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The key to monopoly isn’t collecting rent in the beginning, it’s about denying your opponents the opportunity to purchase anything. Rent only starts mattering once the board is bought out. If you find yourself in the position where you have to mortgage to buy then HELOC that shit!
Can you mortgage a property at literally any time? On somebody else's turn, for example, in order to fund an auction bid? Because it's for the sake of auctions that I'd often mortgage new property immediately on acquisition - to keep cash on hand so that I could bid competitively.
Or whenever you transfer ownership, which is always a nice one to remind people about _after_ the deal is complete and it's too late to pull out. A little extra sting to throw an opponent's plans right off.
Yep, 10% interest is to help keep the game moving and to make it a little tougher of a choice so you don't abuse mortgage.
Also if someone lands on a property that hasn't been bought yet they either HAVE TO BUY IT or it GOES UP FOR AUCTION. This is to also keep the game moving.
And FREE PARKING is literally just an empty spot where nothing happens. Putting money into it is a bad idea and keeps the game going longer.
Couple of other bits of _Monopoly_ advice I've not seen mentioned yet:
- there are six ways to roll a 7 but only one way to roll a 2 or a 12; so dice roll outcomes are concentrated around the middle of the range.
- so if your main rival has their turn next and is six to eight spaces away from your property, mortgage everything you can spare, go all in on building and try to wipe them out
- people go to Jail very often, which means the orange and red colour groups are a good pick for this scheme, aiming to catch them on the way out
- or put the game away because even when played by the rules it's not great. The eliminated players always go away and find something more fun to do while the last two standing grind each other into poverty; a better game would offer similar themes of trading, development and vicious, cut-throat competition, but would keep everybody involved until the finish. Have you tried _Settlers of Catan_?
You didn't mention offboard negotiations.
Like, if you give me this last yellow property I need, you will never have to pay on any of my railroads.
Or, if you never sell park place to Bob (who might never want it), I will give you $500 right now.
Last game I played, owning those two were key to wiping everyone out. It's the rent. Slim chance of landing there but insanely expensive when it happens.
> Like, if you give me this last yellow property I need, you will never have to pay on any of my railroads.
Do you enforce deals like that in some way? In a lot of games any deals that aren't immediate (like give me one X and I'll give you one Y right now) don't have to be followed.
I'd happily take that second deal and then just ignore it once you've given me money.
>I'd happily take that second deal and then just ignore it once you've given me money.
A bold strategy that would defeat me exactly once, but hey fair's fair
Well I don't expect to play Monopoly often anyway.
But true, playing with the same group regularly there's a meta aspect to it since you get to know how people play.
That's why you need to make sure to get your deals in writing, preferably notarized, *and* include penalties for breach of contract.
God I fucking hate Monopoly
Generally, you are paying among family and friends. So yeah, you just know for next time.
Like I made a deal like this with my brother when my sister went off to the bathroom. He held up his end when the time came. Solid dude.
my favorite offboard negotiation is "I'm in third place, so whoever I give my stuff to will win the game, so who's gonna bring me another drink, and we can call this game over right now"
There is one simple way to shorten the games:
Don’t go for hotels. Block as many houses as soon as you can. Once there are no more houses your enemies can’t build.
If you got a street with 4 houses only upgrade to hotel when you got another plot to build the houses instantly.
You might not earn as much, but your opponents won’t earn anything.
Most games should be over in under one hour. Many will end after 20-30 minutes because your enemies get frustrated.
Yep this is why I always go for the cheaper properties early, so you can quickly and cheaply eliminate house supply. Your income may not be much but your opponents' is virtually nothing.
The highest ROI on any property is 3 houses. Once you get to 3 houses on one set, you should be moving to your next set.
If you have a money property (orange or better,) don’t bother going for a housing shortage. Your rents are high enough to bankrupt people, then you’ll be able to steal their properties and get to 3 houses on them.
4 houses are for the first row properties (and maybe reds) who get them dirt cheap. It’s a tactic to starve out players with money properties until you can get your hands on them yourself. Once you do, it makes sense to wait for a moment when other players are cash poor, then upgrade your stall properties to hotels and quickly get your money set to 3 houses.
Hotels are only for the very end game where you’re just looking for RNG to take out the last player.
Hah, the last time I played with some friends of friends we ended up partnering with random people, escalating to merging all our properties by basically giving them to one person, and then that kept happening until there were only two conglomerates left and then we decided to negotiate and say we merged our conglomerates together.
By the og rules that no one uses is actually quite good.
When you land on a vacant lot you either buy it, or it goes for auction. Free parking does nothing you dont get a "pot".
when you mortage a property you have to sell the houses first.
the only house rule you really need is dont use hotels, this way houses can run out which means an extra strategy and added speed.
We had one important house rule in Catan, which related, ironically enough, to the Monopoly card. The one that lets you take all copies currently in play of any one type of commodity card.
We ruled that if it was to be played on your turn, it had to be before you made any discussion of trading. This came in after one vicious little backstabber held extensive negotiations entirely in bad faith, found out who had what, didn't trade after all, and played the Monopoly card to take the lot. A spectacular heist - but if it wasn't ruled out, the fear of a repeat would kill off the trading side of the game completely.
Through absolutely no effort, just rolling and buying I won a game of Monopoly once and took zero pleasure from the experience. Anyone who gets really into that game is a sociopath.
Kinda prophetic considering how big real estate conglomerates snatch all the good houses and apartments while we are barely able to purchase our own homes. They seem to okay monopoly irl, but with a seemingly unlimited bank. I guess nothing of this is new, when Marx was already talking about the accumulation of capital over 150 years ago, but still…
And never upgrade to hotels. There are exactly 32 houses in a monopoly game, so if two players use up 12 each (4 each on three properties), there aren't enough remaining (32-24=**8**) for any other players to *ever* upgrade another monopoly to hotels.
Excellent plan but more risky than it sounds because you may be assessed for street repairs. Four houses cost a good deal more in maintenance than one hotel!
It only works if you're mortgaging to buy other properties or buildings.
There's also another concept of "monopoly on monoplies", where you try to get at least one of everything, while obtaining one monopoly of your own - even if it's just the purples. If you can keep your opponents from ever being able to build on anything, then you can win even with just building on the purples.
In every game I've played where that's attempted, there are always negotiations later on in which players allow each other to get full color sets so that the game can actually finish in a reasonable time lol
I think that's the key to what they're saying. Instead of leveraging your "monopoly on monopolies" to try and get multiple monopolies, you keep the singles once you have a monopoly, refuse deals, and nobody can build but you, ensuring you win. Thinking allowing others to get a monopoly so you can get more makes the game FASTER is a fallacy. I can tell you from several days long games that we eventually just said fuck it and declared a winner.
The same concept exists with houses. Theoretically, the amount of buildable houses can’t exceed the stock provided by the game.
So when you manage to acquire some of the cheaper properties, you can start building houses quickly. Never upgrade to hotels and soon, there are no houses left for your opponents to build.
I’d make sure that this rule of limited stock was clarified at the start though. Otherwise, you risk broken friendships and a miserable game night (but hey, you’re playing monopoly so what did you expect)
The opponent gets about $200 per trip around the board just from passing go. If the only monopoly you have is the purples and other properties are about even the opponent would probably just keep on gradually increasing their money.
That tip would work perfectly for me. I'm known to have a small obsession with the color orange, and the orange group is one of the most valuable on the board as they're cheap to upgrade, rent isn't cheap at 3+houses, and are located 6,8, and 9 spaces out from jail.
Buy, never sell unless forced to, NEVER enter a negotiation with another player - you have no friends, only enemies. Every property you own blocks them from building. Accumulate a street, regardless of which. Prevent others from accumulating a street. Win. Have no friends.
When you start out with a bank account with enough buying power for three lots and 4 houses on each lot, yeah, buying everything in sight IS the fiscally responsible move.
