Orange and light blue. . . works every time.
Orange and red - you own that corner and you own the game.
Even better…play any game other than Monopoly.
The list of better games is almost as long as the list of games. And lost of them are family friendly (My parents and nephews basically stole my Superfight cards when I visited)
And these days they have Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop, which is also an excellent way to find new games and see how much fun people have playing them.
Monopoly caused fist fights on the Holidays when I was a youngster, epic fist fights.
this. so much this
First you get the money, then you get the St. James Place, then you get the women.
I’m somewhat amused that a computer finally figured out what 8 year old me figured out back in the 80’s.
Serious question, does anyone actually enjoy this game?
I haven’t played Monopoly for years, other than an occasional digital version, but I did discover some time ago that I had been playing it wrong. Playing by the actual rules significantly streamlines the game, which might have prevented some of the tension that people experienced.
Only those with the endurance to play and win.
I found it ironic that, as a kid, every “house rule” simply extended the length of the game. As an adult, I played it once according to the rule book and when the game was over in 30 minutes I was amazed.
It’s a great game to show that monopolies allow one person to “have everything” while everyone else just pays them rent.
What good does knowing this do? Does anyone actually make decisions about what to buy? You have enough money to buy every single thing you land on for about three laps of the board — and if you don’t buy every thing you land on, you’re way behind the people who do. The disadvantage of opportunity-loss of not buying seems much, much higher than any advantage you have of picking-and-choosing.
And then, once most of the board is bought up (by random chance of whatever you land on), then it does matter which ones you happen to have. So, good job randomly-landing on all the Oranges, if that gives you an advantage. But it’s not like you worked for it.
I’m sure there are many house rules that improve this game — why not just allow buying any property, maybe as an auction at the start of every turn? — but I’ve never bothered to find out because of the better games out there.
Well, remember that the rules state that if someone lands on a property and does not buy it, it immediately goes up for auction. Thus, people have quite a bit of choice over what they buy, since money is tight.
Well duh. The most common numbers are 6,7 and 8, and the most common place for people to end up is in Jail. It’s not terribly hard to figure out that the orange set is best. (Light blue is probably not far behind because of Go and whatever the square next to Go is in your particular version, and Stations are pretty decent if you can get to three of them.)
As others have said, playing this game by the actual rules in the box produces a pretty cut-throat and streamlined affair, in which decisions about purchases are not merely about buying everything you land on automatically (because auctions can be powerful tools for both trapping others and getting bargains), and by making trades (after all, it is called the Property Trading Game!) And it brilliantly demonstrates the futility of pretending that rentier capitalism is anything other than a disaster.
But, as others have also said, we’ve had a century of developments in board games, and it has largely been left behind as an actual game, whilst still being surprisingly robust for such an early design (only the roll-and-move really lets it down in my view.) I don’t judge people by their lack of knowledge though; if someone suggests Monopoly, it’s often because they know (or think they know) how to play it, and are unwilling to enter the process of learning something new.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
