Anyone got any interesting “house rules” when they play Monopoly with family and friends - little special rules you’ve invented to spice the game up?
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Well, the most common one I know of is the “get money when you land of free parking.”
However, what money you get seems to vary. I always played by putting $500 in the center of the board, and anytime anyone pays either of the two taxes, it goes in the middle, and if you land of free parking, you get it. You then re-seed a new $500 bill from the bank.
A very common one we always played by: you can’t buy property until you’ve made a complete circuit of the board.
We too played with the “land on Free Parking and get money” rule. We usually had any money paid as a result of Chance or Community Chest cards go in the Free Parking kitty. Otherwise, the banker was assumed to have the privilege of setting the Free Parking payment personally from bank funds.
We also played where throwing doubles three consecutive times lands you in jail, but I can’t remember if that’s a house rule or a real one.
The one I most commonly experience is “get money when you’re just visiting the Jail.” (Is that the same as Free Parking?) All those home improvements fines, fees and taxes end up in a nice pile on that side of the board. if you land on it the space without being sent to jail, it’s like hitting the lottery.
Another version is double railroad: If you buy all four railroads you can demand double rates from what’s on the card.
Another version is Ghettopoly: if own all cheap properties on the “ghetto” side of the board past “Go,” you can build double the amount of houses and hotels on that side and demand double rent.
Another version allows Park Place and Boardwalk to remain free, unowned uninproved properties for the whole game. The rent goes straight to the bank or the “free money” under the jail.
Another is to suspend the “three doubles” rule.
My family played that if you landed on the Go square, you got $400. Taxes and Community Chest fines went into the middle, to be won by landing on Free Parking. Anthing can be traded for anything - you can trade properties for money, other properties, promises not to build for a set ammount of time or ‘free lands’.
I played at a friend’s house once, and the family were shocked, shocked when I hid my money. They considered it unnecesarily sneaky, while I saw it as being esential - no one would trade the third property in a set if they saw the player had enough money to build hotels immediately, surely?
I haven’t played Monopoly in years - it brings out all my worst qualities.
This is the main thing we did. We would make all sorts of complicated deals. “Can’t pay the rent, eh? I’ll let it slide if you if you let me live rent free at your orange properties for the next four times around the board.” Sometimes we’d put people on an installment plan. “You can pay the rent plust 15% interest in ten equal installments over the next ten turns!” You could sell debt to one another and even borrow from the bank on these securities!
If we had a lot of players, groups would get together and form corporations. Say three properties of the same color were owned by three different people. They’d all throw some money into a separate account (dutifuly maintained by the banker) and the corporation would buy all three properties from the players, and distribute rent according to their proportional investments. Houses had to be paid for by the corporation. Yes, you could sell your shares to other players. (We used scraps of paper as makeshift stock certificates.)
We allowed double hotels. If all properties in a color had hotels on them, you could add another hotel to one of them for twice the normal price of a hotel. This would cause double the hotel rent to be paid.
If you owned two or more railroads, you could “ride” them from one to another, and it would count as a move. So if you owned Reading and B&O, you could move from one to the other as if you had moved one space. But only if it was in the middle of a turn, you couldn’t ride the railroads if you landed on one.
We printed up a bunch of crazy Chance-like cards which you would get if you landed on Free Parking. Stuff like “You win big at Blackjack! $1,000!” and the “Stay at a hotel free” card which could be redeemed when necessary, my personal favorite, “Tornado knocks down three of your uninsured houses!” You would then have to pick three houses to remove from the board, or pay the equivalent money to the bank if you didn’t have three houses.
I once went so far as to sell another player tornado insurance.
Yeah, our monopoly games were pretty damn wild.
The Archives are your friend: What is supposed to happen when you land on " Free Parking" in Monopoly?
I hate, hate, hate the free parking rule, especially when people prime hte pot with $500.
What is the most common gripe about Monopoly? That it takes too damn long.
What is the best way to drag out a game? Sudden infusions of cash to a doomed player late in the game.
My brother had the rule that if you were able to sneak money out of the bank without the other one spotting you, that was OK.
Of course this meant that neither of us could leave to go the bathroom…
I remember one game without the Free Parking bonanza that “ended” with three of us holding developed mid-range monopolies. Thing was, as we went around the board, each of us picked up $200. With nothing left to spend it on except rents, the only way a player could be eliminated is if he was unlucky enough to hit a series of enemy monopolies without having either of the two other players land on his. We called it a draw when it became clear that each of us had picked up enough cash to insulate ourselves from ruin.