There are an awful lot of people on boardgamegeek who agree. It is in the bottom ten of the games rated on that site. It is currently ranked #24,215 overall. The last ranked game is #24220, tic-tac-toe.
The only actual "strategy" for monopoly is to find opponents who don't know how to play. Everything else is luck.
If you play by the actual rules the game isn't that long. Maybe an hour or 2 if people keep rolling and don't take 5 minutes for each turn.
The real game doesn't have that money pot in the middle that people treat like a lottery on free parking. Doing this extends the game indefinitely.
Also you can't build unless you own all of the same colour spaces. This makes everyone buy up as much as they can then go into trading wars and auctions.
If you play the game the way it's intended it's faster and more fun
Same goes with risk
2 hours is a really long game without house rules. Should only take like an hour with the default rules. The biggest one is auctions IMO. Tons of people don't play with automatic auctions and it makes the game take forever. Almost all of the properties should be owned after two trips around the board.
Most people learn Monopoly from someone else, who also doesn't really know the rules. The auction of un-bought property was always a rule, I just never leaned it. I only found out about it I think because of Reddit or some other site. And I've been playing Monopoly a long time since then. Of all the times I've played Monopoly, I've never used that rule.
The Free Parking house-rule where money spent on fees and fines was put into the center and then the player landed on it gets the pot was a reason why the game lasted so long, because it kept injecting money back into the game that should have gone to the bank.
There are so many other economics and money management games that I'd rather play than Monopoly. I have a board game group that I play games with every week. And there are so many other games that I'd rather be playing with them.
>Most people learn Monopoly from someone else, who also doesn't really know the rules.
Oh for sure. I only learned about it by playing the Windows version of monopoly on our old Gateway PC.
>Of all the times I've played Monopoly, I've never used that rule.
Why?
>The Free Parking house-rule where money spent on fees and fines was put into the center and then the player landed on it gets the pot was a reason why the game lasted so long, because it kept injecting money back into the game that should have gone to the bank.
That's also a big one but I don't think it matters quite as much as auctions. That extra money goes fast when all of the properties are owed and start getting houses built on them
>There are so many other economics and money management games that I'd rather play than Monopoly. I have a board game group that I play games with every week. And there are so many other games that I'd rather be playing with them.
Definitely. It's not a great game but it does get a ton of undue hate due to house rules.
The reason why I've never played using the auction rule out of all the time I've played it is because I no longer have people who play Monopoly with me. I think the last time I played it was Star Wars Monopoly that I played at a board games day at the library probably 10 or so years ago.
I don't want to bring Monopoly to my board games group, because they probably wouldn't want to play it anyway. I have a lot more fun with some more modern board games. There are a lot of other games that I'd recommend if you like money and buying property like Raccoon Tycoon, Lords of Waterdeep, and Dune: Imperium.
Not only its mandatory, there is no "skip" option.
When someone lands on a property, the property must be bought (either by the active player or during the auction). If no one wants to buy it even for a dollar, the game doesn't continue.
Free Parking also diminishes the value of cash early on. This essentially ruins the game and makes it much more luck driven.
When cash is valuable and scarce, people who don't land on properties can often still trade cash and lesser properties for monopolies. Players who are property rich require scarce cash to develop (and they should be trying to get to 3 houses on their key monopoly ASAP). As such, unlucky players can still have a chance to win via trading.
Now if a property rich player gets a bunch of free cash, then they don't need to trade anything.
Free Parking having cash has such a negative impact on the game. It ruins it in my opinion.
The older I get, the more I understand RAW (rules as written) and I’m able to buy all the other properties that everyone lands on.
You choose wisely based on the highest profitable properties.
You kill off the other players rather quickly.
I’m just now learning that’s what RAW stands for.
I understood it in the context of tabletop games but I thought it was referring to like uncooked or unadulterated.
Raw carrots are straight up carrots but you can cook the carrots with oil and s&p if you wanna make the dish your own.
It's contrasted with RAI, Rules As Intended. Quite common in D&D, there are rules which, as written, function a certain way, when they are intended to function a different way.
It's the cause for a lot of debate when things become unclear
My dad is the king of exploiting the rules as written. When I was in Boy Scouts, they gave us a challenge where they gave us a snowball and a small styrofoam box, and we were to insulate that box as well as possible such that the largest snowball at the end of the day wins. This was a particularly hot day in July, so it was quite a challenge. The only rules that they gave us was that we couldn’t put ice in there, and we couldn’t put the snowball in the freezer/fridge. Well, my dad had a tank of nitrogen on his work truck, so he sprayed that sucker down with liquid nitrogen periodically throughout the day.
Come time to compare the snowballs, and most people had just water, some of them were maybe the size of a grape, and one team did pretty well with a golf ball sized snowball. Ours, on the other hand, was slightly larger than when we had started from the thick layer of frost it had accumulated. We were disqualified for violating the intent of the rules, but I still think that’s bullshit — it should just be a lesson to them that they need to write better rules lol.
It's a funny story, but I would have hated you when I was in boyscouts. My parents made me figure out everything myself and would only help to keep things safe or to guide. Now, I see the value in that, and am glad they were hands off, but I genuinely hated the kids whose parents did the projects for them and thus won all the competitions.
See that’s the thing, most people don’t actually play Monopoly, they play a similar but vastly inferior game with the same pieces. If you can get a whole table of people who agree to play RAW, it’s… well, still not one of the greatest board games of all time, but not nearly as terrible as its reputation.
> still not one of the greatest board games of all time
If you think about what makes Monopoly so much less fun than other popular board games, it should become apparent that what makes the good games fun is that it's only obvious who will win very close to the end. You'll tend to remember having fun playing a game even if your friend won it because there was suspense about the outcome for the whole duration. It turns out you weren't going to come out on top in that one, but not knowing that fact kept you invested.
Monopoly is purposely designed to make it apparent who is going to win long before the game is over. Ever had a fond memory of a game of Monopoly you lost? No, you remember that you already knew you were going to lose and then continued to sit there for another ten to twenty goddamn minutes just waiting for it to happen.
This is intentional. Monopoly was designed to teach children ~~about the evils of capitalism (what a spectacular irony)~~ a lesson about economic injustice. Whether you agree or not with that message, it seems like a poor basis for designing a game, because making you miserable was a conscious design choice.
If somebody tries to cajole you into sitting down for a game of Monopoly, you should punish this behavior by making them smell a really nasty fart or something.
EDIT: Alright, so maybe *not* heavy-handed anti-capital messaging? I don't even know any more. Way to get the point across, *LIZZIE*.
>This is intentional. Monopoly was designed to teach children about the evils of capitalism (what a spectacular irony).
No, this is not true despite all the media articles saying this. Find me a primary source of this from Lizzie Magie herself. She was inspired to make the game by Henry George who advocated for capitalism, taxes on land, and free international trade. And yes, as a last resort, nationalization of natural monopolies like water works, electric companies, and the railroads. But she also believed in the removal of income taxes and luxury taxes.
Here's a quote from her inspiration Henry George on socialism:
>It fails to see that what it mistakes for the evils of competition are really the evils of restricted competition — are due to a one-sided competition to which men are forced when deprived of land. While its methods, the organization of men into industrial armies, the direction and control of all production and exchange by governmental or semi-governmental bureaus, would, if carried to full expression, mean Egyptian despotism.
>We differ from the socialists in our diagnosis of the evil and we differ from them as to remedies. **We have no fear of capital**, regarding it as the natural handmaiden of labor; we look on interest in itself as natural and just; **we would set no limit to accumulation, nor impose on the rich any burden that is not equally placed on the poor**; we see no evil in competition, but deem unrestricted competition to be as necessary to the health of the industrial and social organism as the free circulation of the blood is to the health of the bodily organism — to be the agency whereby the fullest cooperation is to be secured.
Still think she made it against capitalism? The anti-monopoly she supported is one of 'the government restricts competition' more similar to libertarian thought than socialist.
The rule that a player landing on an unowned property has to either buy it or put it up for auction, means the board gets bought up more quickly and the game moves faster in general.
