Monopoly’s as fun as you choose to make it. My primary “strategy” was always to get Marvin Gardens, at all costs. If it was my only holding, then so be it. No particular reason, really, I just loved the name. If I got the other yellows too that was a bonus. But I would trade them away without a second thought just to get that sweet, sweet Marvin Gardens.
I would not be surprised if adults read less books than childrens.
What’s most interesting about this is that by removing jail, Hasbro has removed the most important space on the board.
Edit: Oh I just checked the link, and it’s been updated. Fear not! Jail is here to stay.
Update 5:29 p.m. [July 25]: I wanted to get to the bottom of this controversy (see below), so I e-mailed Hasbro’s Nicole Agnello, a publicity manager at the company. We exchanged e-mails, and she assured me that the “jail” spaces are intact in Monopoly Empire:
[QUOTE]The Monopoly Empire game has a different game play where players buy and sell brands, rather than real estate but there are still the traditional ‘go to jail’ spaces on the board.
I also asked her about a colleague’s quote in The Wall Street Journal, wondering if it applied to any Monopoly game on the market. She wrote back:
The jail spaces have not been removed from any Monopoly games.
So there you have it. Jail spaces, according to the Hasbro people themselves, have not been removed from Monopoly games right now. The free world can rest easy. For now.
Update 4:34 p.m. [July 25]: There is perhaps hope for fans of Monopoly who believe in jail. Fast Company is reporting that an unnamed Hasbro employee is saying that the jail for Monopoly Empire, the alternative version of Monopoly featured by The Wall Street Journal, remains intact. “I just wanted to clarify that the Monopoly Empire game does have a jail space. It has not been removed from the game,” the rep told Fast Company’s Alice Truong. That runs counter to what spokesperson Julie Duffy told The Journal, which reported:
There is no longer a ‘jail’ for players to languish in while waiting for a lucky roll, says Hasbro spokeswoman Julie Duffy.
We don’t know if Duffy is referring to a different set of rules or some other aspect of the game entirely. We’re currently reaching out to Hasbro to get to the bottom of the jail mystery. [/QUOTE]
Hmm…I haven’t seen that particular breakdown before.
Interestingly, that presentation is targeted at optimized a play session, rather than optimizing the game design. He cites breakeven times for building houses, but as far as I can tell, he doesn’t provide a strict valuation hierarchy of the squares. (I.e. amount / opponent landing * likelihood of landing). I assume it would look fairly similar to the probability distribution of landing. (You could do the calculation for every board position, making a “perfect” monopoly AI). Of course, you still need to deal with only semi-rational actors in the other players.
It would be interesting to use that comparative valuation as a basis for “fixing” monopoly’s rules. Straw man attempt: tweak the payouts such that all the spaces are actually the same long term value, and see how that affects play (that just makes perfect play easier: it just becomes purely about reading the other players).
It really becomes a psych / econ question then, seeing how people will over-pay to get a monopoly (gotta finish that checklist). Hooray! I’ve made it even more boring!
We never put money on Free Parking, that’s a common house rule I first encountered post-college, and it seemed like playing with Easy mode turned on.
Of course there are auctions. Wait, how do people play it without auctions? That you just wait until someone else lands there?
This is actually an official variant, listed in the rules (at least my edition)… the “Short Game”. If you play the short game, otherwise with the correct rules, it is a tolerable game. I would say that it is a good 30 minute trading and auction game, that takes about 60-90 minutes to play. The kids (10 and 13) like it more than I do. It’s funny, though, if they play with their friends, they immediately add all sorts of house rules that make the game go on forever. They seem to enjoy getting huge amounts of property, houses, hotels, and money, over my preference of a taut game of interesting choices.
In any case, if you like trading or auction games, you can certainly do better without looking too hard.
Geoff
I kinda remember liking that sort of thing as a kid, too. Most kids are poor and powerless in the grand scheme of things. I don’t mean “poor” as in living in poverty, I mean they have very little spending money compared to adults, and adults make most of their decisions for them. $100 was unthinkable wealth when I was 10. So sometimes they’re more interested in “let’s pretend” than playing a game.
