I’m pretty sure that these are real rules. At least my computer game version (Hasbro?) holds these to be true, though there are options to turn them on or off.
*The banker does not play, he or she just does the banking. (With the exception of a small number of players.)
*Free Parking is nothing but a blank space. Cash paid to the bank in fees and taxes is not piled there, and a player landing there gets nothing.
*No player may buy any property until he or she has gone around the board once, i.e. has passed GO.
*If a player declines to buy an unowned property, it goes up for auction by the banker. Bids can start as low as $1.
*At any time during any player’s turn, anyone can propose a trade with any other player. Trades can include property, mortgaged or not (but undeveloped), cash, and get out of jail free cards. All players must agree to this trade or it doesn’t happen.
I’m sure that there are other rules, but no one I’ve ever played with has followed a single one of these.
I don’t see anything in there regarding having to pass GO before buying properties, or all the other players signing off on trades that don’t involve them.
We play with the empty Free Parking and the Auctions, but not ‘go-around-the-board-once’ or consensus on trades.
Wouldn’t that trade rule allow the first person to get a monopoly to veto any trades that would allow anyone else to get a monopoly? That would just about guarantee a win, eventually.
I’ve seen a variant, where players start on random corners. (In a 4 player game, everybody starts on separate corners of course.) This evens out the randomness of who gets first crack at properties.
And Og knows that the first person to have a well developed monopoly has strong odds of winning.
Free parking is just an empty space that does nothing. It is written. I recall all sorts of invented nonsense involving this space.
Round the board once with nae buying was the rule we played as kids in the UK, and there were no auctions. If you didn’t want to buy a property that was it.
The few times I’ve played as an adult it did strike me that the rules were sub-optimal for producing a competitive game. So I see why people home brew their own.
FWIW, I play a Hasbro-published computer version of the game and the “Standard Rules” for this version do not include ‘once around the board first’ or ‘all players must agree on a trade’. Trading and auctioning are important parts of the game, though (although I never trade with computer players unless I get a better monopoly from it than they do).
All players having to agree on any trade even not involving them would be totally stupid.
The auctioning unpurchased property rule is a standard one and absolutely essential to the game.
Never add additional money to the game in any house rule - including the free parking varients. The “not starting to buy property before passing go once” variant essentially adds 200 to the game for each player before the real action starts and so should be avoided.
My verson has an option for “House Rules” but I’ve never clicked on it to see what they are.
So just to make sure I understand - your version allows any player to veto any trade between two other players, and there’s no way to turn that off? That just seems really weird.
I haven’t played Monopoly for nigh on 20 years, but No to all of those.
Our house rules were as follows:
1/ You don’t have to pay rent if you rolled a double. ie If the dice show 2-2 or 6-6 then you don’t have to pay rent. But if you rolled doubles three times in a row your freeloading ass went straight to jail. This was awesome when you rolled doubles and landed on a hotel on Boardwalk.
2/ When you have landed on the jail square you can score some drugs for $25. ie You can pay $25 to smoke a cone from the bong.
I’m pretty sure that it can’t be turned off, but I’ll have to look again.
But yeah, the trade has to be accepted by all players. You can also agree to a trade only if other players give you large amounts of cash. Sometimes the computer accepts that!