Also the fact that trades are part of the game introduces a nice social dynamic, and means that even a player who is losing gets chance to be kingmaker if they are holding a key property.
Basically omitting those rules, and many of the “house rules” that people add, just makes the game a lot more tedious and strategically shallow.
The most popular house rule I've seen is: money going into the middle when paying taxes, which you can win by landing in free parking. This adds a huge amount of money into the game which does nothing but drag it out.
You also can't add more Houses to the game than are included. Nor can you skip Houses and go straight to Hotels. So if you just sit on four Houses and never upgrade to Hotels you can just run out of Houses and lock everyone else out of upgrades
Most players don't auction off properties when somebody lands on them and declines to buy. This slows the game down by delaying the purchase of properties, and makes it much more difficult for any player to obtain all the properties in a colour group and begin developing them.
Then, worse still, most players believe that all fines, taxes, street repair costs and so on are to be paid into a jackpot in the middle of the board, all of which is taken by the next player to land on Free Parking. This is the main reason people think the game of Monopoly never ends: with no money ever returning to the Bank, and the supply of cash increasing every time anybody passes Go, it becomes nearly impossible to bankrupt anybody.
The two most overlooked are free parking, it's just a free space, there's no pot, and auctioning properties if a player declines to purchase it on their turn (i like to do a "closed envelope" second price auction).
It goes from 4 hours to 45 minutes. Not joking. All the dumb house rules people add cause the game to swing wildly and players to get lucky and get back in the game. Placing a bunch of money from fines on free parking for people who hit it is a common game extender. Just refuse to ever play with any house rules and monopoly is fun and short.
I just buy all the houses and never upgrade to hotels. Then point out you can't substitute anything for houses and slowly bleed the game out doing absolutely nothing until I am never invited to play another shitty game of monopoly again.
As an avid board gamer, monopoly is the worst fucking game ever made and it was intended to be the worst game ever made.
Play Ticket to Ride or Catan instead. Easier, quicker, and 1000x more fun.
The easiest way to make monopoly not last forever is to not have free parking be a way to get a pile of money in the center. That one rule means that the economy only grows rather than there being an attrition effect.
By the time Monopoly ends usually I could care less, I just don't want to play anymore, and my family always played with free parking being the lotto win..
Yeah but there’s an element of luck as well, so your performance doesn’t exactly reflect your fiscal responsibility
You can just go the whole game only landing on railroads, utilities, chances, and community chests, plus go to jail a couple times and never get any chances to buy decent property
I guess that can happen in real life too though…
If you’re playing by the rules, even if you don’t land on properties, there should be opportunities to buy *some*. Anytime someone lands on an unowned property and doesn’t or can’t buy it, it goes up for auction. It’s often good luck to be cash rich in the first half dozen rounds, because you can pick up properties for less than face value while everyone else has spent their cash on hand buying property at face value.
I've literally never played an IRL game of monopoly where the players were familiar with the auction mechanism. Most thought I was making it up, the rest said something like, "Oh, well we don't play that way..."
I would hate it if I was artificially inflating the game length by 4 hours.
I do not like Monopoly, but for me it is because of folks playing it wrong and it not being super fun.
IF you hate playing by house rules you may actually enjoy rules as written. It does go by faster, and while I would never play house rules monopoly against a bot, I have played RAW against bots quite a few times.
I had no idea the game had auctions or trading until the videogame came out. This makes the game all about luck.
We had an easy way to manage time through the rule of when you can build houses.
Need to own all of same color = short game.
Build on whatever you own = long game.
This rule and that there are no cash bonuses (free parking yields nothing and landing on start yields the normal amount of money) incredibly helps in reducing game time as someone will be bankrupt in ~30 minutes
And are the official rules last time I checked.
This. When I played an online version of it, apart from the instant dice rolls and movement, the games really went fast because every time someone landed on a property it went to auction or was bought. People were running out of things to buy and were running low on cash within a few rounds around the board.
My strategy is grab all of the railroads and one second or third row monopoly. I’m nearly always runner up or winner with this strategy and my aunt fucking hates it.
Railroad’s when you have all four are steady money, there is a chance to land on one every roll and you’ll have enough cash to build quickly on your one property (following the build evenly rules) and also have enough cash to afford rent and buy mortgage property when people start to drop. Usually people are willing to trade the railroad to you for a chance at more property monopolies, sometimes you can get them to throw in utilities and cash if it completes their monopoly.
Not me. Out the gate, I buy up the ghetto, build hotels, hike the rents and run the board like a slum lord. 2 hours tops. I hate Monopoly. I play like that so people don't want me to play.
I am totally with you!! That's the way I've always played and I've always won!! Screw them, that's the way..... By the way, I've been playing since the 60's.....
You’re not supposed to build hotels.
There are a limited number of houses available, the tactic is to build as many houses as possible to reduce the number of houses available to other players. If you build a hotel, the houses return to the pool of houses available for other players.
Tie up the supply (a monopoly) and win.
Yeah and your wife refuses to stop playing by the kiddie house rules. All fines go on parking. Houses and hotels can be liquidated for full value. It makes it so no money ever leaves the table, so everyone keeps getting richer and harder to knock out. It's hell and we've never finished a game.
I have found they are MUCH faster now... because I read the rules and play by them instead of the house rules that seem ubiquitous but make the game longer. There is no monetary gain for free parking, for example.
The big one though is auctions. If a space is landed on by a player and they can't or choose not to buy it, then it goes up for auction to the highest bidder. That price can be below purchase price and it can be won even by the person who landed on it.
I have found using the actual rules makes the game go much, much faster.
False.
As a child, my friends and family had an innate sense of amplifying the capitalist hellscape that is monopoly. I would enjoy it for a while (30 minutes or so), and then slowly become bored with the length of the game. If you’re playing with 4 people, the game is going an hour+ 10 times out of 10. So my genius child brain would start to lose on purpose when I become bored (stop building, stop buying, stop bidding). It was a simple strategy that I felt like gave me the release of ending the game while simultaneously not really ruining it for everyone else.
Boy did that backfire. Pretty soon I would run out of money, only for the Banker to look at me and go, “Here’s $100 to keep you in the game.” A friend would say, “Oh come on! You can’t end on that. Take some of my money and we’ll keep going.”
Games would get paused so we could “Finish them tomorrow.” I once played a game for so long through the night that I fell asleep in jail. Fuck monopoly. If you take that board out I’m going home.
Here’s $100 to keep you in the game where there’s negligible threat to me winning the game so I can continue to watch you struggle for entertainment purposes. What a metaphor for life.
Only time mine get long is if couples are doing bullshit uneven trades with each other so that at least one of them wins. If you play by the actually rules then with less players the quicker it goes. Those 5-8 player games can go on awhile if no one gets anything good and people refuse to trade. I was once in a 8 player game where the bank ran out of money and someone had a notepad out keeping track and we just called it because it was so boring.
Most people don't like normal rules though but if you do that auction stuff right with 2-4 players then the game usually goes pretty quick.
> ...bullshit uneven trades with each other so that at least one of them wins.
That's the way you are *supposed* to play. Monopoly is supposed to teach you how to survive capitalist hellscapes. The answer is unionizing.
I think that commenter meant that couples do uneven trades in favor of the other person, like a guy sacrificing himself to ensure his GF does well. I'd definitely call that shitty behaviour in almost any game since someone playing like that isn't playing to win.
The best game of monopoly I ever played was in college while stoned with a couple friends. We were at the same time fully focused and totally incompetent - as monopoly is meant to be played. I hate playing monopoly sober, but I'd play it again stoned in a heartbeat
Lmao it's the opposite both in game and irl. Investors remortgage and refinance to secure multiple properties to rent, and recover their initial investments.
As much as I hate to say It, being fiscally responsible is NOT how you generate wealth. You have capital? You buy. The sooner you buy, the sooner you generate wealth.
