a car the other day with a Coexist sticker next to a Cook County Sheriff's sticker, next to a Pray! sticker. I wasn't quite sure which way that car swung, until I saw the fourth and final sticker -