None of us trust each other alone with the board. That is how this has happened. I will describe the scene: I am holding on to Sam’s leg. Sam was my friend before this started but he isn’t now. He has lost both of his adilette slides in the tussle. We are both lying on the floor in a position which, if it wasn’t for the aggressive energy in the hallway, could be described as ‘pre-erotic’. We are twisted together so I am both on top of and below him. Sam is holding on to his upright girlfriend’s leg. Also going on: the plastic beaker I went to the kitchen for has bounced all the way down the stairs, and also Sam is biting me. Everyone is yelling. We have been playing for an hour, now, barely out of nappies in the overall life of the game, but already we have all gone, collectively, insane. Kimeya needed to take her laundry out of the machine in the kitchen and didn’t trust us alone with the board in the lounge, so we both had to go with her. Sam and her both needed the bathroom too so we all had to go in shuttle runs, each watching over the door of the other while they pissed silently behind it, a complex and passive–aggressive urine-soaked retelling of the old Fox–Chicken–Grain brain teaser. Sam, while pissing: ‘Joel, are you still there?’ Kimeya, while pissing: ‘If you guys touch that board SO HELP ME GOD.’ To reiterate: Sam is biting me. His teeth are in my shoulder. I have him in a headlock while he slowly goes pink. Look at the clock. Look at us, all, here, on the grey-yellow carpet of their share-flat in Clapton. Fifty minutes ago we started playing Monopoly. And look at us, now, here. All our dignity gone and the only thing remaining is our hunger for the win.

* * *

Monopoly is the best game, because the Actual Devil lives inside it, and you don’t get that with other board games or games in general. I mean yes: there has been a certain renaissance, in recent years, for board games, particularly adult ones – the best of them is Settlers of Catan, which is very good, and where you and four others tessellate an island together out of board pieces, then compete to roll dice and collect resources, building up roads and townships and most crucially an army, until whoever hits the ten-point limit hits the ten-point limit and wins, and in mimicry of Monopoly, the best game, it is also played in stages (the early game is all about collecting wood and stone, wildly; the second is about etching out a plot of land for yourself, a feeling of control, the hope that, after you die, and the wind and rain comes, this island will know your legacy; the end-game is realising you have no chance to win unless you dick over your opponents and really squeeze them whenever they come to you for wood, which they are also trying to do whenever you come to them for stone; there is no way to escape this island without calling at least someone you are close to a ‘dickhead’ or a ‘fuckhead’ or a ‘fuckhead dickhead’: the major mechanic in many of these games is ‘not just crushing but humiliating your opponent, your opponent who in real life is your close family or your very best friend’); another game I like, Resistance, takes the Monopoly mechanic of ‘yelling furiously at the people you love’ but projects it onto a game of subterfuge, where you take it in turns to, as per the draw of random cards, play as a spy amongst a midst of golden adventurers. But many of these games lack a certain, final, over-the-top blooded edge to them, one that is stretched taut over every inch of Monopoly. A lot of these games are fun, is what I am saying, and are aimed at— how to say this? They are aimed at all of the people who have ever bought a full set of adult-edition Harry Potter books. They are aimed at hide-in-plain sight nerds whose main idea of violence is ‘having a favourite Game of Thrones .gif’. Monopoly, meanwhile, makes my blood come alive. It makes me want to tear off my clothes and kill. Monopoly makes me want to get my hands red in the middle of someone else. It makes me want to murder people, in a way that feels extremely cool and powerful.

Consider the history of Monopoly: Monopoly, the board game, is steeped in monopoly, the concept thereof. It was originally invented as The Landlord’s Game, by Lizzie Magie – a feminist, short-story writer, stenographer, comedian, stage actress, engineer and later game inventor, and most importantly a proponent of Georgism, a single-tax economic philosophy – who around the turn of the 20th century invented The Landlord’s Game as a way of championing the idea that land, rather than property, should be taxed by the state (some Georgism thing, man). The original game had two sets of rules: the ‘Prosperity’ rules, under which everyone benefited from a central pot of money every time someone on the board acquired property – the aim of the game was everyone won (everyone! won!) when the player who started with the lowest amount of money had doubled their cash. And then you had the ‘Monopolist’ rules, which were meant to be a stinging criticism of capitalism and instead proved to be really, really fun, and those are the ones that more closely resemble Monopoly as we know it today: buy low, rent high, crush your opponents into dust and the richest man standing wins it all. The game was a sort of pass-around hit among left-wing intellectuals (especially popular at Wharton, Harvard and Columbia) and among the Quaker community, who redrew the board with street names and destinations from Atlantic City. One person who played the game was Charles Darrow, unemployed at the time, who took the concept of The Landlord’s Game, drew it up as Monopoly, and then eventually licensed it to The Parker Brothers for a hefty fee. So see: Monopoly, game, existed because it was monopolised, an idea stolen wholesale and repainted a more palatable colour and sold at a profit to the masses. Nobody knew Monopoly was a sheer rip-off until a court case in the seventies, when economics professor Ralph Anspach – who was being sued by the Parker Brothers at the time after marketing The Anti-Monopoly Game, because Monopoly cannot help but attract trouble – dug up Magie’s old patents. Monopoly was the result of selling someone else’s idea for violent profit and the truth about that only emerged when Monopoly tried to hammer down someone else’s idea years later. Capitalism pulses so naturally through the blood of this game that it can’t help but come out on the game board.

