Whenever I play Monopoly we’ve always just given in once the game reaches this point.
I once had this interesting Monopoly add-on that made the game a lot quicker and more interesting.
It was an electronic dice device that laid in the center of the board. You pressed a button and it had a smaller representation of the board and it it showed where you moved. Anyway, it enforced that every property landed upon had to be bought. If the person who landed on it didn’t want it, it would go up for auction. The person who did land on can bid and hope to buy it for less than face value.
Then, after all properties were bought it would start to call groups, like the orange group, or the green group.
If you owned a majority of that group you kept them. If you owned only one, you had to sell it to the bank and it would then go up for auction. This made people have groups quckly. But if someone just bought to consolidate a group, they probably didn’t have enough money when the next group came up.
It did a few other things, like loan money for improvements that would come due and be a major setback for someone who built up too fast and then didn’t get enough guests.
I don’t remember ever actually completing a game of Monopoly when I was a kid.
I’m with MadMonk. Monopoly was the game we’d pull out occasionally when we forgot how long it took the last time we tried to play it.
I never read the official rules. I just went by the rules I was told. We always had the free parking money. The game went on forever. After an hour or two we’d inevitably get too bored to finish it.
I bought the game as an adult and did indeed finish every game, but they still lasted over an hour.
I like word games like Taboo way more than board games like Monopoly.
What? Oh, I doubt that. Surely that would cause them to have to discontinue it all together.
I just realized that I haven’t played a board game since I reached the age of majority. Damn, I need more old-fashioned friends.
It’s been awhile, but I seem to remember games going about 2 hours or so with four or five players. I’m sure there was a lot of wasted time with conversation and the such, but we never played with any of the typical house rules, and we did auction properties.
However, it’s nowhere near as long as Risk.
Sadly, it won’t keep going on much longer. I heard it’s being phased out in favor of some new electronic replacement.
Amateur! Diplomacy’s what you’re after. 
I’ve just finished a pbemail that’s been going all year.
Same here. We didn’t use that silly “Free Parking” rule most of the time (it depended who you played with), but, whether you did or you didn’t, the damned game took forever to play. We NEVER had houses or hotels up after only a few runs around the board. It took forever for anyone to get a whole color block, because we always tried to block anyone geting a Monopoly on a block, since as soon as you do, even without improvements, rents go up.
It can’t all be the lack of the auction rukles – it always toook us mnany turns before all the properties were even landed on.
We’ve played recently, too (my brother-in-law is a compulsive Monopoly collector – he’s got scads of different-themed games)
but I’ve NEVER played a short game of Monopoly.
Were you disallowing trading of properties? In my experience, that’s how the first colour blocks get developed, by a mutually-beneficial deal between two players.
No, but people were reluctant to give their opponents control of a block, even if they were able to get one themselves in that fashion.
This is usually what happened in our house too. One of my brothers would have the one property you needed to get your Monopoly, and would refuse to sell it to you. After a few turns of saying “C’mon fucker, sell me Illinois Ave! I’ll give you $1500 for it!” and him refusing the game would dissolve into a wrestling match and my mom would yell at us to go outside.
We always played with Free Parking and no auctions, so it definitely took forever. Also, a lot of my games were only two player. That really dampens the potential to trade properties, since one person is usually pretty obviously screwing themself in the deal.
That could be our problem too. I’ve never played it with more than 3 people (generally myself, my brother and an adult).
Besides, we were more inclined to play Gin Rummy, Canasta, Hearts, Scrabble or WordUp.
I miss that. 
Part of the problem with it is the way it eliminates people at different times. Some body gets kicked out 15 minutes in, while the others are setting in for a long time. If it’s the youngest kid, which it usually seems to be, they havn’t developed the patience to sit and watch a game they arn’t part of without disruption.
So to keep the peace, house rules and fudge-factors develop that stop people from getting kicked out too early, which ends up with making it nearly impossible to for anybody to lose ever, and the game never ends.
AT least that was how it developed with everygroup I tried to play it with.
Playing Monopoly without trading is like playing soccer without feet. Sure, you might be able to finish a game through dumb luck, but pretty much the entire point and interest of the game is in the trading. If your brother doesn’t want to trade you Illinois, screw him. Find somebody else to make a trade, conspire with opponents against him, and that solves itself.
Monopoly is 99% about creative trading. For example, and only crappy players fall for this, the Orange and the Red properties are considered the best monopolies to have in terms of how frequently they’re landed on, the cost of improvements, etc. (Well, unless you have a big bankroll–that’s when the Greens and Yellows are more attractive). If I have Boardwalk, and somebody has Park Place, I’ll trade them Boardwalk to finish my Orange or Red monopoly. And, since for amateurs Boardwalk-Park Place seem to have an overvalued reputation, I’ll try to get some cash in the trade, too. So, I give them an expensive monopoly, suck them dry of cash for improvements, and meanwhile I’m gleefully building houses away on my Orange or Reds.
You just have to use your bargaining and salesmanship skills to convince people to trade with you. If they don’t want to trade with you, then go bark up another tree. If you’re only playing two players, well, that’s a problem. I don’t think Monopoly is interesting unless you have at least four players (three is doable, but the fourth player really adds the extra dynamic.)
Good grief. That would kill the game.
There was a great free internet version of Monopoly that I played for a while. The computer took care of the rolling, moving, cash management, auctions, etc., so it went really fast. It made it so quick and easy to mortgage properties to borrow money that it changed the nature of the game entirely. Really fun.
My friends and I used to play “stone-opoly.” Every time you passed Go, you got $200 and a bong hit. Those were some loooooonnnnggggg games.