Loveretto – Monopoly for dirty people

When embarking on a sexual journey with new people, be it as a one-night stand, during a threesome or even group sex with half the football team, one issue often creeps in that makes it much more difficult than it needs to be: How do we actually get to the sex part?

Imagine you’re a couple. You finally managed to find that dream girl online and she’s actually agreed to experiment with you. None of you have done this before and you’ve already drank two glasses of wine, gone through all possible casual smalltalk, and you’ve even given her a full tour of the house. How do you go from this awkward sorry state to actually having sex with this girl? The answer: A fun sexy ice-breaker – in this case a late 90’s porn themed sex monopoly game called Loveretto.

Less hotels, more strip joints

Loveretto is not your nan’s Monopoly. For legal reasons I assume the makers of Loveretto would probably also prefer I don’t call it Monopoly 😉

For the sake of illustrative clarity though, it’s similar in concept. You walk around a rectangular board, landing on properties as you go. If you land on a property, you can buy it (assuming you have the cash). When another player lands on the properties they then have to give you something. Unlike Monopoly however, Loveretto lets you pay with more than just money.

Consider the brilliant evening I have in store for myself here below, having a great time with Missandei from Game of Thrones (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Ryan Reynolds from anything Ryan Reynolds is in (this could totally happen – don’t squash my dreams internet!!):

At this point, we’re all set to play. All of us start out with $2400 and a lot of pent up sexual energy. It’s my turn, so I roll the dice giving me an 8 and giving me the option to buy my first property:

With the prospect of potentially getting a massage from Ryan Reynolds, I of course grab that puppy quick and fork up $440 dollars. Considering my own house cost me quite a bit more, this is a steal. Now it’s Nathalie’s turn. She rolls a 5 and gets a sushi place.

I think you see where this is going now? We keep running around the board, buying properties, until eventually this happens:

Ryan, being the fitness god he is, holds it for so sooo wonderfully long… mmmm…. those abs……… sigh…… I digress 😞

I think you get the idea.

The good

In all honesty – the concept of this site works wonders for a lot of people who do not yet have the confidence to just throw themselves into these activities. We’ve successfully used the site more than 10 times, with both men, women and couples. In all cases it got the job done – often times quite early on, after the first few challenges that got the newbies to do mild stuff or have stuff done to them.

You have quite a bit of control of the experience, being able to not only set user info, game parameters (e.g., starting cash and challenge levels), sexual preferences for each user (including sexuality and specific fetishes), but also even the availability of specific props or toys. It’s pretty extensive.

You might be wondering: Why not just flirt and start touching? A lot of inexperienced people (most I would argue actually) aren’t comfortable being the first to initiate intimacy by touching, kissing, rubbing etc. By all submitting to the game (with the option of opting out of any challenge), you let people psychologically get over these barriers, so they can tell themselves “It’s not because I’m choosing to kiss Ryan right now – the game is telling me to”.

I can tell you from repeated personal experience – it works.. it works very well.

The bad

So here’s where it gets a bit awkward. I’m a fan of Loveretto really. But there are times when.. ehm.. it’s a bit weird

Property ownership is straight up marxist.

For some reason, the developers behind Loveretto decided they wanted to make sure people got an equal number of challenges. Rather than gaming the dice to make sure each person gets one of their properties hit regularly, they decided to do this:

So yeah, it’s literally not possible to get more properties than the other players. So whenever someone get’s one property behind, the game disallows all purchasing until the dice happens to let the lagging player get a new property. Turns out, when you play with multiple people, this happens a lot. It happens so much in fact that we’ve turned to “pre-loading” the game by rolling the dice a bunch of times and buying all the properties before taking any challenges. Be sure to reject the challenges it suggests though. Otherwise it increases the activity level, that determines how sexual the challenges are. Before you know it, the first challenge you actually take will be on the max activity level, probably involving anal probing and nine-tail flogging – best to avoid that.

If you don’t pre-load the game with all properties purchased, be prepared to play some actual Monopoly before playing the sexy version. Financial decisions and quotas will be a big part of the start of this thing.

At times, you’re basically just playing Monopoly

Even if you do pre-load the game though, you’re still in for a bit of Monopoly. I mean, why is this a thing? Why?

Our fix to this has been to set the starting cash to something ridiculous – like $20000. We still get $50 tickets for improper parking in front of sex clubs (yeah – I know), but at least the game doesn’t stop us buying stuff this way.

Some challenges are just.. cringe

Nathalia Emmanuel sucking her thumb like a baby ladies and gentlemen – I’m sure that hits at least one guy’s dirtiest fantasy out there.

Conclusion

All in all, while it’s very easy to pick on the tacky graphics, the weird game dynamics and the, at times, really really weird challenges – it’s a good concept done fairly well. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s decent. If you go into using it knowing its limitations, its idiosyncrasies can in themselves become ice breakers – people who laugh are more relaxed and people who are more relaxed have an easier time getting in the mood.

So try it out – just don’t take yourself too seriously while doing it. Before long the game will tell you to grunt like a pig or something and that veneer of seriousness will crack anyway.

Attributions

Post image courtesy of Maria Lin Kim – thank you.

Thanks to Michelle from Loveretto for making our threesomes and foursomes more fun.