I love playing games, be it board games, card games or online games. They are not just good to past time and create bonding, games are also great way to learn and reflect because of its immersion factor.

In Monopoly Deal, there are 3 places where cards can be played during a turn:

1. A player can place money cards or action cards (rent, house, hotel, force deal, pass go, etc) face up in their bank.
2. A player can play property cards face up in front of them in their property section.
3. A player can play action cards in the middle discard pile.

No.1 and No.2 are basically investments you make while No.3 is action that you can take to realise your investment or increase it.

Money can be put into the bank for later use (as an investment) by using the money card or by converting the action card into money. This is also true in life. We can withdraw what we put in and it doesn’t have to be just money. We can also put in our own life action card as an investment that we can withdraw later. Our life action cards can be help or favour or advice that we give to others. These kind of actions will increase our deposit into our emotional bank account. This kind of investment is usually overlooked because it is intangible. However, many a times, this is the kind of investment that produces the biggest profit in life. These kind of investment produces interests in terms of trust, credibility, closeness, reliability, dependability, love, care and many more powerful connectors.

Another investment you can make is by putting the property card into your property pile to be used later. This is again a straight forward reminder to us all that what we put in will be paid in kind.

However, in Monopoly Deal, any cards you have in your hand can’t be used. It is considered inactive. Just like life, anything you have that is inactive (no energy is put into it) it becomes dormant and is of little use except as a reminder to the fact that you have it and yet are not doing anything with it.

Maybe we should start looking at investment in more than just one way, a lesson learnt from Monopoly Deal.