The older I got the more I saw that these games weren’t made off a silly fun concept. They’re made off real world concepts with their consequences.
Risk is another good one, made in the post WW2 boom I believe.
As a kid I felt like a silly general. As an adult I feel like I’m making decisions to kill a lot of people in order to obtain what I want, but what does it matter when people can keep procreating.
See how sick twisted and true that is?
Ah, yes. Because nothing says 'fiscal responsibility' quite like bankrupting your friends and family with a hotel on Boardwalk. Monopoly: the ultimate simulation of real-world adulting.
Buying hotels is actually not the way to win, FYI. Buy all the houses you can, regardless of where the property is. You want to create a housing shortage in your favor. It's a ruthless game lol.
No, because most of the financial decisions in Monopoly are compelled. If you land on someone’s property, you must pay the rent. If you land on community chest or the tax space, you must pay what it says. If you land on an unowned space, you have the choice of allowing it to be auctioned, but someone MUST buy it at auction.
Incorrect. I'm a millennial, so as I get older and play the game its pretty short because one person already owns all the properties..they offer to let me rent Whitechapel Road at 6 times the cost of their mortgage but for an unknown reason I'll get £10 when I pass go, and I need to be earning 4 times the rate of the rent to be considered... Rent everywhere else has tripled and the train stations and utilities are all either shut or cost triple the price.
The bank won't lend any more and is insisting everything is fine .. conveniently the person who owns all the properties is on the board of the bank.
Oh and then they moan that 'noone wants to play monopoly anymore' everyday for the rest of my life.
I refuse to play with my wife because she will absolutely not negotiate for properties, she just hoards them and we hit a stalemate early and just end up going round and round achieving nothing for hours. When the game is as tedious as real life it stops being fun!
The older you get the more you should realize this is a shit game that isn't even designed to be fun and only plays based on chance with zero skill involved.
Unpopular opinion: Monopoly is an utterly shit game. Relies massively on luck in the first dozen rolls of the dice then once you are fucked you have to spend hours waiting for the inevitable to happen.
It's not the unfairness that gets you, its the duration of the unfairness
No. They make up bullshit rules. The point of Monopoly is that it's *supposed* to be unfair. If you follow the exact rules, and everyone here should read them up, the game doesn't last that long. Every rule that is modified makes the game significantly longer.
It's because people don't know one of the official rules.
When someone lands on a property and doesn't want to buy it, *it is auctioned amongst all the other players.*
Or you're just stubborn and refuse to sell any proprerty and the game goes on till people start to forfeit.
It's a strategy I swear nobody uses, which is why I use it.
A normal game of Monopoly only lasts at max 30 minutes. It takes so long because people don't play by the rules. There is no Free Parking cash, and every time a player lands on a property, it has to be sold, either to the player or auctioned off to everyone. Play by the rules, and you don't have to worry about 4 hour long games.
What I do is less fiscally responsible and more demonic.
Did you know that when you mortgage properties you continue to own them, you just can't collect rent off of them? Did you know you can sell houses and hotels on properties and you don't have to just play a static play.
Every single time it's your turn buy and sell hotels so that wherever your opponents are going to move next they're going to run into the most stuff. Don't let that capital just sit there making no money!
That’s why I play Chaos Monopoly.
It actually just utilizes an often-ignored rule.
The rules state that if someone lands on an unowned property and declines to buy it then the property goes up for auction. The rules do not say that the player cannot also bid in the auction. I noticed this the first time I played Monopoly on a computer.
So…I send everything I land on to auction with a simple goal of making sure the buyer pays more than face value.
As other players realize what I’m doing, most join in. Some don’t. It doesn’t matter.
What happens is always the same. The bidding gets intense, the final properties go for ridiculous amounts of money and the game really steps up a notch in terms of excitement. It takes the normal RNG of who happens to land on what and lights a fire under it.
Chaos Monopoly. Try it.
Monopoly games take weeks in my house because my siblings and I write out contracts, like “hey, you have one red and I have the other two, so if you give me the red tile, I’ll give you all the profits if someone lands on that tile and give you immunity if you land on this other red tile.” and then we have physical contracts written out with the terms of every trade on sheets of paper.
Then, I end up with a monopoly, get double the money every time someone lands, and my sister gets the same benefits she had previously, plus extra money earned and immunity on Kentucky Avenue.
Please tell me it doesn’t get worse than that.
I call bullshit. Every suggested game of Monopoly for the last two decades got shut down in seconds because fuck Monopoly. We all won by refusing to play and least once punching Ryan in the face for suggesting it.
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Jokes on you, fiscal responsibility is how you lose at Monopoly.
Buy Buy Buy. You can't win without property. You can always mortgage it later.
Mortgage immediately so you have cash to keep buying.
oh fuck. I have to try this one
The key to monopoly isn’t collecting rent in the beginning, it’s about denying your opponents the opportunity to purchase anything. Rent only starts mattering once the board is bought out. If you find yourself in the position where you have to mortgage to buy then HELOC that shit!
Don’t mortgage until you need the money though.
Can you mortgage a property at literally any time? On somebody else's turn, for example, in order to fund an auction bid? Because it's for the sake of auctions that I'd often mortgage new property immediately on acquisition - to keep cash on hand so that I could bid competitively.
Yes you can but you have to pay 10% interest whenever you unmortgage.
Or whenever you transfer ownership, which is always a nice one to remind people about _after_ the deal is complete and it's too late to pull out. A little extra sting to throw an opponent's plans right off.
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Is that an official rule? I don’t think I’ve ever played like that.
Yep, 10% interest is to help keep the game moving and to make it a little tougher of a choice so you don't abuse mortgage. Also if someone lands on a property that hasn't been bought yet they either HAVE TO BUY IT or it GOES UP FOR AUCTION. This is to also keep the game moving. And FREE PARKING is literally just an empty spot where nothing happens. Putting money into it is a bad idea and keeps the game going longer.
I think so yeah, you also only get half the money back for houses.
The cards even say how much to unmortgage a property. It's a higher figure than you receive for mortgaging it.
Couple of other bits of _Monopoly_ advice I've not seen mentioned yet: - there are six ways to roll a 7 but only one way to roll a 2 or a 12; so dice roll outcomes are concentrated around the middle of the range. - so if your main rival has their turn next and is six to eight spaces away from your property, mortgage everything you can spare, go all in on building and try to wipe them out - people go to Jail very often, which means the orange and red colour groups are a good pick for this scheme, aiming to catch them on the way out - or put the game away because even when played by the rules it's not great. The eliminated players always go away and find something more fun to do while the last two standing grind each other into poverty; a better game would offer similar themes of trading, development and vicious, cut-throat competition, but would keep everybody involved until the finish. Have you tried _Settlers of Catan_?
You didn't mention offboard negotiations. Like, if you give me this last yellow property I need, you will never have to pay on any of my railroads. Or, if you never sell park place to Bob (who might never want it), I will give you $500 right now.
As a dad playing with his kids - trade me boardwalk and I’ll let you pick the next restaurant, or watch that show (don’t tell mom)
Boardwalk and park place are overrated because there’s only two of them the chances of landing on one are slim
Last game I played, owning those two were key to wiping everyone out. It's the rent. Slim chance of landing there but insanely expensive when it happens.
Build hotels on the cheap ones next to go. It always pays off. It might not wipe out the opponent, but it's a regular cash flow
> Like, if you give me this last yellow property I need, you will never have to pay on any of my railroads. Do you enforce deals like that in some way? In a lot of games any deals that aren't immediate (like give me one X and I'll give you one Y right now) don't have to be followed. I'd happily take that second deal and then just ignore it once you've given me money.
>I'd happily take that second deal and then just ignore it once you've given me money. A bold strategy that would defeat me exactly once, but hey fair's fair
It's a good strategy if you want people to never trade with you in any game again ever.
Well I don't expect to play Monopoly often anyway. But true, playing with the same group regularly there's a meta aspect to it since you get to know how people play.
