I learned about the auction rule on the SDMB. I have never met anyone who played with it.
Of course, that’s in part because you hardly ever see anyone NOT buy something they land on.
Our family’s Monopoly games always become amazingly complicated spaghetti networks of competing deals, because, brother, when the dealing starts it never stops, and there’s nothing in the rules prohibiting really complicated trades. A typical midgame trade would be something like this; “I’ll give you Marvin Gardens and two landings’ worth of immunity from paying rent on the red properties, in exchange for Baltic Avenue and a condition of permanent immunity from paying rent on any yellow property, providing that if you land on Water Works before I do you must buy it and I have an option of buying it from you for three times its face value.” We had to keep the deals in a notebook. This sort of thing only works really well with four to six players, so that if two people work a big deal it benefits each other to the exclusion of the other players.
There’s a game still going that started in 1987. I’m the Thimble!
(they took a long time and generally ended with a fist fight and/or crying)
Edit: I just realized in my previous post I wrote Community Chess and not Chest. I am ashamed.
Nope - game time decreases to about 1.0 to 1.5 hours when you play by the actual rules. Free Parking keeps and introduces so much money into the game that bankruptcy becomes rarer and rarer - and games don’t end until people go bankrupt. Auctioning properties off speeds up the process of getting monopolies, which also contributes heavily towards getting rid of other people’s money.
Obviously how quickly you physically play also has lot to do with how long your game takes – if you roll a 12 and you pick up your token and move it space-by-space, it’s going to take a lot longer than if you roll a 10 and move your token immediately to the corresponding space on the next side of the board. If you land on a property and hem and haw over whether you want to buy it, and then have to look and see how much it costs and then count out your money and then wait on the banker to give you the right change and then wait on the property person to find the right property, etc., then yeah, it’ll probably take a while.
I think the biggest legitimate contributor to long games is a Mexican Standoff sort of trading situation. If nobody gets a natural monopoly and nobody will trade to get a monopoly, nobody will be able to buy houses or hotels and the game does become a long grind. I suppose it depends on the personalities of the people who are playing, but this doesn’t usually happen.
The biggest non-kosher contributor to long games is, I believe, the Free Parking pot o’ money. Immunity is probably up there. Ignoring the limited houses rule may contribute.
But physically play fast or slow, get rid of those house rules and you have a relatively speedy game. I’d bet that if you could simulate games with reasonable trades, those without house rules would finish on average a lot sooner (20-50-100? rolls) than those with house rules.
In high school a group of friends and I would regularly gather for games and we could usually get two or three in in an evening – we strictly played by the rules, and even inquired of the company once or twice as to rules clarifications (being that they hold a tournament with actual prize money, they’ve pretty well figured out how all the rules and ambiguities should be resolved).
I believe that for Income Tax you’re meant to calculate purchase price of all properties and buildings, plus cash on hand. The rules say “printed prices” of property and “cost price” of buildings. If it’s the cost of the buildings, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s the cost of the properties as well.
Immunities (which are technically not allowed because they are essentially loans between players) and lopsided trades (which are allowed) lengthen the game and, when played with kids, sap the game of any educational value it could have. What the game should be teaching kids is (1) how to evaluate what assets they have, (2) how to increase the value of those assets by taking calculated risks and precautions, and (3) that if they don’t do these things well [and go broke], then they should have to pay the person that they owe [and stop playing the game].
In any case, non-competitive families/friends shouldn’t be playing elimination games like Monopoly, in which the goal of finishing the game in a timely fashion is in direct opposition with the goal of keeping everyone entertained from the beginning to the end of the game.
Last time I played we had to declare a three-way tie. The three remaining players each had a fully-developed monopoly (though nobody had the disporportionately expensive Broadway - Park Place set) so it was mostly trading money back and forth, and since each turn around the board brought another $600 into the game, the odds of anyone going bankrupt (which would take landing on other monopolies multiple times and neither opposing player landing on your own) became increasingly and obviously remote, so we called it a draw - oligarchy.
I can understand people not playing with the Auction rule because it sounds too complicated or whatever (it’s really not) – but how could you have never HEARD of the rule? Don’t people read the rules of a game before they start playing?
Who has time for rules, Atlantic City’s up for grabs!
My guess is most people don’t learn Monopoly by reading the rules, but by being taught the basics by other players, so if the auction rule (or any other rule) is disregarded by the experienced player, the novice player will never know about it, nor bother to read about it.
I always fucking hate playing this game, not because I’m not good at it, but because the one person who doesn’t understand the rules is always the loudest, most belligerant asshole at the table. So instead I play online, where the computer decides what’s right and what’s wrong.
