Evopolio: One Game to Rule Them All

Yesterday, I found a new favorite board game:  Evopolio, the Bolivian version of Monopoly.  Some friends and I get together a few times a month to hang out and play games, and we’d been joking about this one for a while.  Evo Morales, the socialist president of Bolivia, has fairly low approval ratings in the city (here’s hoping I don’t get deported for saying that), so we assumed that the game would be making fun of him.  Oh no.  It was not.  It was a sincere tribute to the current state of the country.  And it was delightful in every possible way.

To start off, the board ran backwards (which Tasha found incredibly stressful), was oblong, and was made of a folded piece of cardboard.  Instead of dollars, there were bolivianos, and there was a stack of cards simply entitled “Luck” to put in the place of Chance/Community Chest.  Oh, and a bag of rocks.  Because, as we found out, you can draw cards that institute blockades on the board.

We started playing, reading the rules on a kind of need-to-know basis, and quickly discovered that every “Luck” card would either be the best or worst thing you could think of.  Within four rounds, we had a blockade in progress, those with businesses had been commanded to pay non-business owners 100Bs each (socialism, remember?), and the bank had started demanding bribes (which wasn’t in the instructions, but Kevin felt that he should strive for verisimilitude in that area).  One of the cards pulled early said, “If any player is a smuggler or a drug trafficker, they are hereby arrested.  The bank takes everything they have, and they go to jail.”

For a little while, the game progressed mostly normally, but we had to keep switching directions because of the blockade.  A mudslide occurred, which took one die out of the game for three rounds.  We made some trades, bought some properties, and laughed at the increasingly Bolivian Luck cards.  People went to the hospital for drinking tainted juice and getting beaten up late at night, politicians gave bribes, and then, suddenly, I became a drug trafficker.  After seeing the earlier card, I was pretty nervous, but the immediate 1000Bs I was given and the bonus 300Bs every time I passed Go were fairly nice.

My three favorite Luck cards:  You were caught urinating in public and have been fined (Top Left), you drank a drink off the street and have severe diarrhea; go to the hospital (Top Right), and you fell off your bike on Pedestrian Day and broke your nose; go to the hospital (Bottom).

After becoming a drug dealer, I drew a card saying I’d been caught smuggling sugar into the country and was being fined and sent to jail.  I mean, I guess better to get caught with sugar, right?  I got out after waiting three turns, only to be IMMEDIATELY sent back for smuggling gasoline into the country.  Apparently, I’m only good at hiding the drugs.

Tasha and I came out ahead by the halfway point; she had a lot of properties, and I had my drug money.  Lydia went out, and Seth looked to be going the same way when, suddenly, Tasha became a smuggler.  She was heartbroken, but collected her bonus all the same.  We made an alliance to get Seth out of the game so we couldn’t be taken down by another lose-everything Luck card.  By this time, he was down to his last 50Bs and a monopoly in La Paz (of which he had declared himself king).

Then, Tasha had to draw a Luck card.  She picked it up, read the first few words, and then looked at me with shock and horror.  She turned the card around.  “If any player is a smuggler or a drug trafficker, they are hereby arrested.  The bank takes everything they have, and they go to jail.” 

And with that, Seth sprang up, jubilant.  “I AM THE ONE TRUE KING!!”  And so he was.  Don’t do (or sell) drugs, kids.  You’ll lose at Evopolio.

The  [very humble] photo Seth celebrated his victory with, stolen from his facebook.