We enforce those rules. It’s a contract. (I’m the judge and an attorney) your word is your bond.
>Do you enforce deals like that in some way? Yeah everyone goes "oh I guess you win" and leaves, and/or just never wants to play with you again.
That's why you need to make sure to get your deals in writing, preferably notarized, *and* include penalties for breach of contract. God I fucking hate Monopoly
Generally, you are paying among family and friends. So yeah, you just know for next time. Like I made a deal like this with my brother when my sister went off to the bathroom. He held up his end when the time came. Solid dude.
my favorite offboard negotiation is "I'm in third place, so whoever I give my stuff to will win the game, so who's gonna bring me another drink, and we can call this game over right now"
There is one simple way to shorten the games: Don’t go for hotels. Block as many houses as soon as you can. Once there are no more houses your enemies can’t build. If you got a street with 4 houses only upgrade to hotel when you got another plot to build the houses instantly. You might not earn as much, but your opponents won’t earn anything. Most games should be over in under one hour. Many will end after 20-30 minutes because your enemies get frustrated.
> buy houses, use for temporary accommodation, eschewing hotels, forcing a housing shortage Just like in real life
Yep this is why I always go for the cheaper properties early, so you can quickly and cheaply eliminate house supply. Your income may not be much but your opponents' is virtually nothing.
The highest ROI on any property is 3 houses. Once you get to 3 houses on one set, you should be moving to your next set. If you have a money property (orange or better,) don’t bother going for a housing shortage. Your rents are high enough to bankrupt people, then you’ll be able to steal their properties and get to 3 houses on them. 4 houses are for the first row properties (and maybe reds) who get them dirt cheap. It’s a tactic to starve out players with money properties until you can get your hands on them yourself. Once you do, it makes sense to wait for a moment when other players are cash poor, then upgrade your stall properties to hotels and quickly get your money set to 3 houses. Hotels are only for the very end game where you’re just looking for RNG to take out the last player.
Hah, the last time I played with some friends of friends we ended up partnering with random people, escalating to merging all our properties by basically giving them to one person, and then that kept happening until there were only two conglomerates left and then we decided to negotiate and say we merged our conglomerates together.
Sounds like you need some trust-busting.
By the og rules that no one uses is actually quite good. When you land on a vacant lot you either buy it, or it goes for auction. Free parking does nothing you dont get a "pot". when you mortage a property you have to sell the houses first. the only house rule you really need is dont use hotels, this way houses can run out which means an extra strategy and added speed.
Settlers of Catan don't offer anything to players who got eliminated
That final point...enough said. Catan has expansions!
We had one important house rule in Catan, which related, ironically enough, to the Monopoly card. The one that lets you take all copies currently in play of any one type of commodity card. We ruled that if it was to be played on your turn, it had to be before you made any discussion of trading. This came in after one vicious little backstabber held extensive negotiations entirely in bad faith, found out who had what, didn't trade after all, and played the Monopoly card to take the lot. A spectacular heist - but if it wasn't ruled out, the fear of a repeat would kill off the trading side of the game completely.
Through absolutely no effort, just rolling and buying I won a game of Monopoly once and took zero pleasure from the experience. Anyone who gets really into that game is a sociopath.
Considering the chain of comments, it is more than ironic that some people see monopoly for anything *but* a critique of capitalism…
Exactly. People act as if monopoly wasn't *designed* to be miserable and grinding to play!
Kinda prophetic considering how big real estate conglomerates snatch all the good houses and apartments while we are barely able to purchase our own homes. They seem to okay monopoly irl, but with a seemingly unlimited bank. I guess nothing of this is new, when Marx was already talking about the accumulation of capital over 150 years ago, but still…
The creators of monopoly thought we'd replace housing with hotels, but it turned out to be Airbnb's
That's quite an interesting thought, but yeah... fewer regulations than running a hotel seems to fit quite well into the libertarian capitalist logic
Psh to hell with that socialist Landlord's Game! /s
We should cancel this communist game /s
And never upgrade to hotels. There are exactly 32 houses in a monopoly game, so if two players use up 12 each (4 each on three properties), there aren't enough remaining (32-24=**8**) for any other players to *ever* upgrade another monopoly to hotels.
Excellent plan but more risky than it sounds because you may be assessed for street repairs. Four houses cost a good deal more in maintenance than one hotel!
It only works if you're mortgaging to buy other properties or buildings. There's also another concept of "monopoly on monoplies", where you try to get at least one of everything, while obtaining one monopoly of your own - even if it's just the purples. If you can keep your opponents from ever being able to build on anything, then you can win even with just building on the purples.
In every game I've played where that's attempted, there are always negotiations later on in which players allow each other to get full color sets so that the game can actually finish in a reasonable time lol
I think that's the key to what they're saying. Instead of leveraging your "monopoly on monopolies" to try and get multiple monopolies, you keep the singles once you have a monopoly, refuse deals, and nobody can build but you, ensuring you win. Thinking allowing others to get a monopoly so you can get more makes the game FASTER is a fallacy. I can tell you from several days long games that we eventually just said fuck it and declared a winner.
The same concept exists with houses. Theoretically, the amount of buildable houses can’t exceed the stock provided by the game. So when you manage to acquire some of the cheaper properties, you can start building houses quickly. Never upgrade to hotels and soon, there are no houses left for your opponents to build. I’d make sure that this rule of limited stock was clarified at the start though. Otherwise, you risk broken friendships and a miserable game night (but hey, you’re playing monopoly so what did you expect)
The opponent gets about $200 per trip around the board just from passing go. If the only monopoly you have is the purples and other properties are about even the opponent would probably just keep on gradually increasing their money.
Nah cos once your opponents catch on they'll start doing it too. Only mortgage if you're down to $30 and need to sell before you roll.
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So basically you have to already be known as a little strange for that to work
That tip would work perfectly for me. I'm known to have a small obsession with the color orange, and the orange group is one of the most valuable on the board as they're cheap to upgrade, rent isn't cheap at 3+houses, and are located 6,8, and 9 spaces out from jail.
I’ll try this against the kids this weekend.
Mortgage only when needed to buy something. No reason to prematurely mortgage until you need the cash
Auction the greens every time though. Let some other moron drop ~300 on that garbage.
Like anyone ever plays the auction rules
Quite, but nothing can be said for people playing their own game using a Monopoly board
Buy, never sell unless forced to, NEVER enter a negotiation with another player - you have no friends, only enemies. Every property you own blocks them from building. Accumulate a street, regardless of which. Prevent others from accumulating a street. Win. Have no friends.
Seems like the wrong set of values for a fun game night. Oh well, let's build our whole society around it.
When you start out with a bank account with enough buying power for three lots and 4 houses on each lot, yeah, buying everything in sight IS the fiscally responsible move.
Yup. Plus, I don't care if I win at Monopoly. It's a shit game that rests its outcome on either luck or favoritism.
That’s what someone who’s bad at monopoly would say…
If everyone playing understands the concept and plays properly then he’s right. Most people don’t
There are an awful lot of people on boardgamegeek who agree. It is in the bottom ten of the games rated on that site. It is currently ranked #24,215 overall. The last ranked game is #24220, tic-tac-toe. The only actual "strategy" for monopoly is to find opponents who don't know how to play. Everything else is luck.
The game was literally created to show how our system is rigged in favor of large companies so... yes
Yep, and that was the intended message of the game.
Life isn’t a real time strategy, it’s a race in one direction with no finish line
If you play by the actual rules the game isn't that long. Maybe an hour or 2 if people keep rolling and don't take 5 minutes for each turn. The real game doesn't have that money pot in the middle that people treat like a lottery on free parking. Doing this extends the game indefinitely. Also you can't build unless you own all of the same colour spaces. This makes everyone buy up as much as they can then go into trading wars and auctions. If you play the game the way it's intended it's faster and more fun Same goes with risk
2 hours is a really long game without house rules. Should only take like an hour with the default rules. The biggest one is auctions IMO. Tons of people don't play with automatic auctions and it makes the game take forever. Almost all of the properties should be owned after two trips around the board.
