The garage-sale edition of our Monopoly game didn't have the official rules, so we made up our own. However, the object of the game remained the same: bankrupt your opponents.

The key rule was: If you land on it, you can build on it. If you landed on St. Charles Place, and no one had taken it yet, you could buy it and build a hotel there for $750. You didn't have purchase houses before building a hotel. You did not have to collect all the same color properties before building. You could own St. Charles Place, your opponent could have Tennesse Ave. There was no renting or mortgaging of properties. We were 7 years old, we had no idea what a mortgage was. So, if an opponent landed on St. Charles Place, they didn't owe you rent, they owed you the cost of the hotel: $750. If you had 3 hotels there, they owed you $2250. Those were pretty much the only rules. You could even build hotels on the railroads for $500, but not on Water Works or Electric Company. A hotel on Water Works? That's just crazy talk.

No one built houses, only hotels. We would use Lego blocks as hotels when the plastic hotels ran out. The board usually looked like a broken castle with huge towers of Lego scattered around the perimeter.

"Oh, you landed on Indiana Ave? That's mine. Lets see..."
(counting lego blocks)
"5, 10, 15, 20, 24 hotels"
(punching in calculator)
"24 times $1,050 equals... you owe me $25,200."

And much like regular Monopoly, they had to pay you some how. We lived like kings! Damn, hell, ass kings!

I recently witnessed how the game is played under the real rules... "You landed on Baltic. That'll be $4 in rent please." Boring! What's more fun... getting $4 rent from an opponent, or getting $5000 because they landed on your Reading Railroad slum?