Pretty much, yea.
Keep another book on hand explaining that showing just how broken and abuseable the rules were is the actual intent of the original game to showcase how broken capitalism is.
And another book on first aid.
Monopolyâs not a bad game, especially for its era.
You board game casuals have such unreasonable expectations. Just because somethingâs not fun and makes you hate everyone you play it with, including yourself, doesnât mean itâs not a great game!
Why even play Monopoly when there are better games out there?
The damn game is named monopoly!! its right there, on the front of the box!
Itâs like that Trump board game, the winning move is right there in the name. Just walk down the street and shoot someone, you win.
Waitaminute isnât that the Dick Cheney hunting sim?
Wasnât that sim bundled with the original NES? It was called⌠Dick Hunt?
Youâre right man I was thinking of the Andrew Jackson Dueling Sim. Anyone ever gotten past the bonus âforce the cherokee off their landâ level?
There are 32 houses in a Monopoly set, but pay attention because a couple extras are usually included in the set, so hide them. Yes, Iâve used the House Monopoly strategy growing up, and yes, people didnât want to play anymore, even if they knew what I was doing.
I switched over to Settlers of Catan, which is funner and shorter, but no one wants to play that either. Thankfully there is an online version of Catan (Android or iOS) , which is a lot of fun, when the app doesnât freeze up or an online opponent doesnât just space out on their turns reducing the game to a frigging death march.
So how do you play this game to have fun? Somebody must know, or it wouldnât keep getting dragged out at friendsâ and family get-togethers.
How to make friends hate you:
Know what board game I absolutely adore? Ticket to Ride. Seriously, check it out.
I think the linked text is right, which is that people keep dragging it out because they learned the rules in 1953 and itâs the path of least resistance during lulls in family get-togethers.
That said, if you play with board game geeks, itâs a decent game. Not great, but good. There was a Flash version of it on some website I enjoyed playing for a while, because the computer opponents actually had some decent strategy, and the game implemented trades and auctions with them. (And also because I was exactly the right amount smarter than the best computer opponent, which meant I won reliably. That helps.)
My winning strategy is saying, âNo, fuck off, I donât want to play monopolyâ. Works every time.
This is just Monopoly 101, and it wonât help you win against anyone with some experience with the game. And the âget a monopoly at any costâ is really not a good strategy. It takes a fortune to build up BW/PP, and practically no one ever lands on them.
Addendum (and shameless self-brag): Back in the early 80s, I was a member of the very first group that ever played Monopoly on-line (confirmed with Parker Bros.). We played over the CompuServe network, one hour a week. The game took 7 weeks to complete. There were 5 players, and we each took turns being the banker. This was a text-only system, so we all had duplicate boards set up at home to track the play. The CompuServe âchatâ system had a built-in dice roller, and a random number generator, for use in game play. The dice rolls were made by entering the command /ROLL, and the system would answer with a pair of random numbers between 1 and 6 that all the players could see. For Chance and Community Chest, we devised a list of all the cards for each deck, in a specific order. To draw a card, you requested a random number, with the specified range being the number of items still on the list. So to start, you would enter /ROLL 16 and the system would return a number between 1 and 16. You would count down that number, which was your card, and then mark it off. Next time it would be /ROLL 15, and so on. When the list was all marked off, weâd start again with a fresh list. Since everyone had the same lists in the same order, no cheating was possible. That weekâs banker was responsible for keeping track of everyoneâs money, property, cards in possession, buildings, and board position at the end of the session. He or she then messaged the other players sometime before the game with all that info, so there was enough time to work out any possible discrepancies.
While Parker Bros. did confirm to me that they had no reports of an on-line game prior to ours, they wouldnât accept it as official history, because there was no documentation, or even the names of the other players (on CompuServe, everyone used âhandlesâ rather than real names, and during game-play, we all changed our handles to our token pieces - I was Top Hat).
I regard this as the definitive word on the subject. (I shall have to buy the collection that it eventually gets published in, I think.)
Wasnât there some âofficialâ version of Monopoly that offered some strategic twist that much improved the game? âWorld Vacationâ, or something along those lines?
Thanks for ruining a great learning opportunity for kids.
My dad played that way, and it took me a while to figure out how he was winning. Then I beat him. Proudest moment for both of us 
No idea but Iâve done a variant where if you land on someoneâs property you can do opposed rolls to not pay rent (if you lose you go to jail, which can be helpful if you land on the first in a long string of monopolied areas.) Then if you win that roll you can roll again to rob the place for the value of its rent.
Ticket to Ride is great. Settlers of Catan is a fave too. I love Carcassonne, though it requires the players have long attention spans and are willing to wait until the gameâs over to calculate the score.
Risk is my go-to pre-1960s board game. More anger, scheming, and betrayal than Monopoly, plus itâs usually quicker to mop up the board.
