Well, somewhat. Obviously the player who lands on all three orange properties and buys them early in the game has a lucky advantage.
However, I believe that the area in which the most skill lies is in trading properties. It pays off to have good people-skills. Working deals with two or three people at the same time, figuring out how much you can afford to trade away to get that one last much-needed property, these all require skill and not so much luck.
Skill also lies in deciding how much money to invest in improving properties (especially if you’re staring at an opponent’s four houses lying six, seven, and nine squares ahead of you. Skill lies in deciding how much to bid on that last remaining house, whether it will get you to the three-house threshold, or prevent your opponent from doing the same.
Put a player with horrible skills in a game with a player with great skills, and the player with no skill will win maybe one or two out of ten times based on luck alone.
There was a recent Simpsons episode where they had a huge fight over Monopoly. The police came and Wiggum picked up a house and said “Looks like another case of Monopoly-related violence.” I can’t recall if this episode aired before or after the Simpsons version of Monopoly came out, though.
Calvin and Hobbes say to make your own Chance cards. One of their examples–“Computer scam diverts money to your account. Collect $5000.”
I reccomend the book Beyond Boardwalk , which provides a comprehensive and excellent Monopoly variant. The biggest single difference, as has been suggested several times this thread, is doubling the price of all properties. That way, when a player lands on it, he can buy it outright for double the price, or it can go up for auction. Suddenly, lots of auctions, lots of situations in which skill matters.
The second biggest change is that the 2 utilities become railroads #5 and #6. Suddenly, they’re worth something.
quite an interesting read, and makes the game more fun.
two other fun variants that I helped invent:
(1) use two boards. Put the Go of one board under the Free Parking of the other board. Travel around in a big figure 8. The monopolies on each board are separate (works best with a foreign language board for one), but if you own the same monopoly on both boards, rent on it doubles. If you land directly on the center free parking, you can choose which way to go
(2) treat the dice roll like backgammon. If a 2 and a 5 come up, you choose to either move 2 then 5, or 5 then 2.
Yep. Bart had about 20-30 hotels all piled up on one row of property. All hell broke loose when either Marge or Lisa (I forget which) discovered that Bart’s “Hotels” were just red LEGO bricks that he had placed on his property when no one was looking.
Does anyone remember National Lampoon’s Monopoly Cheating Kit? (Google shows a link for Issue #38 in 1973). They included card-stock bogus Community Chest and Chance cards, such as winning contests for $1000, plus new property cards with outrageous rents. Best were the $1000 and $5000 bills printed on the correct type of paper that you were supposed to sneak into your cash supply.
Crack Houses. Houses that you can acquire through chance cards and place on an opponents property. These lower rent values for the whole three-property “neighborhood”. That way you can set up turf wars even after the initial buying spree. If player who played a crack house is sent to jail later, each player may remove one of the crack houses he placed on their property.
The classic TV fight over Monopoly occurred in The Carol Burnett Show when Eunice, Ed and Momma (Vicki Lawrence) played a game that ended in acrimony and tears (as all those skits ended)…
The single best house rule my family used, and which was used frequently in college (though we played Risk much more often–North America is by far the best continent to try to control, Europe by far the worst) is the option rule. Once a player has bought one property of a partucular color, he or she can option the other properties from the other players.
Variant A: Let’s say player A buys one of the orange properties. He then negotiates an option on each of the other two with player B, paying an agreed upon fee for each option. If player B later lands upon any of the properties for which he sold player A an option, he must buy the property and sell it to player B at cost.
The advantage for B is that he collects his fee up front but may never land on said property, thus getting something for nothing. The disadvantage is that the price he could charge would be much higher if he waited until after landing on the property and buying it. The advantage for player A is obvious, but the big disadvantage is that it becomes very expensive very quickly to buy options on every potential monopoly property from every player, some of whom may not want to sell, and A may not have the cash to purchase the property when the option comes due.
Variant B: Options are set at the price of the property itself. Let’s say that player A wants to option a property from player B, the property being valued at $200. The option would cost $200 exactly, no negotiation. If B lands on the property, he must purchase it and turn it over to A without further payment, essentially breaking even. If B never lands on the property he keeps the $200. If B lands on the property but cannot raise the $200 to buy it for A, he is bankrupt and must turn over all his property to A.