The amazing people at Habsro sent us a package. To our surprise, it wasn’t a video game or a disc edition of a game. It was a classic Monopoly BID! Card Game. Packed in convenient yet attractive packaging, it came with 110 Cards and 1 Manual Sheet, which was small enough to convey that it won’t take long for us to dive right into the game.
Monopoly BID! Is available over major e-commerce websites and your nearest toy stores. Hasbro has conveniently put everything great about card games in the recent decades and simply converted them into one game. The result? Probably one of the best card/ tabletop games on the market right now.
Here’s our Review for the Monopoly BID, played with experts in Video Games and Board Games.
Let’s Play by The Rules
Once you open the package yourself, you’ll be getting a beautiful deck of 110 Cards. These cards are divided into 3 categories. – Property Cards, Currency Cards and Action Card. For an Auction to take place, we need property to auction and currency to make the transaction, but what are the set of Action Cards doing here?
Before we get to what the Action Cards do, let’s quickly go over how the rest of the cards play out.
- Property Cards: A set of property cards with unique colour identities. Each colour will have a number marking, denoting how many cards of the same colour you need to have to make a set. For eg., A brown colour card has the marking number ‘2’ on it. This means if you buy 2 brown property cards at an auction, you will make a complete set. Unlike your deck card which is to be remained concealed from your opponents, your property cards will always be proudly displayed to other players.
- Currency Cards: Cards doing what their name tells. You can find denominations of 1,2,3,4,5 in Monopoly Currency. You can club multiple cards in one turn for the highest bid. SOLD!
- Action Cards: Here is where things get interesting, you can get 4 different types of Action
Cards, which are – Wild Card, Steal Card, Nope Card, and Draw 2.- Wild Card – Wild Card allows you to substitute a property. For eg., if you already have 2 red cards, but need 1 more to make a set, you can just use a wild card and confirm the setting. Here’s your free Auction Card.
- Steal Card – As the name suggests, No questions asked, just take away 1 of your opponent’s property cards. This can, however, be interrupted with a ‘Nope’ card.
- Nope Card – Nope Card will allow you to defend against any player who plots to steal your card. Never hurts to have this card around.
The game can be played with 2-5 players. Each player will get 5 cards from an active deck. This active deck will be a shuffled bundle of Action Cards and Currency Cards. If a player is provided 5 cards at the start and does not own any currency card, he will switch to a fresh set of cards. Perfect, now that all players are ready, the youngest player will start the game. Right at the start, he can start with an action card. The player can use as many Action Cards he wishes to play. Afterwards, the Auction will begin.
From the deck of the Property Cards, a card will be drawn and presented at the table. After checking out the card, each player will prepare to bid. Once all players are ready, all of them will shout “1..2..3.. BID!!” and will proceed to slam their currency card(s) on the table. The player who has offered the highest bid will take away the card and discard the currency spent in the discard pile.
However, if there is a tie between the highest amount, the tied players will have to do another round of bidding upon the already invested currency. But if there is a tie the second time around as well, that particular auction will be forfeited and will continue to the next round.
The Battlefield of Monopoly BID!
This part will feature a narrative experience of an actual game of Monopoly Bid, that was hosted 4 days ago for this coverage.
Formally giving credit to the parties involved, we would like to thank Anindita, Namrita and Aarav for joining us in the game. While Anindita is a Mass Com student, Namrita is pursuing to become a CA and Aarav works at one of the Big 3.
The only reason we let you know about their life is to let you know Monopoly Bid is not a mere child’s game. It requires strategy, confidence, years of experience in life and most importantly the ability to think 20 moves ahead.
Moving from our exaggeration, the team proceeded to a match. The rulebook had everything cleared out so no one had to waste any time figuring out the game at all.
The game started with me since I was indeed the youngest, but I was the owner of the cards and I was representing the entire team of Gameffine amongst these people. I had no choice but to put my best foot forward. I started with the Auction for a blue card requiring a set of 3.
A moment of silence followed, and suddenly everyone was watching each other. This meant everyone was ready. A voice in bold volume shouted “ 3! 2! 1! BID!!” and all 4 slammed their currency on the table. I submitted a currency of 2, Anindita of 3, Namrita of 2 and Aarav of 5. Nobody would have anticipated this massive currency spend on the first transaction itself. But Aarav knew the stakes and he wasted no time.
Another round followed with Auctions and soon Namrita and Kazz had 2 different colour Property Cards with them and Anindita owned a Yellow Card. And I knew, this was my time to shine. So I drew out a property Card. It was a Yellow Card. I knew I couldn’t let Anindita take this one away. The bid was ready. 3..2…1.. BID!!. I submitted a currency of 6 and won. But what came next was my biggest nightmare ever.
Anindita in her turn used a stolen card, and I knew I was in danger. But I had my smile wide, for I had nothing to fear.
As soon as moved her arm across the table, I stopped her and submitted my ‘Nope’ Card, cancelling her stealing the card. Leaving everyone struck for a moment, I knew how to handle myself and my properties. But my smile stopped when I saw Anindita not retreating for her turn. There it was. A reply to my bold move. Anindita proceeded to submit a ‘Nope’ Card cancelling my turn.
I was taken aback. I was panicking and had to use my last resort. The last nope card saved for the worst of horrors. I submitted my Nope Card.
But this wasn’t the end of it. Here it was, a complete annihilation. Anindita immediately drew out a SECOND Nope card. Cancelling my 2 Nope Cards. This means her stolen card can now be used to steal my property.
Laugher spread across the table with a shocked face, as I was still recovering from the emotional damage I suffered.
And soon, it was Namrita’s turn. While we all started to prepare our currency cards, she called to use her action cards. She used 2 wild cards, for completing 2 different decks. But, nobody saw this coming either.
She already had 1 deck completed, and this move added 2 more to her complete set collection. This meant she had completed 3 sets of decks. She had one. The game ended.
Namrita slowly brought every property while everyone else raged intense battle. She drew almost no attention to herself, and hence she won the first ever match of Monopoly BID! This group played.
Verdict
Monopoly BID! Is an amazing game of cards with enough content for up to 5 players to play at once. Since the cards are compact, you can play them almost anywhere. The Auction System is the core of the game, which is indeed unique and fun to perform each round. The usability of Action cards adds a whole new level of twists and unpredictability. The flexibility of using multiple cards at once only adds more fun to it. We do wish there were more variety of Action Cards, but we are glad about what we already have.
We at Gameffine would like to award Hasbro’s Monopoly BID! 9/10.
Final Review: Essential
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