When I was a kid we didn’t play auction or Free Parking money and it still went on forever. And this was back when we had the outside to play in. I never knew people finished games of Monopoly.
One variation we used at summer camp was unlimited hotels on a property. So if it cost you $750 to put hotels on the light blue monopoly with rents of $550 and $600, you could pay $3000, for instance, to put 4 hotels on each, and collect rents of $2200 and $2400. It removed the problem of too much money in the game to ever bankrupt anyone, because if you had a monopoly, you could put all your money to work to get the other players’ money.
It has five sides?
I disagree. While there is an element of luck in it, there’s a good deal of strategy, too. The entire point of the game, for me, is in making deals and negotiating with players for trades and being better at it than them. That’s the main mechanic of the game. You can definitely tell who is less experienced and who is more experienced as a Monopoly player by how they value trades. It’s also a game that works best with four people, so that there are no “natural” monopolies formed by the roll of the dice. Two player monopoly, for this reason, is pretty terrible. Three is better. Four is perfect. Five is okay, too, but I feel it gets a little crowded with that many people.
To be a good Monopoly player, you have to be able to trade well. This requires plenty of strategy including knowing which monopolies are most profitable based on the state of the game, your cash and the person you are trading with’s cash balance (to know how much you can build up your monopoly), you and other players positions on the boards and dice probabilities (to factor in things like probabilities of you or your opponent landing on a developed property into your trading offer; this may also affect when you make your trading offer), when it is good to stay in jail rather than paying to get out, when it’s not, the probabilities of landing on individual properties (for example, in general, the closer you get to GO, the probabilities for landing on those properties decrease), how many houses are available (you can cause a “housing shortage” by not improving your properties all the way to a hotel; if all 32 houses are on the board, you cannot improve any properties until some return to stock by either a player selling them off or by a player improving a four house property into a hotel), etc.
If I play a group of three casual players, I almost always win, as people who haven’t really thought about the game generally have a poor understanding of properly valuing trades.
It has number 1-3, one bus, and two Mr. Monopoly sides, apparently.
My Dad’s got a version with no rule changes, but it uses a “debit card” instead of cash. I’m a total gadget freak, but I don’t like it. If I’m playing a board game, I want things tangible.
When playing the game as designed, I always wind up with no chance of winning fairly early on, but still have to go through the motions for a long while after that. That’s why people want to add Free Parking and such, so that there’s a way to get a turnaround–a way to keep people in the game.
While part of the speed die makes sense to make the game shorter, the part where you just add the pips seems not to be all that helpful. It’s not the speed of travel that makes it take so long to get every property bought.
BTW, I’m also of the opinion that trading is bad. It’s always an advantage for the player asking for the trade–that’s why they ask for it. The only real advantage seems to be speeding up the game, as you mostly trade to establish monopolies, which allow for building, which allows for higher rents.
Trading is the entire point of the game of Monopoly. Without trading, you have a boring, useless game of luck. I don’t understand how one could play without trading. I mean, this is like playing poker without betting. The whole game mechanic and what turns it from a game of complete luck to one of reasonable skill is is the betting. The whole skill mechanic of Monopoly depends on trading. It’s a wheeling and dealing game. If you play without trading, you’re missing what Monopoly is intended to be.
And, no, it’s not always the advantage of the person asking for the trade. I usually prefer to lay back and wait for trades to come to me and try to manipulate them to my advantage. Sometimes showing your hand and what you want isn’t advantageous. In our better games, trades can go between three or all four players when they get really complex. There is no inherent advantage to being the one starting the trade. Oftentimes, it’s the other way around, as the person asking for the trade shows their interest in a property or properties I have, and I can extract more out of them since they’re the ones interested in my stuff (and they end up in a psychological bidding war against themselves, much as what happens at auctions when you have a “set” price you are willing to pay for an item and then just in the heat of wanting to “win” it, you end up paying a lot more than you initially intended), while I’m playing it cool with what properties of theirs I want (even though I may want them as much or more than they want my property).
If you go online you’ll find statisticians who’ve totally worked out the payoff and odds of each and every property. Their is a good movie about this on Netflix where a HS math teacher uses the game as a teaching tool.
However the new variants totally throw those out the window.
Another thing about trading: if you’ve got more than two people in the game, chances are good that nobody gets a monopoly without trading. Or maybe just one person gets a monopoly. You have to trade to have a game.
But trading isn’t the only element of strategy in the game, even without these new wrinkles. Once you’ve got a monopoly, how much money to put into houses and hotels, and how much to hold in reserve against landing on other players’ properties, is a key decision. And there’s no automatic, by-the-book way to play it.
You can play it safe, and collect a good deal less rent than you might have when someone lands on your monopoly, or you can go all-in and wind up having to sell back a bunch of houses to the bank at half-price when you land on someone else’s property.
Plus about the only value of this game is that kids get practice counting money in it.
We’ve always played no bonus for landing on Free Parking, and that unowned properties get auctioned if the person landing on them doesn’t want to buy them. But here are a few of my favorite ignored rules:
- If you get out of jail by rolling doubles, you move forward that number of spaces, but unlike every other time that you roll doubles on the first roll of your turn, you don’t roll again.
I’ve been playing Monopoly off and on since I was six years old, and only noticed this rule a few months ago when I was looking at the rule book. I can’t remember anyone, ever, playing by this rule. Have I been the only one who’s been oblivious to this rule for decades?
