Our Bailout Simulation

In honor of the financial rescue bill that was passed on Friday, we at the Garden decided to put together our own little financial meltdown experiment by playing some Classic Trilogy Monopoly.
The Gardener, as Princess Leia, and Nana, as Obi-wan Kenobi, were out to a fast start acquiring properties, taking advantage of that zero percent down, teaser interest rate and the plentiful money supplied by the central galactic bank. Miracle Gro, as Han Solo, was not as fortunate in acquiring property. I kept getting "go to jail" cards.

The game was pretty slow at first, until Nana got the first monopoly on the death star. Once that was set, Nana and the Gardener made some trades to secure more monopolies; the Gardener getting Hoth and Tatooine, (I know, you can't get anymore opposite than that) and Nana ended up with Dagobah and Cloud City. The problem with that trade was that Nana had an entire side of the board with houses ( you can see it on the far side of the picture).

Well, Gardener wasn't so lucky on that back stretch of board and ended up consuming all her equity right about the time when she lost her teaser rate. Those stays on the Death Star and Cloud City are quite expensive. Anyways, the gardener was out of luck:
Nana got all her properties (notice how excited those hands are).
We even caught her hiding money under the table!!!

Well, after a while, we realized that no one was going to bail out the Gardener for over-consuming her equity. Pretty soon, I fell victim to the crushing interest rates and had to give up (like I said, I didn't have that many properties. The 2nd Endor property I had I bought from the Gardener after she mortgaged it.):

My bailout didn't come either, and I had to give all my stuff to Nana too.

In the end, we realize that the bill passed by our national morons isn't to help private consumers like us, but the Galactic Bank if it had become troubled. At one point, Nana had a serious stack of $100's that almost put the bank in jeopardy. But it was still fun. Maybe if we sat down to pass a galactic bail out bill, we could have included some tax cuts for Jabba the Hutt's Rum.

Disclaimer: In no way am I trying to say that those who received sweeteners from the bailout bill represent a Hutt. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.