In the sword-and-sorcery film Conan the Barbarian, Conan, played with great concentration by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is asked what is best in life. “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women,” he replies. Conan would’ve made a fine Monopoly player. Sure, Christmas is a time for giving and forgiving, for peace and goodwill, for truces agreed and guns falling silent, blah blah blah … but not on the Monopoly board.

As a child, Christmas Day was the only time I could get my parents and sister and occasionally a great-aunt or two to indulge me in my love of Monopoly. To play a game all the way through to its bitter end was quite a time commitment but it could just about be fitted in during that dead zone between the end of the Queen’s Speech and the start of the decent evening telly. This was, admittedly, a time the adults would rather have spent in a postprandial carb-coma but don’t underestimate pester power.

I was a Monopoly fiend. I knew, without consulting the rules leaflet, the denominational composition of the £1,500 each player starts with, from two £500 notes down to five £1 notes. I had most of the rents by heart. I knew that seven was the number most likely to be rolled on two dice — an important consideration when checking the position of your opponents’ tokens before deciding on which properties to build houses.

Monopoly taught me about the deep, deep pleasures of supercilious pedantry

In the early days, my strategy was to eschew the cheap streets, the browns and the light blues, the purples and the oranges. I held out for the more prestigious addresses, the reds, yellows, greens and dark blues. I fancied myself a swanky sort of real estate magnate, bowling along Bond Street in my top hat or parp-parping down Park Lane in my racing car. I could take or leave the railway stations. The utilities I had no interest in — a maximum rent of £120? Don’t waste my time. 

However I quickly realised that the key to victory — and it was all about the winning rather than the taking part — was simply to buy everything one could. The slum properties were definitely worth having. Indeed, there is a genuine delight in relieving some rube of £250 for landing on your hotel on Old Kent Road when they’ve just received their £200 for passing “Go”. “Money-savvy Martin Lewis’, as the Radio Times dubs him, agrees with me to a certain extent. In the Christmas issue of the listings mag he counsels that “Orange properties should be your number one target, for the sweet-spot combination of rent return on investment and the higher probability of landing on them in the first place.” I’m not entirely certain his understanding of probability is all it might be, but no matter. Interestingly, the exciting property developer Nick Candy was disdainful of the cheaper properties when he and his brother Christian played Daniel Thomas of the Financial Times in 2010. Let’s see how his poor grasp of finance works out in his new role as Reform Party treasurer.

Once you’ve amassed your empire, ruthlessness must be the name of the game. Don’t show clemency. Don’t do deals. You want your rent and you want it now — capisce? Unlike that other popular Christmas board game, Cluedo, the winner in Monopoly is not the first past the post — it’s the last man standing. You get the pleasure of vanquishing your foes one by one, seizing all their assets and casting them out penniless and weeping onto the cold, wintry streets.

My parents and elderly relatives handled the bitter sting of defeat with grace — I would later realise they were simply grateful for the chance of a snooze. My sister — several years younger than me and a financial illiterate — was a different matter. Having foolishly landed on one of my hotels yet again she would beg for extra time to get the cash together, to be allowed to stay in the game for just a few more rounds. I’d ask myself, “What would Rachman do? What would Nicholas van Hoogstraten do?” Greed is good.

The irony is that the game capable of unleashing such joyful avarice, of unlocking such deep reserves of sadism, was originally designed to highlight the injustices of capitalism and to promote a more equitable society. In 1902, American feminist and inventor Elizabeth Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to spread the radical land tax ideas of economist Henry George.

Players went round the board snapping up properties and collecting rent from anyone who landed on them. Each time players passed a corner square bearing the legend “Labor upon Mother Earth produces wages’ they collected a salary of $100. In another corner was the warning: “No trespassing. Go to jail.” This space, Magie explained, was owned by a British aristocrat. 

The game proved especially popular amongst students and Quakers, with people making their own boards and introducing their own variations on the rules. Then along came a heater salesman called Clive Darrow who made a few modifications and — in the only known instance of a man taking credit for a woman’s idea — claimed the game as his own. He sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935 and, marketed as Monopoly, it flew off the shelves. The rest is history.

When Waddingtons bought the UK rights, the firm’s boss spent the day touring London to choose the street names. According to legend, at the end of the day there was one space left and so he named it after the pub in which he was having a drink, the Angel, Islington.

And here’s a fun fact: during the Second World War, Waddingtons made hundreds of special sets to send to prisoners of war. Hidden inside each board was a silk map, a compass and two files and cash was concealed amongst the Monopoly money — surely a great MacGuffin for a film. Perhaps this is what Margot Robbie and her production company, the outfit behind I, Tonya, Barbie and Saltburn, have in mind for their mysterious upcoming Monopoly movie.

The game became so successful that Fidel Castro called it “symbolic of an imperialistic and capitalistic system” and ordered every copy of it in Cuba to be destroyed. China also banned it.

Monopoly taught me about the deep, deep pleasures of supercilious pedantry — “Actually, I think you’ll find you can collect £200 when you land on Go, you don’t have to pass it”. It persuaded me of the simple joy of complete mastery of a set of rules, as well as the delight to be had in rigorously enforcing those rules. “No, I’m afraid you still have to pay £50 to get out of jail, even if you’ve spent three turns in there”; “Unfortunately you only get half the price you paid when you sell a house back to the Bank. I’m so sorry.” The rules were holy writ, local innovations were to be stamped upon. No, you don’t place your fines and taxes in the middle of the board, to be won by any player landing on No Parking.

But I think the main life lesson to be learnt from Monopoly is that it is insufficient to simply defeat your enemies. As Conan says, you must crush them. Poison their wells, salt their land, exult in the sweet music of the keening of their kinfolk. Merry Christmas.