I have figured what it is that makes Monopoly like a sort of crack pipe of board-based emotional violence, and that is this: Monopoly is like six or seven different games at once, games stacked on top of games, a primary game that morphs into something More. The Monopoly you know is Stage 1: you race around the board eating up all the property you can get your sticky little hands on until it is all bought up, and this can go on for anything from four to eight trips past Go (everyone is refusing to land on Marlborough St., always Marlborough St., so that’s where the hold-up is). To some families, this is where Monopoly begins and ends – there’s five of you, someone’s kid brother keeps getting distracted, your mum gets up halfway through her turn to go and make a round of tea, there’s a film on in the background that everyone is half-watching, it has somehow taken 25 minutes for everyone to do their first pass of the board, so an hour or so in you all decide to pack it in and just watch the film instead, to the protestations of your dad, who is convinced that, because he is £500 up, he is winning. No. He is not winning. You all have failed on the first circle of Monopoly.

The next stage of the game is the foreplay-like preamble before Stage 3, where it really gets good: at this point in the game, there is a lap or two of the board where everyone is low on funds, and they are tetchy and tentative, they think about but do not ultimately buy Leicester Sq. when they land on it, they are property rich and cash poor, and they go around picking up little fines and getting hit with small, petty rents, and fine, fine. Your family might ditch out at this stage, too, convinced the game is a scam, that it is boring and dull: that you just go around, grinding, losing money on property and slowly being overwhelmed by the cost of life, a sad analogy for existence. Again, and without meaning disrespect: you’ve fucked it.

Because if you ditch out before Stage 3 of the game then you have approached greatness but melted your own wings before you have truly had a chance to touch it, because Stage 3 of Monopoly is negotiation, and that is where it transcends the board game and becomes something More. Stage 2 is necessary scene-setting for this section of the game, because most importantly it frays your nerves and your temper – imperceptibly, maybe, maybe you didn’t notice yourself losing your humanity, atom-by-atom, to a green-and-red board game, but you did – the half-second of calm before the explosion. Monopoly is a game designed to drive you mad, and Stage 2 is important in that, because in those tedious loops around the board something alchemic happens: you start to believe the false money stacked in front of you is, if not real, then halfway towards real; the Monopoly currency starts to take on a weight and importance it didn’t have before; you start casting your eyes round to see who has the coloured cards that will help you complete a monopoly, escalating you up the path to richness. Ask yourself the question: who do you have to crush to make a buck round here? And that is where Stage 2 grabs you and pulls you in: Stage 2 is important because it makes you a proto-capitalist, despite your real-life politics, because it’s just a game, isn’t it? It’s just a game. It’s just a game that you really, really, really – all your blood wants to jump out of your body – really want to win.

Back at the board, we have made up our own rules. You do this too. Every veteran Monopoly player has one or two firm rules which act like a handbrake to stop the entire game descending into a fistfight. Put your taxes underneath the Free Parking zone, for instance, is an unofficial rule. Three double-die rolls in a row puts you in prison. There are rules about the even distribution of houses on a monopoly (can you place four houses on one land plot, and one on another? That is open to interpretation: you will be more amenable to this rule change if you, personally, own a good monopoly, like a green one). The only three firm rules are: travel in a clockwise direction, pay what you owe, crush the competition. Everything else can be decided outside of the game. We have, predictably, gone mad with it: we now have to make wiggly fingers hand gestures whenever the Chance card is drawn, and say the word ‘blop’ when someone lands on Community Chest. After three turns of this, failing to make the hand gestures in a timely and enthusiastic manner results in a £50 fine (after 80 minutes of game time, our entire Monopoly is approaching a dictatorship). Or: you are not allowed to make problematic slurs over the course of mid-game banter, which also results in a £50 fine (your narrator had to pay £50 for making an animal noise that was interpreted as being a swipe at the mentally ill, for instance; another player – not naming any names, but it was Sam – had to pay £50 for calling something ‘gay’, which was a real schoolyard throwback: Monopoly gets inside your brain and makes you forget how to be a person). Very crucially, the final rule is this: no special sweeteners can be added in as part of negotiations. No auctioning up. Negotiations can only be between two people and must be entirely above board. And here I am suddenly hamstrung.

