It became apparent I wasn’t going to be able to recover from landing on several properties of hers with hotels in a row. She didn’t want the game to be over. She came up with this idea all on her own, telling me, “you give me one dollar and I’ll give you this seven hundred dollars.” I told her it was such a nice thing for her to offer, but it wasn’t going to help me recover from the situation I was in, that I couldn’t get back to a point where the game would be competitive.
I also told her it wasn’t fun for the losing person to hang on, barely above bankruptcy, just to have the game last longer. I said I’d rather finish this game and start a new one. We hadn’t even purchased all the properties from the bank and each only had a few we were able ti improve with houses because we had the full set. I didn’t mind being in a losing position, but I wanted her to give her an idea that it might not be fun if she was on the losing side, possibly just wanting the game to be over, knowing she couldn’t possibly win. She understood. I think she mostly just wanted to be playing in some fashion or another because she’d had such a good time playing all weekend.
After she won and I told my daughter congratulations and she took being the winner with grace. I’m not sure it would have gone down the same way if she’d been losing, but we’ll find out more on that in future games I’m sure.
The modifications to this version of the game for visually impaired and blind people is extensive. It enabled my daughter to play the game both independently and successfully. We added some additional modifications of our own that she and I came up with while we played to help her more quickly discern different items in the game.
First, the board. It’s a standard Monopoly board glued onto a thicker backing. On top of that is a clear moulded sheet with braille and raised demarcation lines to separate the different areas of the board.
Each space on the board is separated by with raised lines. Inside each board space is the braille indicating what the space is. The Jail space even has two areas, one for visiting and one for incarcerated players. The dice are larger tactile versions with the faces inset and easily discernible pips on each side of the die. In order to keep track of the dice she and I rolled them within the Chance and Community Chest raised boxes on the board.
There are two different spaces for the Chance and Community Chest cards. The traditional-sized spots we used for rolling the dice. We put the included large print/braille versions of the cards in the bigger areas shown above as orange and yellow cards.
These bigger cards look like this:
My daughter can pick up one of these cards and read the braille easily, but we decided to add some additional indicators for orientation purposes. I clipped off the top right corner of each card. This is commonly done with lots of things written in braille. It immediately tells you how to orient the card. I added a corner stripe of tactile tape (very similar to blue painters tape) to the top of each card. Top right for Community Chest and top left for Chance. After we made these changes my daughter could orient the card quickly as well as determine how to place it back in the bottom of the correct stack afterwards.
Property cards were our next modification. I’d never thought about it before but there is a lot of text on a property card. The ones in this set are about four times the size of the traditional ones.
We take so much for granted with sight. For instance, if I had the four properties in the picture above and someone had landed on my Indiana Avenue property on which I happen to have three houses I would determine the rent by: glancing at my cards for the color red, scanning down the text on the card looking for the number three and then jump over to the end of the line to get the amount $700. I would read very little in the whole process and I’d know the rent amount in less than three seconds elapsed time.
When you’re blind you can’t do that. A lot of organization and memory helps, and my daughter has good skills in both, but that organization is only at a seven-year-old level. She has to take the cards and look through them until she finds the correct deed. She then reads the braille line by line until she gets to the correct rent. She does do some skipping, but it’s a significantly slower process since her entire imput devices are the tips of her fingers.
My daughter pointed out an issue she was having with the property deed cards. She couldn’t tell the difference between the front and the back. I never realized it before, what with the scanning and all, but there are a lot of words on those cards. There’s more text on the back for when the property is mortgaged. She reads double spaced braille at school. These cards are single spaced with braille on both sides. And while the single spacing wasn’t a problem for her, we came up with a way for her to quickly tell the front of the card with proper orientation by putting little brown felt dots on the top right corners. After that, she could even tell quickly which ones of her properties were mortgaged because the felt dot wasn’t on the up side since the property had been turned over indicating it was mortgaged.
Money moves around quickly in Monopoly with far more bills exchanging hands with players and the bank than I’d really paid attention to before. The money included in this modified version of the game was on a stronger card stock. Each bill had been each individually braille with the monetary denomination. But my daughter was still taking time to figure out how each bill should be oriented. Raised braille dots indicated the up side, but then there’s a rotational orientation of 180 degrees. And here’s the thing—braille upside down can still read like braille but is confusing because the contractions don’t make sense. I’ve done this too many times, trying to figure out what I was reading only to realize I had the paper upside down.
So we chopped off the top right corner of every bill using a corner punch so everything would be consistent (I do so like accuracy). When we were done with that it was easy to orient and organize the bills. I actually liked this from a sighted perspective as well. Rotated bills in a pack stood out because the top right corner stuck out. It made being the banker’s job easier if you’re persnickety, which I am.
That took care of most things. My daughter would roll the dice for each of us, rotate the board around until she found her or my token and then move it the proper number of spaces, using the raised plastic lines to count spaces. She loved rotating the board, feeling the braille and figuring out where we’d landed or were going. But this posed another problem—houses.
Our tokens mostly stayed in their space, even when she brushed them with her arm, but once we got into houses, they were going to go everywhere, I was pretty sure. How could we lock them down so they didn’t move? I’d recently gotten some “sticky dots” as my daughter calls them, for her to use in her craft endeavors. I’d ordered three kinds: low tack, medium tack and high tack.
In typical fashion, I ordered a commercial-sized lot of each because hey, you never know when you’re going to need six thousand glue spots, right? So we tried all three sticky strengths. The high tack was great insofar as it soundly held the house or hotel on the plastic sheet, but it was annoying to disengage from the house board when we upgraded to a hotel (or when I had to sell houses to pay for my daughter's high-priced hotel rent on Boardwalk).
We tried the low-tack next but that was the opposite problem with the houses easily pulled off. So we went with the baby bear porridge option and used the middle tack glue spots. Easy to put on, easy to remove. The fact that the board is covered in a thick sheet of formed clear plastic made this the perfect solution as it didn’t damage the board at all.
And that, my friends, is what we’ve been doing over the Memorial Day weekend. Lots of Monopoly. My son was busy and didn’t get to join in at the start of the game with us. I’m rather glad though because now his sister knows how to do something he doesn’t and can help to teach him. Any time she can be a leader and help others gives her a confidence boost.
I was hoping to take this Monopoly on our upcoming sailing trip in July, but the board is too big to take on as it doesn’t fold and is too wide to fit in a suitcase. It would also take up the entire table we’ll be using for eating. So we’re thinking about alternatives for the board that will be more compact. I’m sure my daughter will have some good ideas on that front, she always does.
The Big Boy Update: As of tomorrow, my son has an entire new rewards program to earn screen time. I think we positioned it well and had him participate in the process. It’s more limiting, while giving him the opportunity to potentially earn more time by doing lots of things at home we’ve been wanting him to start doing. Thanks to Aunt A for her advice on what they’re doing at home there, we used that as inspiration, copying a good bit of their plan.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is quite honest and a fair player, even if she doesn’t like to lose. When I wasn’t available to play Monopoly this weekend she would play for the both of us.
Some of the time she would play with her friend, Madison, who would play in my stead. Madison had never played before, so the two of them tried to make the best judgement calls on what to do when they weren’t sure what the rules were. After the first day she came in and told me I’d landed on her railroad and owed $100 in rent (she landed on three railroads early in the game). She and Madison had dutifully collected the $100 from my money and had given it to the bank. When I told her the rent went to her, not the bank, she was excited. Over the rest of the weekend, any time she played without me she would come in and give me an update on what had been happening. She really has enjoyed playing, even when I haven’t been there to play with her.
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