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I’ve never been in a game where anyone’s paid the 10% interest on a mortgage when un-mortgaging a property. Most people are aware of the rule, but nobody I’ve every played with has considered it worth bothering with.
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Building shortage: the rules say that the houses and hotels that come with the game are all the houses and hotels there are, and if they’re all in use, then you can’t build anymore.
IME, Monopoly sets never stayed intact for very long while growing up, and partial sets would be combined to make more complete sets, so the number of houses and hotels in a set was always in flux, rather than something fixed or canonical. I’d have no objections to observing this rule, but I’ve never been in a game where anyone’s even suggested abiding by it.
- Similarly, I’ve never been in a game where the rule was enforced that you couldn’t build hotels without first having four houses on each property. If you had just acquired the Med/Baltic monopoly and you had $500, you’d just give the banker your $500 and go straight to hotels without bothering with houses at all.
I think this is the difference between playing with players who like board games and are pretty serious about playing by the rules and with casual players. You know how when you play casual Scrabble players and they get pissed off when you use your knowledge of legal two- and three-letter words like “aa” and “qi” and “zax” and play them? I think it’s similar. The Monopoly players I’ve played with play by all the all the rules, including mortgage and housing shortages. The people I know now who still play board games (most of my friends do not) are enthusiastic players and play by the rules as written.
Other rule wrinkles that may not be noticed (I’m aware of all yours): If you land on that income tax square after passing Go!, the $200 you collected is included in your income and taxable if you decide to pay 10%. Income tax is also, of course, based on net worth, not cash on hand, so count those properties in!
Community Chest and Chance cards are never shuffled: just put on the bottom of the deck. This can prove useful later on if all cards are gone through and you’re keeping track.
“Immunity” from rent is not allowed in property trade deals. (Although I have played with a house rule allowing it. Not in my house, though.)
You cannot loan money to other players. The bank cannot loan you money, either.
I find it interesting that growing up everybody seemed to play Monopoly by different rules and nobody really understood the official ones.
That changed when they put Monopoly on computer. I had never even heard of some of the rules before that.
Yeah, that’s another thing. When I was about 12 or 13 computer and console versions of Monopoly started showing up, so I think that did help contribute to a better understanding of rules among my age group–at least the nerdy ones that would play Monopoly on a computer. 
While playing on the computer is okay, it’s just not as fun trying to negotiate a trade with a computer. I mean, there really is no negotiation, it’s just enter what you’re trading and it either accepts or declines. There’s no convincing, no back-and-forth concessions, etc. But it does help people learn the mechanics.
There’s also computer-mediated play between human players. That way, you can haggle and deal to your heart’s content, but the rules are still what the computer says they are.
And while it’s true that a skilled player won’t accept or propose a deal that’ll hurt them, and all deals are zero-sum, they’re only zero-sum for the entire set of players. You can still have two players making a deal that will profit them both, at the expense of other players not in the deal.
This in turn has other implications. Once it does get down to the last two players, a lot of the skill leaves the game, and it’s mostly determined by the players’ relative positions at that point and luck… which means that when it’s at three players, the player in second place should be working to keep the third-place player in the game, to prevent that happening.
You make it sound as if ‘casual players’ don’t actually like board games. Or that players who play by something different from the official rules can’t be serious about the game.
Besides, y’know, it’s a game. Games are a way of having fun. Sure, if you’re going to compete in the national Monopoly championships, you’ve got to have an agreed-on set of rules that everyone abides by. But most of us aren’t going there. And if informal variations on the rules make the game more fun for those involved, then that’s GOOD.
As The Cat In The Hat says, “It’s fun to have fun, but you’ve got to know how.”
It’s also worth mentioning that in some instances, informal variations on board games have become more or less official variants. There have been a number of these in Diplomacy, for instance.
Sure it can. It’s called ‘mortgaging.’
But other than that, you’re right. The only circumstance where money can be loaned in Monopoly is when you borrow from the bank by mortgaging property.
No offense intended. I will try to express myself better next time.
Oh, absolutely. If any of the house rules make it more fun for your group, that’s cool. Like I said, I sometimes play with the “immunity allowed” house rule. I just find that a lot of people think Monopoly is a boring game of complete luck, and I just want to say, try playing it by the rules and playing it as the subtitle of the game intended it: " The Fast-Dealing Property Trading Game." It’s like poker. I thought it was an idiotic game of luck as a child. Then when I started playing it with money, I started to understand there’s more to it, and that the betting is where the real game is at, not so much the cards. Same with Monopoly for me. Once I got in with a group of players who played by the rules, the importance and fun (once again, for me) of trading and negotiating came into the forefront, and the game became interesting again. And it also made games a lot faster and interesting instead of going around the board for hours exchanging money because nobody has a natural monopoly and nobody wants or knows how to trade. I just think Monopoly is an unfairly maligned game with much more skill involved that is evident to most casual players, if they play it by the rules as written. Most house rules I’ve encountered make the game less skillful, and tend to drag the game out (like the Free Parking jackpot rule). But if you like a higher element of luck in your game (and many people do), go for it.
These two are related – that is, as long as there are four available houses, the rules permit you, in a single turn, to buy four houses and then buy a hotel, which costs dollars plus four houses. So the shortcut method is generally legit. But you’re right: if there are no available houses, or even exactly three available houses, you can’t directly buy a hotel.