Because the real game of Monopoly happens in a magical, spectral space, just hovering in the air a few inches above the board – of Stage 3, of Negotiation, of squabbling back and forth over a property, of making an underhand deal. Nee-go-see-a-shun: so let’s for instance say you have Whitechapel and I have Euston Rd, or whatever their equivalents are on whatever branded board you have but for simplicity’s sake let’s stick to London rules, and let’s say a swap of these properties would be mutually beneficial to us both: we entered this arena as friends but now we are enemies united in a common goal, to crush. So I might offer you Euston Rd, yeah, in exchange for Whitechapel. But I also don’t want to be stung by rent every time I land on your monopoly. And so, I will say, quietly under my breath, where nobody else can hear it, when everyone else is trying to remember whose dice throw it is: well, maybe, you know, every time I land on Whitechapel, you can give me a pass. And maybe … maybe when you land, on Euston Rd. Maybe I can look the other way. Maybe … maybe we could grease each other’s wheels a bit, here. Maybe we could play some real Monopoly.

Admission: I consider cheating a natural part of Monopoly, or at least a third- or fourth-tier subgame that sits invisible like a saddle over the top of the game proper. I am telling you right now that if you play Monopoly with me and trust me to be the banker then you are a fool. I am saying that if you play Monopoly with me and I quote a rental price while holding the property card up to my face with a wry smile then you should demand to see that card, because I am definitely massaging that figure and quoting a false one back to you on the basis that you – you with your blind, your innocent trust – will pay it regardless. Monopoly is an evil game and I am an evil player of it. I am rolling the dice quickly because you got distracted and didn’t notice me landing on your property. I am making up house rules about jail, about how you end up there and how long you must stay. I will win at Monopoly, because to win at Monopoly is to bend the very rules around you until you get what you want. I am going to crush you in a negotiation, because that’s what Monopoly is. That’s the real quiz. Don’t you get it? Monopoly rubs away at the skin of you and reveals the steel-cold skeleton underneath. You cease to become a person when you play this game and become instead a monster. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? Give me Whitechapel. Give it to me. Give me Whitechapel and I promise not to crush you.

When I was nine years old Labour won the election. I remember this because I woke up to my mother cheering – my mother had a very unusual way of celebrating things, which was to grit her teeth together, punch the air in front of her, and somehow without opening her mouth shout ‘yes!’ – and my Year 5 teacher came to school that day in a brilliant red pantsuit. I was raised in a firmly anti-Conservative household – I vividly remember bouncing on my bed at age seven, or eight, with my friend Charlie, and we were discussing the country’s prime minister at the time, John Major. ‘I hate him because he takes all our money,’ I told Charlie, solemnly. I have no idea how that idea filtered into my young brain. I am assuming my parents whispered anti-Tory sentiment to me in the womb. ‘Fuck Maggie Thatcher,’ they might coo through the bump to my foetus. ‘Burn the witch like she burnt the industry out of this country.’ I’ve voted Labour all my life and until they zig too far over the wobbly line in the centre of British politics then I will continue to. You’re meant to vote to bring the rest of the country up, not protect those who have already made it. I digress.

The point is: fuck all that, because when I play Monopoly, I am David Cameron rimming Maggie off, I am Edwina Currie fucking John Major harder than he can fuck her back, I am a roaring drunk Boris Johnson, I am Tory to the core-y, I am shaking hands with property developers in shady backroom multi-million pound deals, I am blocking social housing to build luxury apartments in an effort to squeeze an extra £200k into my own private account, I am wearing a Panama hat in the Cayman Islands and laughingly lighting a cigar with a £50 note. This is where Monopoly truly comes into its own: it allows you to rub away all your morals, all your ethics, all your beliefs, all the myriad ways you have been shaped into who you are today, all the saturated memories of election day 1997, all the bouncing on a single bed with Charlie, bemoaning the state, all that, gone – because in Monopoly you get, for a minute at least, to taste what it is to be the bad guy. To leverage property to crush those around you who you deem to be lower. You get, for a moment, to be Conservative and Republican all at once. You taste what it is like to be powerful and rich. And I would like to tell you, all of you: stop this from ever happening to me, in real life. Stop me from ever accruing wealth. Because, if Monopoly is anything to go on – and it absolutely is – I will become a monster.

