Tiny Monopoly - Is It Playable?

After finding that tiny $1.25 edition of Monopoly at the Dollar Tree yesterday, and blogging about how comically small it was, the big question was ... is it playable?

So we spent about an hour rolling the micro dice and moving our little colorform-on-plastic-disc pieces.  There was a rule where if you decline to buy a property it goes up for auction starting at $10.  This sounds like a more recent addition to force games to go faster.  We tried it.  We didn't like it.  When it works in your favor, great; if not, the other player got a $300 property for $40 because you couldn't afford it.  We don't keep our money secret either, so we could just look over an bid some amount we knew the other player couldn't match.  Meh.

The tiny pieces were usable.  We had fun swapping tiny money for tiny property cards.  Sometimes it felt like the game was fine but our fingers were freakishly huge.  

We could just barely (!) read the text on the Chance/Chest cards with our tired older eyes, and charge tiny rents as needed.

The small dice were so lightweight it was easy to accidentally roll them clear off the table.  Rolling 3d6 and looking up the card captions was a clunker for me.  It's not the same as pulling the top card off a deck -- it involves adding numbers and straining to see the result, and you can only get an uneven distribution that way.  I suppose the normal decks did have more than one of certain cards, probably just the Go To Jail and Get Out Of Jail cards.  But there's almost a 50% of rolling in the 9-to-12 bracket.

The one thing that failed was the die cut around the mini houses.  I had one that pulled up wrong, and the layers split apart so I was left with a paper house the size of my pinky fingernail with no sticking power.  So be very careful getting those labels off the sheets.  Anne was able to do so even with her shaky hands, but that one bit was frustrating.  I ended up using my next house to tack it down...

Overall, it was oddly fun.  We are both very polite players, so we don't get into big fights or do the usual back-stabbing the game is notorious for.  We got to where only one property was left unsold, and we each had just one set we could build houses on but very little cash to do so.  We finally agreed it had gone on long enough.  And we agreed that it was reaaaaaalllly small.  In the end, we got a snack-size baggie for the stray pieces and packed it up and gave it a prominent spot on the shelf.  Why?  "Weird game experience of the year" came to mind.