Exactly. The rule requiring a stop at four houses before advancing to a hotel only makes sense in the context of the building shortage rule.
Just, I mean, in terms of “people who like board games” and other people… most people who really like board games don’t like Monopoly.
You need four houses on each property. So there have to be 8 or 12 houses available.
n/m
You’re probably right about “most.” Among my circles of friends, it is well thought-of and I really do believe it’s got an unfairly maligned reputation. Of mainstream board games, it’s probably my favorite one besides chess. I kind of would like to play with some of the house rules mentioned here, especially the “anything goes” approach to deal-making. I have one group of friends I’ve played with where the deals are allowed to go beyond the normal rulebook. That is, we allowed stuff like temporary immunity on properties (so, the first time you land, you don’t have to pay, but the second, you have to pay up; or immunity for two trips around the board, or something like that.) We’ve never tried full-on “anything you can think of” type of dealing, like offering up shares in properties or insurance against landing on properties. I suspect it would get out of hand and possibly break the game at some point, but it’d be fun to try. And the handshake rule is a new one to me, too. Hmmm…I’ll have to get a game going soon.
Are trades allowed at any time? Can trades involve cash? If so, immunity from rent seems totally legitimate to me: “Let’s make this trade now. As part of the trade, next time you land on my property, pay me the $400 [or whatever] rent. Then I’ll buy a property from you for $401, and sell it back to you for $1.”
From reading the rules, it looks like this would work as long as the rent-paying player has an unimproved property, railroad, or utility. It would involve trust, and the rent-collecting player could renege on the deal at various points without cheating. But if the players trust each other, it should work, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, that is a loophole some players use. I’m not aware of anything in the rules against it.
Our house rule for this is a hybrid auction. We start at the list price. If anyone wants to bid up from there, then it’s a regular auction like most Americans are used to. But if no one wants it at list price, then we operate like a Dutch auction, and the list price goes down $10 at a time until someone snaps it up. I’ve found that 1) this speeds things up when there’s an actual bidding war and 2) it tends to reduce the number of very low sales.
Cool. When I play games with trading possibilities (e.g., Settlers of Catan), I tend to have more fun figuring out weird and creative deals than I do with actually winning. If I can get someone to trade me temporary holding of four cards until my next turn, plus not using the robber on me, in exchange for one free use of my brick port plus not using the robber on them, with a one-full-turn warning before breaking the nonaggression pact, that right there is what I call a victory :).
The official rules of Monopoly clearly state:
It doesn’t allow you the choice of not collecting.
I suppose you could get around this by having the player pay you the rent and then giving it back to him. While Monopoly has rules against one player loaning money to another, it doesn’t say you can’t give them money.
Or
Since the official rules say you don’t have to pay rent if the player owed the rent doesn’t ask for it, before the next player throws the dice, you could get around it that way too.
You can ask for the rent until the second player following rolls the dice. (This keeps people from rolling the dice really fast to keep a buddy from having to pay rent.)
The rule actually says (bolding mine):
So clearly the owner has the option of failing to collect rent. It just can’t be done by prearrangement. (Not sure how you’d enforce this in an online game where players can potentially communicate privately.)
But I should have included the bolded part in my list of frequently overlooked rules. Many people are sure that you’ve got to ask for rent before the next person rolls the dice, but it’s not. The cutoff is when the second player following rolls the dice.
Whatever the reason they wrote the rules that way 80 years ago, I think it’s an important distinction, because it means that if someone lands on your hotel, and the next player rolls the dice real fast before you can say “you owe me rent,” you’re still owed the rent if you ask for it. Two players have to roll before you are barred from collecting rent.
Really? We started playing with the auction rule, after one of us kids actually, you know, read the rules that came with the game instead of playing how we learned to play from other kids, we were like, WHAAAA? And it did speed up the game, but it didn’t help make up sets because in general, everybody got a piece of a set someone else already had.
At least before we played with the auction rule, people (we’re talking 6-12 years old here) might skip buying the “cheaper” properties on the first row to save up to buy the “better” properties on the last row for the first few turns around the board, to avoid running out of money when the “good stuff” came around… And going for being the first player with a monopoly on a cheaper set was a viable strategy.
So it would boil down to making trades, deals and pacts, which it always did even without the auction rule, but that stage of the game is what actually dragged on forever, not the initial “buy from the bank” stage, which was actually the casually fun and friendly part.
This is because everybody did trades with side strings attached like “you don’t pay rent to me on this and I don’t pay rent to you on that”. Otherwise why would I ever trade someone (say) Pennsylvania Avenue for Ventor Avenue, unless they were giving me BOTH of the yellow properties I was missing, and why would he/she do THAT, etc.?
That devolved into outright 2-on-2 alliances, because after a while who wants to remember “I’m good with X on the Greens for Yellows, with Y on the Reds for Oranges”, etc., which tended to become a giant stalemate for hours on end before someone either got really unlucky with the dice or just gave up.
Now, I do remember hearing that, as with auctioning, the “official rules” of Monopoly - such as might be used in formal tournaments, the concept of which boggled my childhood mind - forbade “immunity” deals, though reading the fine print of the rules in the box made no such statement. In fact, it says if a player lands on square and the owner doesn’t ask for the rent, that the player doesn’t have to pay until the owner does. So the owner can simply not ask for rent.
I guess “reciprocal rent immunity” becomes a “gentleman’s agreement” rather than a contract enforced by the bank, but even a child can grasp the idea that once you are exposed as a backstabber you will never, ever get an ally again in our small circle of game playing friends (probably extending to outside Monopoly, too), so it never happened.
A few times, we tried to play with a “no immunity” rule in place. That also sucked. Nobody would make any trades, and again by the official rules, you couldn’t give property in lieu of cash to make rent - you had to mortgage everything to the bank, and then run out of money, and then the bank auctioned off your properties.
Waiting for someone to go bankrupt when there are no monopolies on the board, just to get to bid on their mortgaged properties, was really, really, really boring.
Yes, if you play a game where no trades are made for monopolies, it gets boring very quickly. It’s not a game unless people start trading.
And that’s one area where we found that the unlimited houses and hotels really helped, because it made the monopolies more* equal, which meant that people were more willing to make trades where one person got the yellow monopoly, say, while the other person got the light purple monopoly, because the person who got the light purple monopoly wasn’t going to get clobbered on the rent differential.
*Not entirely equal of course - there were still better and worse monopolies. But the differences were a lot less extreme than with the standard rules.