The rule sheet in my monopoly set (which contains a sort of FAQ explaining things like, no, you don’t get money for landing on Free Parking) states clearly that the bank cannot run out of money, and advises using slips of paper to make up the difference if it’s emptied. The supply of buildings is intentionally limited, but not of money.
I’m confused by this. You mean like if it’s the last house or hotel available? Otherwise, why would you pay more than the listed rate for it? Wouldn’t each player just buy a building in turn?
One scenario: There are no more buildings, but someone wants to upgrade to a hotel, freeing up four buildings. You could turn these into the bank as per the rules, or auction these off to other players for (hopefully) more than listed price – either as a lot or individually.
I imagine Donald Trump plays Monopoly with all sorts of deals like this.
Sounds like what he meant to me. I can see how this might get really messy.
We used to play that you could owe each other money. “OK, I owe you $34,567, but you owe me $29,821. Whose turn is it?” Needless to say our games got verrrryyy long. They usually ended in boredom.
The rule about improving color groups evenly? We completely ignored it.
I played a TON of monopoly in college with my friends. It can actually be quite fun. The Free Parking rule (as others have pointed out) actually makes it a much WORSE game, as it causes it to drag out.
My favorite two house rules (and both of these were more like experimental variations than rules-we-always-played-with) were:
(1) Take 2 boards, ideally distinct from each other (we used normal monopoly and russian monopoly, but you could also use normal monopoly and star wars monopoly, or whatever) and lay them down in a big figure 8, with GO from one board under Free Parking for the other board. Then you move around on this enormous figure 8, and basically have twice as many properties. The 8 railroads all work together (with new, higher rents, for owning 5,6,7 or 8). Each individual monopoly remains individual, except that if you own both matching monopolies (ie, both orange monopolies), the rents are doubled.
(2) When you roll the dice, and get a 3 and a 5, making 8, instead of moving 8 spaces, you move 3-then-5 or 5-then-3, landing first on the intermediate spot. (Kind of like moving pieces in backgammon). This gives you far more decisions to make.
Yes, it only comes into play when there are few remaining buildings (sometimes as many as the last 12 houses, needed to build a particular monopoly up to hotels). However, that happens more than you might think because a strong strategy is to buy up as many houses as you can on cheap properties and sit on them. By the late game, people are desperate to be able to get a few free houses to be able to build. In one game a single house went for over $1500 because one player with a lead needed it to step up to hotels, and another player with a lead preferred that he not do so.
A couple of my friends made up some rules to make Star Wars Monopoly more Star Wars-y. I don’t remember most of them- but R2D2 only got to roll one die each turn. (I’m not sure if the poor guy playing him ever did make it back to GO, not having a chance at rolling doubles hurt him at least as much as the reduction in possible places he could move per turn). Darth Vader lost one dot off his dice each turn to accommodate the singing of the Imperial March. (When we playtested Vader never did buy any properties- but I think that was bad luck (and too many players) rather than a fault in the rules.
One of our gang also located on the internet a set of rules for Illuminopoly. (Illuminati monopoly). We played that a couple of times. Cheating is encouraged–though it can be punished if you get caught. Other rules were just bizarre- and the amount of money involved in the game went through the roof. (It seems like rather than paying the normal rent you paid half the purchase price of the property- or something. So over time, you spent more, but got more money back.) Weird game. The people who made up the rules never really expected anyone to use them to play the game- and were surprised that we didn’t find them more contradictory and confusing.
The house rule on when a game was over when I was growing up was that the game ended when one of us was wiped out and kicked the board across the room.