But at the heart of it, these “fast” games undermine the whole notion of board games, which are supposed to encourage bonding and silly fights about whether the “bank” is stealing money or if “knifes” counts as a word. Winning as quickly as possible was never the issue.
What a silly article. 30 minute games undermine the “whole notion of board game”? What does that have to do with anything?
Reads like it was written by someone who has only played three different board games in their entire life. Practically every <45 minute board game I own is a better family game than Monopoly with more potential for interaction and bonding.
This is actually likely. He’s upset by a rule change to Monopoly.
Monopoly is a hell of a lot of fun if you go into it with the right mindset. In my family it was an epic night of a family showdown. House rules are mandatory. We had no auctions, when someone turned down the chance to buy something it remained for sale. When you sold back houses and/or hotels you got full amounts back. Free parking got all the CC and Chance card money. Also, everyone had to go around the board once before you could buy anything, so the person who rolls first doesn’t get an unfair advantage. Hilariously someone would occasionally have the bad luck to go to jail a couple of times before they made it around the board once. You could only make deals on your turn, this was so no secret deals could be made behind people’s backs. Finally, quitting was not allowed. You had to play till you lost every last dollar. This was because some in my family loved lording over their win as they took every last dollar from you, but they’d quit the second anyone else had a good start to a game.
Good lord, what you describe sounds like a nightmare. Unless you get really drunk or something. But most things are fun really drunk.
While it’s not impossible to have fun with Monopoly, the problem is that the other options are, generally, more fun for the same effort. It sounds like the family interaction is what made it fun for you, which is fine, but doesn’t make the game itself better. Just about the only thing that Monopoly has going for it in that regard is that simply due to inertia, people who aren’t into board games are familiar with and willing to play it.
Monopoly was originally designed as an educational-for-kids social commentary. The point is that as long as nobody has a monopoly, everybody can continue to go around the board forever collecting an equal but sufficient amount of money. Once a monopoly forms, everybody else inevitably goes bankrupt. Monopolies are bad, and the game is supposed to serve as a practical example to show children why they’re bad. However, the basic concept has been twisted so that everybody wants a monopoly so they CAN bankrupt all the other players (basically “Fuck you, I got mine!: The Board Game”), which is another way that the game fails on a whole new level.
Yes to social commentary, but not for kids. See The Landlord’s Game. It was like, I dunno, wargaming for economists.
I forgot to mention the most important reason for the game being enjoyable, the dealmaking. You could only make deals on your turn, but you could make a deal with ANYONE since it’s your turn. So all the other players are either observing your current deal, or formulating the deals they want to make on their turn. So it becomes a very strategic game of one upmanship. Almost none of our games ended because someone was able to win using only property they bought from the bank, a deal was required at one point or another. This meant that lots of potential wins were ended because someone else was clever enough to put together a killer counter deal.
We even had to make a special rule about that. No ‘here, just take all my property’ surrenders were allowed. This way no one could ‘give’ the game to someone they favored over someone else.
Sounds almost as fun as a game that was actually well-built from the ground up. There are so many better economic games out there that let player choices be more determinative than chance.
Just realized that I do not think I’ve ever played through a full game of monopoly (when I was a kid)… Maybe it was the overturned table, or the cheating from whomever was the bank at the time. Interesting thing about the Jail however – Can’t recall ever thinking about it as a ‘safe zone’.
Even the idea that the banker cheats so as to never go bankrupt themselves makes the game more like our real economic situation. I want less realism in my games, I think.
John Oliver did a good take on this last night in regards to the aluminum scandal.
That’s essentially the argument this very entertaining video reviewer makes: the negotiations and decisions around those negotiations are the heart of the game. It’s a very enjoyable 25-minute gab but you get the essence of it in the first 5 minutes.
Side note: Calandale is my favorite video game reviewer. Tom pointed this one out to me, but in general I just love any game review this guy posts. He has this wild-eyed beardy-man earnestness combined with a basic likability that seems to only by enhanced by the pipe-smoking (which in someone else would seem so pretentious, but in his case is just endearing).
Interesting history of Monopoly in today’s New York Times Book Review: