Betty by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen for January 10, 2025

Face it, you don’t play well with others Bets

Well, they could say sorry woman, or boy, or girl, or dog, or mister, or baby or a lot of other things. But man seems to work best.

“The only winning move is not to play.”

Looks like it was time for another Bad Betty Week. The worst, imo, was the vegan month.

I genuinely don’t know quite what this sequence of strips is trying to do, because it’s showing a rather unpleasant side of the main character. Making everyone else play a (long!) game that they clearly don’t want to, and trying to force them to keep going to the bitter end simply because you’re winning, really isn’t a good look.

(As for Monopoly itself – my sympathy is with Bub and Junior. It started as an uncredited copying of “The Landlord’s Game” by Elizabeth Magie, which Magie designed to educate people in how rents enrich landlords and impoverish tenants, and money flows to the people that already have it. It was never designed to be fair; it had a lesson to teach. That’s not remotely to say people shouldn’t play it if they all enjoy it – but if it were launched as a commercial game today, frankly it would sink without trace, because the games market really took off in the last decades of the last century, and has been innovating ever since. There are SO many better choices out there, if you want to play games.)

As they say in Monopoly world, if you can’t stand the heat, stay off the street

“There’s still a chance.”

Oh, I get it. Monopoly.

The idea of Monopoly was to teach us to not play along with millionaires and billionaires, and to thwart monopolies.

“Game on, get skinned, drop out” (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”) ☺

This story arc really shows Betty at her worst.

A mercy rule, slaughter rule, knockout rule, or skunk rule ends a two-competitor sports competition earlier than the scheduled endpoint if one competitor has a very large and presumably insurmountable scoring lead over the other. It is called the mercy rule because it spares further humiliation for the loser. It is common in youth sports in North America, where running up the score is considered unsporting. It is especially common in baseball and softball in which there is no game clock and a dominant team could in theory continue an inning endlessly.

A long time ago, before I had kids, we visited my ex’s friend, her husband and two preteen daughters. The girls were all excited to play Clue with us. Ex took a turn or two and made a WAG which, of course, was wrong. Ex got up and chatted with the adults leaving me to play a Really Boring Game.

I should have known then.

That game ended exactly the way its designer intended.