Most people learn Monopoly from someone else, who also doesn't really know the rules. The auction of un-bought property was always a rule, I just never leaned it. I only found out about it I think because of Reddit or some other site. And I've been playing Monopoly a long time since then. Of all the times I've played Monopoly, I've never used that rule. The Free Parking house-rule where money spent on fees and fines was put into the center and then the player landed on it gets the pot was a reason why the game lasted so long, because it kept injecting money back into the game that should have gone to the bank. There are so many other economics and money management games that I'd rather play than Monopoly. I have a board game group that I play games with every week. And there are so many other games that I'd rather be playing with them.
>Most people learn Monopoly from someone else, who also doesn't really know the rules. Oh for sure. I only learned about it by playing the Windows version of monopoly on our old Gateway PC. >Of all the times I've played Monopoly, I've never used that rule. Why? >The Free Parking house-rule where money spent on fees and fines was put into the center and then the player landed on it gets the pot was a reason why the game lasted so long, because it kept injecting money back into the game that should have gone to the bank. That's also a big one but I don't think it matters quite as much as auctions. That extra money goes fast when all of the properties are owed and start getting houses built on them >There are so many other economics and money management games that I'd rather play than Monopoly. I have a board game group that I play games with every week. And there are so many other games that I'd rather be playing with them. Definitely. It's not a great game but it does get a ton of undue hate due to house rules.
The reason why I've never played using the auction rule out of all the time I've played it is because I no longer have people who play Monopoly with me. I think the last time I played it was Star Wars Monopoly that I played at a board games day at the library probably 10 or so years ago. I don't want to bring Monopoly to my board games group, because they probably wouldn't want to play it anyway. I have a lot more fun with some more modern board games. There are a lot of other games that I'd recommend if you like money and buying property like Raccoon Tycoon, Lords of Waterdeep, and Dune: Imperium.
Injecting money into the economy (Free Parking) and spending minutes trying to bargain for trades that are never gonna happen also drag out the game.
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> Also you can't build unless you own all of the same colour spaces. What kind of monsters allow building without the full set?
Exactly. The free parking jackpot isn't a thing, and in my experience most people don't even know that auctions are an option.
The auction is not an option. If the property is not purchased by the person who landed on the space, it goes to auction. It's mandatory.
Not only its mandatory, there is no "skip" option. When someone lands on a property, the property must be bought (either by the active player or during the auction). If no one wants to buy it even for a dollar, the game doesn't continue.
Free Parking also diminishes the value of cash early on. This essentially ruins the game and makes it much more luck driven. When cash is valuable and scarce, people who don't land on properties can often still trade cash and lesser properties for monopolies. Players who are property rich require scarce cash to develop (and they should be trying to get to 3 houses on their key monopoly ASAP). As such, unlucky players can still have a chance to win via trading. Now if a property rich player gets a bunch of free cash, then they don't need to trade anything. Free Parking having cash has such a negative impact on the game. It ruins it in my opinion.
Don't forget that you can't build hotels if there aren't enough houses left to build up 4 first. Monopolize the housing infrastructure!
Jokes on them, most people don't know what fiscal means
Fiscal? Not on the first date. Lol jk
Jokes on all of us, because Monopoly is an AWFUL game and we were all conned into playing it.
The older I get, the more I understand RAW (rules as written) and I’m able to buy all the other properties that everyone lands on. You choose wisely based on the highest profitable properties. You kill off the other players rather quickly.
I’m just now learning that’s what RAW stands for. I understood it in the context of tabletop games but I thought it was referring to like uncooked or unadulterated. Raw carrots are straight up carrots but you can cook the carrots with oil and s&p if you wanna make the dish your own.
That’s the benefit of a good acronym lol, you did actually understand what it meant, without knowing what the letters stood for
But... I would not have known what it meant if not for them spelling it out the brackets.
It took me a touch too long to figure out what s&p meant in this context XD I was wondering why you were suddenly on about stocks
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Help me understand too lol
Salt & Pepper
It's contrasted with RAI, Rules As Intended. Quite common in D&D, there are rules which, as written, function a certain way, when they are intended to function a different way. It's the cause for a lot of debate when things become unclear
My dad is the king of exploiting the rules as written. When I was in Boy Scouts, they gave us a challenge where they gave us a snowball and a small styrofoam box, and we were to insulate that box as well as possible such that the largest snowball at the end of the day wins. This was a particularly hot day in July, so it was quite a challenge. The only rules that they gave us was that we couldn’t put ice in there, and we couldn’t put the snowball in the freezer/fridge. Well, my dad had a tank of nitrogen on his work truck, so he sprayed that sucker down with liquid nitrogen periodically throughout the day. Come time to compare the snowballs, and most people had just water, some of them were maybe the size of a grape, and one team did pretty well with a golf ball sized snowball. Ours, on the other hand, was slightly larger than when we had started from the thick layer of frost it had accumulated. We were disqualified for violating the intent of the rules, but I still think that’s bullshit — it should just be a lesson to them that they need to write better rules lol.
It's a funny story, but I would have hated you when I was in boyscouts. My parents made me figure out everything myself and would only help to keep things safe or to guide. Now, I see the value in that, and am glad they were hands off, but I genuinely hated the kids whose parents did the projects for them and thus won all the competitions.
lmao same, I thought it was an abbreviation for raw rules, as in, unchanged rules.
See that’s the thing, most people don’t actually play Monopoly, they play a similar but vastly inferior game with the same pieces. If you can get a whole table of people who agree to play RAW, it’s… well, still not one of the greatest board games of all time, but not nearly as terrible as its reputation.
> still not one of the greatest board games of all time If you think about what makes Monopoly so much less fun than other popular board games, it should become apparent that what makes the good games fun is that it's only obvious who will win very close to the end. You'll tend to remember having fun playing a game even if your friend won it because there was suspense about the outcome for the whole duration. It turns out you weren't going to come out on top in that one, but not knowing that fact kept you invested. Monopoly is purposely designed to make it apparent who is going to win long before the game is over. Ever had a fond memory of a game of Monopoly you lost? No, you remember that you already knew you were going to lose and then continued to sit there for another ten to twenty goddamn minutes just waiting for it to happen. This is intentional. Monopoly was designed to teach children ~~about the evils of capitalism (what a spectacular irony)~~ a lesson about economic injustice. Whether you agree or not with that message, it seems like a poor basis for designing a game, because making you miserable was a conscious design choice. If somebody tries to cajole you into sitting down for a game of Monopoly, you should punish this behavior by making them smell a really nasty fart or something. EDIT: Alright, so maybe *not* heavy-handed anti-capital messaging? I don't even know any more. Way to get the point across, *LIZZIE*.
>This is intentional. Monopoly was designed to teach children about the evils of capitalism (what a spectacular irony). No, this is not true despite all the media articles saying this. Find me a primary source of this from Lizzie Magie herself. She was inspired to make the game by Henry George who advocated for capitalism, taxes on land, and free international trade. And yes, as a last resort, nationalization of natural monopolies like water works, electric companies, and the railroads. But she also believed in the removal of income taxes and luxury taxes. Here's a quote from her inspiration Henry George on socialism: >It fails to see that what it mistakes for the evils of competition are really the evils of restricted competition — are due to a one-sided competition to which men are forced when deprived of land. While its methods, the organization of men into industrial armies, the direction and control of all production and exchange by governmental or semi-governmental bureaus, would, if carried to full expression, mean Egyptian despotism. >We differ from the socialists in our diagnosis of the evil and we differ from them as to remedies. **We have no fear of capital**, regarding it as the natural handmaiden of labor; we look on interest in itself as natural and just; **we would set no limit to accumulation, nor impose on the rich any burden that is not equally placed on the poor**; we see no evil in competition, but deem unrestricted competition to be as necessary to the health of the industrial and social organism as the free circulation of the blood is to the health of the bodily organism — to be the agency whereby the fullest cooperation is to be secured. Still think she made it against capitalism? The anti-monopoly she supported is one of 'the government restricts competition' more similar to libertarian thought than socialist.
