Sheldon? is that you?
I’m sure that Milton Bradley has a good reason for their house rules but in my experience, a game that allows one player to stonewall everyone else without providing a mechanism to break said stonewalling is not good design and players who use them end up not being very fun. Parcheesi wouldn’t be any fun if you could blockade indefinitely.
Agreed–monopoly in general is a pretty bad game. But I’d say it’s got even less to think about strategically with unlimited houses. And it needs every bit it can get.
I’m not a monopoly whiz but isn’t it really just as pat without unlimited houses? I mean, if I know I’m playing against someone like DCnDC then it’s just a race to see who can get the most houses and then we’ll chase each other around the board for ages, taking much longer to wear our opponents’ money away since 4 houses don’t garner as much rent as a hotel and you can’t build any hotels without putting houses back in circulation. The increase I see in strategy is inextricably linked with a much greater decrease in playability and enjoyment and monopoly can ill afford to lose in that latter category.
Because he’s not talking about establishing the rules ahead of time, but establishing what type of people you are playing with. The problem is that the very people who are most likely to not care about the rules are the very people are not likely to tell you about their house rules ahead of time. Heck, they may not even know they are house rules.
Furthermore, even if they follow the rules, they may still object to overly aggressive play. Or they may think it’s the only way to play. Even if you discuss the rules ahead of time, these sorts of thing is not something you are likely to find out.
My point is, it’s not as easy as “discuss the rules ahead of time.” There are a lot of dynamics in group play.
House rules can be fun in any game, but they do need to be agreed upon in advance. I mean, I always assume that we are going to play by the official rules unless someone states that the fines and fees and taxes are put in the middle of the board and people who land exactly on “Free Parking” get that money, for instance. And it’s EXTREMELY annoying to have refrained from buying hotels because I haven’t been able to buy the four houses first, and then someone else goes from two houses to a hotel on their property, and I didn’t know that was an option in this game.
Isn’t that an example of what the gamer world calls an “exploit”?
I actually think it’s a pretty darned good game, but if you play it with unlimited housing stock or stupid free parking jackpots, or pretty much any house rule I’ve encountered (I can’t think of a single house room that actually improves the game), it becomes pretty much a game of chance. It doesn’t work well with two people, either. Too easy to get a natural monopoly without trading. I’d say four is about optimum. Played correctly, it is a good blend of skill and luck, something on par with, say, cribbage or backgammon.
I really don’t think so. It’s one of the more important strategic elements of Monopoly–controlling housing stock. I don’t know the history of the game in depth, but housing shortages are addressed in the official rules, so I have to assume the game was designed with that in mind, and this isn’t any sort of “exploit” in the rules.
Because what he said was this:
Bolding mine. Where I differ is that the rules need to be nailed down either way, not just if you’re going off the official rules, given that it’s well known that most people who play Monopoly don’t play by the official rules, and aren’t even aware of some of the rules. If, in casual play, you want to play by the official rules, you need to establish that and give particulars of what that involves, rather than just assume that they’re the default, because even the people who play by them know they’re not.
IME, which I’ll admit is somewhat dated at this point, there seemed to be an almost universally recognized set of unofficial rules. They were the official rules, except for three things: the number of houses and hotels that came with the set didn’t function as a limit*, you could go directly to hotels, and there would be some sort of pot for landing on Free Parking, although the nature of the pot would vary according to different players’ traditions.
*Hell, nobody knew how many houses and hotels there were: some would inevitably get knocked under furniture and sucked up in vacuum cleaners, eventually you’d consolidate two incomplete sets and wind up with 47 houses and 19 hotels, and maybe even a genuinely adequate stock of $500 bills.
To be perfectly honest with you, I HATE Monopoly, which is why I ventured to figure out the quickest way to end the game. There’s really not that much enjoyment to be had to begin with, IMHO. With unlimited houses and skipping straight to hotels, you’ll inevitably end up trading the same money back and forth between yourself and the other remaining player and it pretty much never ends.
There’s a great Dane Cook rant where he asks audience members how many of them like Monopoly. To which he screams “LIAR!”
"Ok, this is why you’re a liar. Because this is your Monopoly game at two in the morning: 'Grandma, can’t we just quit and go to bed? Come on. Okay, we’ll concede… oh, come ON! You’re cheating, let’s just give up. No, Grandpa, you back off-- Grandma’s a cheating whore!"
Again, it’s been awhile since I played (and maybe this discussion is really better suited for an IMHO thread), but ISTM the biggest reason why Monopoly goes on forever is that there’s an ever-increasing supply of money in the game (+$200 per player per trip around the board), but a fixed limit on how much damage one player can inflict on another on a given trip around the board. So if you get to a point where everyone has a decent set of monopolies, someone has to be killed off quick, or you may never get anyone killed off at all: once everyone has a decent cash buffer to absorb landing on a couple of hotels, you might as well just call it a draw.
The question is, what set of rules has the best chance of either (a) keeping you from getting to that perpetual balance of power in the first place, or (b) maximizing the odds of being able to kill off players after achieving such a balance?
Back in summer camp, our solution to (b) was unlimited hotels on a property. If you had the cash to put 10 hotels on the light blue group, then you could do that, and charge 10 times the hotel rate. $5500 for landing on Oriental Avenue gave you a chance to deplete the other guy’s cash fast. And it also expanded the one big way to suck cash out of the game entirely (removal/rebuilding of houses and hotels) because you’d have a lot more of them, and could put as much of your cash into construction as you were willing to gamble.
Yes! Finally someone who really understands!
Online backgammon is all I have.
That’s what makes this so painful.
All the fun is in the trading. I don’t understand all the hate for Monopoly. It’s a well-constructed game that, when played according to the actual rules, is reasonably skillful.
Interestingly enough, concerning housing shortages, apparently tournament rules do prohibit selling a hotel down to four houses in order to create a shortage. Developing up to four houses and leaving them there is fine. Selling down a hotel apparently is not.
Apparently according to who or what?
Here"
ETA: However, reading the comments says that it’s been legalized again:
Yeah, I can’t even think of a coherent rule in the area of what they were trying to do before re-legalizing it, other than forbidding selling hotels at all unless reducing the property down to zero improvements. You can’t “create” the shortage in question–the shortage exists from the beginning of the game.
As far as I can tell, the proposed rule would have required psychic powers to determine what the purpose of the hotel selling would have been.
I guess the rule would have been maybe–sell the hotel, but then before buying houses everyone else gets a chance to buy them first.
The problem with Monopoly is that because 95% of the strategy (and fun) is in trading, people who aren’t interested in actually thinking can effectively turn it into a game of pure chance just by stonewalling, and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop them. If I had any interest in an hours-long coin flip, I’d play six-deck War; it’d go faster and be more entertaining.
I do like RTFirefly’s unlimited hotels rule, though. Next time our Risk group plays Monopoly for giggles, I’ll definitely be suggesting it.
…huh? There was an OP? Oh, yeah, ragequitters suck. Carry on.