There are moral lessons to be learned as a result of this evil that courses through Monopoly and into me. Take, for instance, the time recently when I crushed the soul of a ten-year-old down to dust. A lot of people say: Joel, they say, it is unethical to extort ten-year-olds out of hundreds of pounds the literal first time they play Monopoly, and to those critics I say: fuck you, and fuck you again. The kid had just got Pokémon-themed Monopoly as a Christmas present. I volunteered to teach the boy the game rules by playing a dummy round against him. Nobody else was going to do it. And then he landed on my three-house Koffing (Bond St.), incurring rent of £330 and he learned the main rule of the game, which is that he owes me £330 and he needs to pay up. This is not how children learn and, indeed, grow.

Now, imagine you are sat cross-legged on the floor down with me while I explain this: I am willing, magnanimously, to waive this fee, if he gives me the one token I want – Growlithe (Euston Rd), which would enable me to complete my green Monopoly. In my hand I also hold Starmie (Whitechapel Rd), which completes his light-blue Monopoly. We are at an impasse. We are also getting escalatingly confused by the fact that every road name is represented by a first-generation Pokémon.

So here’s where the game gets good, you see, because for a moment discount the rent: I want his Growlithe and he wants my Starmie. But he doesn’t realise I am in the position of power: Starmie is worth less than Growlithe, but he wants it – in that way that ten-year-olds want things on Monopoly, without the cool calm cowl of logic – and so he wants Starmie primarily because he keeps landing on it and getting stung for £6 rent, and secondarily because it completes his Monopoly. He thinks that because Starmie is worth a lot to him, then he is in a position to leverage more money out of me for it. This, see, is how you crack the helix of Monopoly and force the mid- then end-game of it: you have to negotiate, two wills meeting across an invisible space. The great lie of Monopoly is that it’s played on the board, with a small thimble-piece and some die: no. Monopoly is played in IOUs and side-hustles, of sweeteners and deals. Monopoly only becomes a game when you ignore the board and rise up to play it. Monopoly is only played when you negotiate. And that is where I am at the advantage, because I am an adult, and he is a child, and I am evil and he is good. I will win this.

What we come to is this: I will pay £400 plus my Starmie for his Growlithe, which I am only allowed to build one property on (this is a canny side-negotiation by the child: he shows promise). I will offer free rent on Koffing. He will not have to pay me the rent he owes me for Koffing, for I am a beatific developer, a kind and just Monopoly deity, plus more crucially I have now assembled an unyielding gauntlet from Free Parking to Liverpool St. Station. Now I know what you are thinking: ‘This is an overly fair and reasonable negotiation, Joel! You’re throwing both money and opportunity away, here! You could use this chance to crush him!’ But to that I say: I could crush him now, sure. I already am. But if I give him the taste for Monopoly – for the thrill, for the negotiation, for that blind, blind, blind pursuit of money – then I can make him love a game so much that I can crush him, again and again and again, dozens of times over dozens of games, for the rest of his and my natural life. What I am saying is: why crush someone’s soul, cheaply, once, when you have the chance to crush it a hundred times over?

I can delight in telling you that the boy picked up and threw two (two.) cushions at me, punched two more, and screamed into a fifth, before his dad came in and sent him furiously to bed. I am brilliant at Monopoly.

Back in Clapton, though, against adults, and I have lost. Kimeya wins – she always wins because she grew up in a family that was venomously competitive and played Monopoly like it was an Olympic sport, plus she is a lawyer and started citing actual property law halfway through a negotiation over Bond St. – and we have all, separately, over the course of some hours, variously had a tantrum. A demon lives inside this game, I am sure of it. Pore over ancient texts and find which one. Pruflas, for example, the demon of falsehood, quarrels and discord: that’s a good fit. Agares: earthquakes, foul language and destroying dignity. It is fair to say every demon is assembled here, watching us, invisibly, wreak chaos on one another: demons of distrust, demons of extortion, the demon of shouting ‘oh fuck OFF’ when someone else lands on Free Parking: they are all here. In the cab home, I explain to the driver that I have just spent hours playing Monopoly, and am emotionally spent by it, and do not want to talk about my loss. ‘I used to play it as a kid,’ he explains. ‘It taught me about the geography of London.’ A pause. ‘I never finished it.’ He tells me about a game of football he played once, where a striker was through on goal, and he yanked his shirt back to stop him from scoring, and how he got a straight red. ‘I was always a fair player,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know where that came from.’ I do: games like this pitch each other against our fellow man and bring out the dark and evil streak in all of us. Put your nasty side on and wear it for a couple of hours like a mask. Pull the shirt, kick the leg, outsmart a child. Monopoly is the best game because it allows you to be the worst person. Give me Whitechapel or I’ll cut you.