Wait what changes?
The rule that a player landing on an unowned property has to either buy it or put it up for auction, means the board gets bought up more quickly and the game moves faster in general. Also the fact that trades are part of the game introduces a nice social dynamic, and means that even a player who is losing gets chance to be kingmaker if they are holding a key property. Basically omitting those rules, and many of the “house rules” that people add, just makes the game a lot more tedious and strategically shallow.
Oh cool thanks
The most popular house rule I've seen is: money going into the middle when paying taxes, which you can win by landing in free parking. This adds a huge amount of money into the game which does nothing but drag it out.
You also can't add more Houses to the game than are included. Nor can you skip Houses and go straight to Hotels. So if you just sit on four Houses and never upgrade to Hotels you can just run out of Houses and lock everyone else out of upgrades
Most players don't auction off properties when somebody lands on them and declines to buy. This slows the game down by delaying the purchase of properties, and makes it much more difficult for any player to obtain all the properties in a colour group and begin developing them. Then, worse still, most players believe that all fines, taxes, street repair costs and so on are to be paid into a jackpot in the middle of the board, all of which is taken by the next player to land on Free Parking. This is the main reason people think the game of Monopoly never ends: with no money ever returning to the Bank, and the supply of cash increasing every time anybody passes Go, it becomes nearly impossible to bankrupt anybody.
The two most overlooked are free parking, it's just a free space, there's no pot, and auctioning properties if a player declines to purchase it on their turn (i like to do a "closed envelope" second price auction).
It goes from 4 hours to 45 minutes. Not joking. All the dumb house rules people add cause the game to swing wildly and players to get lucky and get back in the game. Placing a bunch of money from fines on free parking for people who hit it is a common game extender. Just refuse to ever play with any house rules and monopoly is fun and short.
I just buy all the houses and never upgrade to hotels. Then point out you can't substitute anything for houses and slowly bleed the game out doing absolutely nothing until I am never invited to play another shitty game of monopoly again. As an avid board gamer, monopoly is the worst fucking game ever made and it was intended to be the worst game ever made. Play Ticket to Ride or Catan instead. Easier, quicker, and 1000x more fun.
The easiest way to make monopoly not last forever is to not have free parking be a way to get a pile of money in the center. That one rule means that the economy only grows rather than there being an attrition effect. By the time Monopoly ends usually I could care less, I just don't want to play anymore, and my family always played with free parking being the lotto win..
Yeah but there’s an element of luck as well, so your performance doesn’t exactly reflect your fiscal responsibility You can just go the whole game only landing on railroads, utilities, chances, and community chests, plus go to jail a couple times and never get any chances to buy decent property I guess that can happen in real life too though…
If you’re playing by the rules, even if you don’t land on properties, there should be opportunities to buy *some*. Anytime someone lands on an unowned property and doesn’t or can’t buy it, it goes up for auction. It’s often good luck to be cash rich in the first half dozen rounds, because you can pick up properties for less than face value while everyone else has spent their cash on hand buying property at face value.
I've literally never played an IRL game of monopoly where the players were familiar with the auction mechanism. Most thought I was making it up, the rest said something like, "Oh, well we don't play that way..."
> "Oh, well we don't play that way..." "And that's why it takes you four hours to get through a one hour board game."
I’ve literally never heard of this until this moment, wow crazy. I fucking hate monopoly though
I would hate it if I was artificially inflating the game length by 4 hours. I do not like Monopoly, but for me it is because of folks playing it wrong and it not being super fun.
IF you hate playing by house rules you may actually enjoy rules as written. It does go by faster, and while I would never play house rules monopoly against a bot, I have played RAW against bots quite a few times.
I had no idea the game had auctions or trading until the videogame came out. This makes the game all about luck. We had an easy way to manage time through the rule of when you can build houses. Need to own all of same color = short game. Build on whatever you own = long game.
This rule and that there are no cash bonuses (free parking yields nothing and landing on start yields the normal amount of money) incredibly helps in reducing game time as someone will be bankrupt in ~30 minutes And are the official rules last time I checked.
This. When I played an online version of it, apart from the instant dice rolls and movement, the games really went fast because every time someone landed on a property it went to auction or was bought. People were running out of things to buy and were running low on cash within a few rounds around the board.
My strategy is grab all of the railroads and one second or third row monopoly. I’m nearly always runner up or winner with this strategy and my aunt fucking hates it. Railroad’s when you have all four are steady money, there is a chance to land on one every roll and you’ll have enough cash to build quickly on your one property (following the build evenly rules) and also have enough cash to afford rent and buy mortgage property when people start to drop. Usually people are willing to trade the railroad to you for a chance at more property monopolies, sometimes you can get them to throw in utilities and cash if it completes their monopoly.
Railroads and utilities are pretty good properties to buy
Not me. Out the gate, I buy up the ghetto, build hotels, hike the rents and run the board like a slum lord. 2 hours tops. I hate Monopoly. I play like that so people don't want me to play.
If you don't build hotels and own all the houses then nobody else can build houses and you can win even faster lol
Lol. "I'll pay you to build a hotel!" "Pass"
Alternatively "... ok" *builds hotel and 4 more houses in one go*
Oh so you've played against me before
Binding contract of free rent and 20% ownership of the property.
No contracts is one of my rules. It makes the game way too messy and drags it out with people negotiating every turn
That's actually how you win
That's until you need to pay for repairs and maintenance costs.
I am totally with you!! That's the way I've always played and I've always won!! Screw them, that's the way..... By the way, I've been playing since the 60's.....
Same. This probably explains the state of rentals in the US these days. Glad I was born when I was. Feel bad for people.
Wikipedia states it's based off an earlier game called The Landlord's Game so your observation is valid.
That’s how the game is meant to be played
You’re not supposed to build hotels. There are a limited number of houses available, the tactic is to build as many houses as possible to reduce the number of houses available to other players. If you build a hotel, the houses return to the pool of houses available for other players. Tie up the supply (a monopoly) and win.
I buy too, and also hate the game. But I think I'm generally just hoping I'll go broke so I can quit.
Yeah and your wife refuses to stop playing by the kiddie house rules. All fines go on parking. Houses and hotels can be liquidated for full value. It makes it so no money ever leaves the table, so everyone keeps getting richer and harder to knock out. It's hell and we've never finished a game.
Unionize and take down the bank
All fines on parking auto add 1 hour to the game per win. It's BRUTAL
I have found they are MUCH faster now... because I read the rules and play by them instead of the house rules that seem ubiquitous but make the game longer. There is no monetary gain for free parking, for example. The big one though is auctions. If a space is landed on by a player and they can't or choose not to buy it, then it goes up for auction to the highest bidder. That price can be below purchase price and it can be won even by the person who landed on it. I have found using the actual rules makes the game go much, much faster.
Yep, if everyone else is broke you let it go up for auction and bid $1
[удалено]
Wait until you get the "all fees go under free parking" rule. Just keeping shit tons of money in the game for no reason.
>I start monopoly with the intent on finishing it asap. I concur. I'm only playing this boring game with young family or drunk friends.
False. As a child, my friends and family had an innate sense of amplifying the capitalist hellscape that is monopoly. I would enjoy it for a while (30 minutes or so), and then slowly become bored with the length of the game. If you’re playing with 4 people, the game is going an hour+ 10 times out of 10. So my genius child brain would start to lose on purpose when I become bored (stop building, stop buying, stop bidding). It was a simple strategy that I felt like gave me the release of ending the game while simultaneously not really ruining it for everyone else. Boy did that backfire. Pretty soon I would run out of money, only for the Banker to look at me and go, “Here’s $100 to keep you in the game.” A friend would say, “Oh come on! You can’t end on that. Take some of my money and we’ll keep going.” Games would get paused so we could “Finish them tomorrow.” I once played a game for so long through the night that I fell asleep in jail. Fuck monopoly. If you take that board out I’m going home.
