Someone offhandedly mentioned it today. I thought it was a joke. No, they said, they’d really heard that. Huh. What does Snopes say? Nothing. Okay, google it.
I’m of two minds on this. One says “It’s not bad enough that they keep updating old series books – Sweet Valley High with cellphones and email? They’ll have to rewrite whole plots of that! Or making live action movies of '70s cartoons. But Monopoly? Part of the appeal of Monopoly, for me, is that it was so 1930s, with the prices, and the Boardwalk not having gambling! We won’t be able to talk like gangsters and Italian immigrants when we play any more!”
The other side says, “Yes, but your Pittsburghopoly still has paper money. And your Peanuts Monopoly, and your LOTR Monopoly. And you get into the spirit of those just as easily as you get into classic Monopoly. Anyway, one of the reasons Monopoly is a good game for kids is it teaches them to count money and (presumably) budget. And nowadays, they need to know how to use an electronic terminal more than they need to know how to count paper money.”
“But they’re changing the markers, too.”
“They’ve changed them before. They’re always changing.”
this is more practical than LOTR Monopoly and other similar variants. wads of cash just don’t happen anymore. when mommy and daddy brings out the magic in their wallets to buy your toys, you know it’s The Plastic Card that separate the kids and the grown-ups. now you can splurge on your very own card till you go bankrupt too! go straight to jail. do not pass Go.
I guess this means the term “monopoly money” will soon join the list of obsolete phrases like “winding my watch”, “sounds like a broken record”, “a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters”, etc.
Wait… so no stealing a few hundreds from your unattentive little cousin? No accusing the banker of massive fraud? No cackling and tossing up your vast wads of cash in the sir as a victory celebration?
Hehe yeah, cheating was half the fun of the game. The other half being when your opponent loses because he lands on your crappy purple properties and has to pay you for your 50 hotels (because you never read the real instructions.)
Here I was thinking that Hasbro might have been looking at what the rest of the world was doing with boardgames and brought Monopoly into at least the 1970’s, perhaps even the 1990’s. Nope, just the same old Monopoly.
FWIW, there is an updated Monopoly that does feature things like alternative property development, a variety of winning conditions, an intentionally shorted play time, variable player powers, and other looked for updates: the Tropical Tycoon version. I haven’t tried it myself and the DVD portion sounds kind of clunky to me, but I have to give them credit for trying.
Greatly reduce the randomness. A flat roll and move mechanic hasn’t been used in a respected game design in decades. Even games where some variety in movement is desired have gone beyond roll some dice and go that many spaces. Off the top of my head I’d let people pay to decide where they’re going, perhaps even letting their opponents pay to move other player’s pieces. For that to work well you’d have to…
Step back the granularity of rewards and punishments. The amounts you pay or are paid vary so widely that half the events (including properties, rents, and cards) are meaningless and the other half are brutal. One end of the board is six times more dangerous than the other financially, that’s way too much variation. One nice thing about doing this is that you can give the player more things to spend their resources on and introduce additional options.
Simplify the resource tracking. This one I don’t have as solid of idea on how to do it since Monopoly isn’t really that bad but most modern games lean toward a more elegant design.
Emphasize the auctions. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone playing Monopoly where they used the auctions. The auctions are one of the only two significant decision that a player has in Monopoly’s current design and people completely ignore them.
Give the players more options in general. As it stands there are exactly six things that you can do in Monopoly: trade properties, bid in an auction, buy a property, build on a monopoly, mortgage properties, decide how to play taxes. Of these only trading and bidding are significant since the rest have simple, obvious optimal decisions (it’s almost always better to not buy a property and let it be auctions, building and mortgaging have obvious property choices in almost all situations, and you pay your taxes so you pay the least). That’s not enough for a game, especially a game that will take a minimum of two hours (unless god forbid someone decides money should go to the person who lands on free parking in which case you’re stuck in an eternal game).
Hasbro offers a number of specialty Monopoly games- besides the updated Here and Now edition you linked to with famous landmarks and updated prices, there is also an credit card version of the original game, and the classic, cash-based standard Parker Brothers stock number 9, which is in no danger of being discontinued- and probably never will be.
If the game is really supposed to teach the kiddies something, it should have credit cards so they can get into a giant hole of debt and not be able to save any money because it’s all going to pay interest.
Why offer ideas to improve the game?It’s still gonna take 2 damn hours or more.
The whole point of Monotony—oops, Monopoly is to drag on forever till everybody gets bored and just quits.
I don’t think we ever actually finished a game in my family. We just went around the board with the dice, bought and sold stuff sometimes, and then quit as soon as something good come on the TV. *
And I always used the cannon piece to shoot the dog piece, which balanced nicely on its snout if you tip it just right. And the shoe was cool, too. But the top hat was for sissies.
*(a black and white TV with rabbit ear antenna, wrapped with a piece of tin foil for better reception.)
I haven’t played for years, but the problem as I remember it wasn’t so much the length (heck, I’ll watch five days of a cricket match), but the fact that the eventual outcome of the game always seemed guaranteed so early. About halfway through (or sooner), you’d have somebody making a break for wealth and having hotels on the ritzy properties, the others would be paying big money in rent, and have none left over for their own investments, and then it becomes just a matter of luck with the dice each time you go around. And around.