And here, I always thought that complicated deals were supposed to be part of the game. Don’t the official rules allow any player to transfer any property they owned to another player? Once you’ve got that mechanism in place, complicated trades are inevitable.
Bryan, the supply of money was intentionally limited. Once the bank runs dry, you don’t get money for passing Go (or anything else that comes from the bank) any more. From there, it’d be a random walk (assuming the three of you were all truly tied) until one player busted, and then it’d depend on what happened to his assets. Most likely, the first player’s elimination would upset the balance sufficiently to give one of the remaining two a decisive edge.
I don’t know how many times I played before I learned that the official rules are that when someone first lands on a property it goes up for auction if the person who landed on it does not want to buy it.
I have never, ever met anyone who plays Monopoly by the printed rules and I have met many people who become quite hostile if you point out that giving out money for free parking is not part of it or try to auction a property.
Yes, I too was surprised when I discovered that rule.
Monopoly wasn’t one of our favourites as children since it tended to drag on and on. I don’t recall ever finishing a game properly. Instead we used to nominate a time limit. Whoever had the most money at that point was the winner.
I don’t have a copy of the official rules handy, but according to Wikipedia, “The supply of money is theoretically unlimited; if the bank runs out of money the players must make do with other markers.”
Assuming they’re wrong, though, figure the bank would eventually be broken with the money divided up among the three of us, giving each player, say, $2500. The typical rents for the fully developed midrange properties ran about $400-$600. To be eliminated, a player would have to pay out about five rents in a row without receiving one in return. If we were willing to dedicate a few days to the game, this situation would surely come up, but that required more energy than we were willing to inject at the time.
I have to Third or Fourth on the Auction. The Strategy there is so much more than one would think. But getting my Family to play with an auctioner … is not gonna happen.
I read this thread earlier today, and have to comment that the Three Doubles to jail is an actual rule… as actual as my CD-Rom includes it in the “Standard” rules.
It does have a section of Famous house rules; Free Parking Jackpot, Double money for landing on GO directly, ETC.
What I havent seen mentioned yet, and I actually saw first on Daria (MTV Cartoon) and indeed is included in the CD-Rom House Rules section is that of Immunities and Future Rents:
You can make your properties ““not count”” when a certain person lands on it. OR further, you still own th property, but the rent goes to someone else.
I tend to agree however, that a LOT of cash given for no apparent (Luck) reason draws the game out a LOT. Playing on the Computer Fixes things up a LOT… including setup, and money management.
Also, Yes, the Money should be public knowlege… If we all ((Supposedly-Included Rules)) start with 1500, we should in theory be able to figure out what you have at any given time. Save you and I both the trouble, and show your Bills.
Lets hope someone doest start an UNO house rules thread. :eek:
A few winters ago, I was playing Monopoly with some pretty competitive gamers, which led us to actually read the rules carefully. We decided to play by the rules exactly as written and it was actually a much better game than we had ever played before. So here are some rules that most people don’t play by, but that make the game better.
- The buildings are a limited commodity, and you can’t build a hotel until you actually build all the houses. So buying up houses on the cheap properties and sitting on them is a good strategy.
- You can buy and sell buildings at any time, not just on your turn. If more than one person wants to buy a building at the same time, it gets auctioned off.
- No extra infusions of money to the game. The one keeps the game from going too long (everybody’s prime complaint about Monopoly)
We also came up with some house rules:
- You can’t earn money or conduct business while in jail. It always annoyed us that sitting in jail in the late game was a good strategy.
- Double all the buying prices of property and buildings. This makes the early game a little slow, but it also makes luck less of a factor because it’s very hard to monopolize without running out of money, and property gets auctioned more.
I really like the idea of having corporations. Takes Monopoly to a whole new level.
One time we combined Monopoly with a stock trading game. I don’t remember what it was called, but it had about two dozen made-up companies, and a stack of cards which listed every company and a random price. Free Parking was the Stock Market, and when you landed there, you could draw a card, and then buy or sell the stocks at the prices listed. If you had shares already, you would hope that the card you drew listed them higher than when you bought them.
I play where you double the rents on all properties w/o hotels and round each figure to the nearest $5 increment so you can avoid playing with $1 bills and, if necessarily, use them as $1000 bills.
I also do the $500 in free parking, and no conducting business while in jail. In addition to giving 3 rolls to get out of jail, after which, you have to pay a $200 fine (in order to get out).
We had the same rule but it was called “getting away with cheating”. 
That said, I’ve been known to try and swipe peoples property cards (or unowned ones from the bank).