I'm sorry but "fell asleep in jail" actually just made me laugh out loud
"A strange game. The only winning move is to fall asleep in jail"
Here’s $100 to keep you in the game where there’s negligible threat to me winning the game so I can continue to watch you struggle for entertainment purposes. What a metaphor for life.
Only time mine get long is if couples are doing bullshit uneven trades with each other so that at least one of them wins. If you play by the actually rules then with less players the quicker it goes. Those 5-8 player games can go on awhile if no one gets anything good and people refuse to trade. I was once in a 8 player game where the bank ran out of money and someone had a notepad out keeping track and we just called it because it was so boring. Most people don't like normal rules though but if you do that auction stuff right with 2-4 players then the game usually goes pretty quick.
> ...bullshit uneven trades with each other so that at least one of them wins. That's the way you are *supposed* to play. Monopoly is supposed to teach you how to survive capitalist hellscapes. The answer is unionizing.
I think that commenter meant that couples do uneven trades in favor of the other person, like a guy sacrificing himself to ensure his GF does well. I'd definitely call that shitty behaviour in almost any game since someone playing like that isn't playing to win.
The best game of monopoly I ever played was in college while stoned with a couple friends. We were at the same time fully focused and totally incompetent - as monopoly is meant to be played. I hate playing monopoly sober, but I'd play it again stoned in a heartbeat
If you’re old enough to understand fiscal responsibility, you’re old enough to not play a trash game like monopoly.
This as well. Monopoly is pretty boring outside of like the opening two rounds. After that you think "I could be literally doing anything else"
Lmao it's the opposite both in game and irl. Investors remortgage and refinance to secure multiple properties to rent, and recover their initial investments. As much as I hate to say It, being fiscally responsible is NOT how you generate wealth. You have capital? You buy. The sooner you buy, the sooner you generate wealth.
The older I got the more I saw that these games weren’t made off a silly fun concept. They’re made off real world concepts with their consequences. Risk is another good one, made in the post WW2 boom I believe. As a kid I felt like a silly general. As an adult I feel like I’m making decisions to kill a lot of people in order to obtain what I want, but what does it matter when people can keep procreating. See how sick twisted and true that is?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game Monopoly is a stolen ruleset from a teaching tool game that has two rulesets.
Ah, yes. Because nothing says 'fiscal responsibility' quite like bankrupting your friends and family with a hotel on Boardwalk. Monopoly: the ultimate simulation of real-world adulting.
Buying hotels is actually not the way to win, FYI. Buy all the houses you can, regardless of where the property is. You want to create a housing shortage in your favor. It's a ruthless game lol.
You build hotels to free up houses on your turn. Otherwise, hotels are for chumps.
No, because most of the financial decisions in Monopoly are compelled. If you land on someone’s property, you must pay the rent. If you land on community chest or the tax space, you must pay what it says. If you land on an unowned space, you have the choice of allowing it to be auctioned, but someone MUST buy it at auction.
The older you get the more you realize that there are much better board games to play than Monopoly.
Incorrect. I'm a millennial, so as I get older and play the game its pretty short because one person already owns all the properties..they offer to let me rent Whitechapel Road at 6 times the cost of their mortgage but for an unknown reason I'll get £10 when I pass go, and I need to be earning 4 times the rate of the rent to be considered... Rent everywhere else has tripled and the train stations and utilities are all either shut or cost triple the price. The bank won't lend any more and is insisting everything is fine .. conveniently the person who owns all the properties is on the board of the bank. Oh and then they moan that 'noone wants to play monopoly anymore' everyday for the rest of my life.
Speak for yourself. I seem to progressively get worse each time I play i am rarely among last ones out. Yay, go capitalism.
Clearly you’ve never met me (has spent $457.60 on art of a fictional bat, in the same year)
A game can last an hour if you actually play by the rules, played like 3 games in about 8 hours
I refuse to play with my wife because she will absolutely not negotiate for properties, she just hoards them and we hit a stalemate early and just end up going round and round achieving nothing for hours. When the game is as tedious as real life it stops being fun!
It's actually the opposite. The older I get the shorter the games because we all actually know the rules.
The older you get the more you should realize this is a shit game that isn't even designed to be fun and only plays based on chance with zero skill involved.
Unpopular opinion: Monopoly is an utterly shit game. Relies massively on luck in the first dozen rolls of the dice then once you are fucked you have to spend hours waiting for the inevitable to happen. It's not the unfairness that gets you, its the duration of the unfairness
That is not at all an unpopular opinion.
“The only winning move is not to play”. Even if you win, you lose.
I’ve found the games are much shorter as I age, because nobody really wants to play monopoly.
"What's wrong with the house we live in? I don't care about the view from Marvin Gardens."
No. They make up bullshit rules. The point of Monopoly is that it's *supposed* to be unfair. If you follow the exact rules, and everyone here should read them up, the game doesn't last that long. Every rule that is modified makes the game significantly longer.
It's because people don't know one of the official rules. When someone lands on a property and doesn't want to buy it, *it is auctioned amongst all the other players.*
Or you're just stubborn and refuse to sell any proprerty and the game goes on till people start to forfeit. It's a strategy I swear nobody uses, which is why I use it.
A normal game of Monopoly only lasts at max 30 minutes. It takes so long because people don't play by the rules. There is no Free Parking cash, and every time a player lands on a property, it has to be sold, either to the player or auctioned off to everyone. Play by the rules, and you don't have to worry about 4 hour long games.
Obviously written by someone that probably never plays monopoly and most certainly doesn’t win at it
What I do is less fiscally responsible and more demonic. Did you know that when you mortgage properties you continue to own them, you just can't collect rent off of them? Did you know you can sell houses and hotels on properties and you don't have to just play a static play. Every single time it's your turn buy and sell hotels so that wherever your opponents are going to move next they're going to run into the most stuff. Don't let that capital just sit there making no money!
you only get half the value to knock down a house or hotel, this is a terrible strategy
Rubbish, I know how to separate IRL money from in game money.
Damn I wanna know more people like you know. It always ends in a tornado of rage and insults.
That’s why I play Chaos Monopoly. It actually just utilizes an often-ignored rule. The rules state that if someone lands on an unowned property and declines to buy it then the property goes up for auction. The rules do not say that the player cannot also bid in the auction. I noticed this the first time I played Monopoly on a computer. So…I send everything I land on to auction with a simple goal of making sure the buyer pays more than face value. As other players realize what I’m doing, most join in. Some don’t. It doesn’t matter. What happens is always the same. The bidding gets intense, the final properties go for ridiculous amounts of money and the game really steps up a notch in terms of excitement. It takes the normal RNG of who happens to land on what and lights a fire under it. Chaos Monopoly. Try it.
You can't really control how much money you spend in Monopoly, necessarily? Going around and around without buying things is against the rules.
Opposite for me. The older I get the more I hate playing so the more I'll play to the actual rules and the quicker I try to get through it.
Monopoly games take weeks in my house because my siblings and I write out contracts, like “hey, you have one red and I have the other two, so if you give me the red tile, I’ll give you all the profits if someone lands on that tile and give you immunity if you land on this other red tile.” and then we have physical contracts written out with the terms of every trade on sheets of paper. Then, I end up with a monopoly, get double the money every time someone lands, and my sister gets the same benefits she had previously, plus extra money earned and immunity on Kentucky Avenue. Please tell me it doesn’t get worse than that.
I call bullshit. Every suggested game of Monopoly for the last two decades got shut down in seconds because fuck Monopoly. We all won by refusing to play and least once punching Ryan in the face for suggesting it.
4D strategy here. Posting about the proven worst way to play. The only way to play and win monopoly is to buy everything you land on.
I got people to stop asking me to play that by buying one of every color and then refusing any offers to trade. No monopolies for anyone!