On February 5th I attended Life Size Monopoly, which was a part of the Up to Us campaign at Stockton. Up to Us is a campaign run by college students for college students to make them aware of the national debt. With this event, they intended to attract students in order to get them to find out more about the campaign.
Before Life Size Monopoly, I had to set up a team of two to four people. I had trouble finding people who wanted to participate, so I put a post on the Facebook event page saying if anyone wanted to play but did not have a team, I would be happy to help. After posting that, I found a friend who would participate with me, but when I went back to my room after that conversation I discovered that someone had replied to my post. Because of this, I was able to have a three-person team when we arrived.
For the game, we had to create a game piece and pick a team name. We knew there would be a prize for the best piece, so we tried to get creative. I have a giant teddy bear that is the size of a person. We decided to dress is up in a Stockton hat, sweatshirt, and lanyard. We also decided to call the team “Bear With Us”, which made me really happy.
When we arrived at the event, every table had a board game on it. We decided to sit down at the table that had Life. While we waited for our turn at Life Size Monopoly, we played Life in the hopes of winning a $5 Wawa gift card. While we played, a fourth girl was added to our Life Size Monopoly team. We were called up to play Monopoly before our Life game ended, so we did not win the gift card.
Before we began playing, our game pieces were judged. The guy in charge seemed pretty excited about our giant dressed up bear, but we were not the winners of that contest. Instead of using the entire bear as our game piece, which would have been extremely difficult, we decided to just use the lanyard that I had put around its neck.
The rules were a bit unclear at the beginning of Life Size Monopoly. Several new rules seemed to appear as the game went on and there certainly could have been a better way to inform us of how the game was working. However, that was not too big of a deal because my team finished as one of the top teams of the first round. There were two groups that were playing. After each group finished their first game, there was a final game between the three top teams of each group.
In the final game my team did not do very well. I am not certain what place we came in, but I would not be surprised if it was last. In the course of the night we did not win anything. However, we had a good time and we learned about the national debt. And that’s what really counts.