I disagree. Immunity is not a loan. A loan is the understanding that money will be taken now and paid back later. An immunity deal doesn’t involve paying back anything.
ANYTHING that isn’t a loan is allowable if it doesn’t involve outright theft. Immunities, quid pro quos, options, buyouts, reduced rents, all are allowed, as long as you aren’t loaning money.
If you’re never played here, you don’t know just how quickly the game can end. Complicated deals reward the player who can best spin a web of treachery and lopsided deals that will suddenly result in catastrophic financial disaster for his hapless opponents.
Complicated deals also tend to result in the creation of more monopolies - especially in a game with many players - since it makes people more aggressive and willing to give up the property that sets an opponent. And it’s monopolies that ultimately end the game.
The real opportunities for amazing results are three-way trades. If you’re clever enough you can convince two people they’re getting a reasonably good deal for themselves individually while you’re in fact putting a Machiavellian plan into place that will make you reign supreme over the streets of Atlantic City and rule with an iron fist full of multicolored money.
I play a lot on Pogo (when I have a free Club Pogo pass). It uses the modern variants on two rules plus a clarification:
Income tax is always $200. No option to pay 10% of your current net worth. (Which values mortgaged properties at half the listed purchase price.)
Luxury tax is upped to $100.
If you want to jump-build to hotels – building a hotel on a property when no property in that group has 4 houses – there have to be enough houses in stock that you could build to 4 houses across the group. This enforces the tactic of depleting the housing stock.
In my experience, almost every game turns on two points:
One Big Trade is concluded. Rarely there are Two Big Trades, even more rarely is a Third Big Trade. It is a critical point of strategy to make sure that YOU are involved in the One Big Trade.
Someone lands on a well-developed monopoly, and the rent hits them so hard that they have to start selling off houses. They rarely recover.
Now to the rules questions in this light:
Mortgaging a property you own to buy a property you just landed on is perfectly legitimate. In fact, for a good enough property (such as one that completes a monopoly) it’s a very good idea. At the other end, you could be forced to mortgage a property to cover a Bank debt.
Gaining money from landing on Free Parking or double salary from not landing on GO simply lengthens the game. Monopoly is designed to make a disaster non-recoverable; when you start selling buildings and mortgaging properties to pay rent, you are on your way out.
Not gaining salary from landing directly on GO cripples people in the early game, when it is the major source of income. In the late game, either you have a well-developed monopoly to generate income, or you have already lost.
Properties ALWAYS enter play. The game is all about properties.
Not a rules issue, but an observation. Mexican stand-offs happen, especially among reasonably good players. It takes some awesome negotiating skills to make the game’s One Big Trade and unblock the stand-off, and even more so to make sure YOU come out on top. In fact, making the One Big Trade and gaining an advantage is THE central element of Monopoly. If it weren’t for the trading, the entire game would be a matter of luck.
For what it’s worth, Hasbro does use this book as an official source on their web site.
But yes, Monopoly IME is definitely an exercise in treachery, as well as finding your Trader Joe who just likes to make deals for the sake of making deals, or someone hypnotized by the seductive brand name of Boardwalk and agrees to fork over Kentucky and Tennessee for it… and gives you cash into the bargain!Muhahahaha.
Fie on that. It didn’t come packaged with our game so it ain’t part of the rules.
It’s called “Monopoly,” not “Gentle Competition.” Deals that bring out the evil cutthroat in all of us are what the game’s all about.
When you and your friends and family step to the table to play Monopoly, there is an implicit agreement that the bonds that tie you together, the history and love and relationships that brought together the players in the first place, must be forgotten. Monopoly is a game of utterly ruthless competition, where your enemies must not just be dominated, but destroyed, and not just destroyed, but destroyed with a hideous enthusiasm. The true Monopoly player may be a kind and generous person in all other facets of life, but when the money is distributed and the dice rolled, your heart must be as coal, and your will as iron. You must not only set aside all that is decent in your soul, but just use your brain to outwit your enemies and plan their complete and utter destruction and humiliation.
There’s also that they don’t allow it in tournament play.
It seems that all legal interaction between two players in Monopoly is for one-time deals, no future considerations. I believe this is because there’s no in-game mechanism to enforce a player’s action or inaction in the future. In other words, once a suitable trade is found, it’s executed and the deal is done. Any other kind of deal requires some ongoing consideration with no in-the-rules way to enforce it.
FWIW, using the failure to ask for rent technique:
It seems to me you ought to be able to hammer out a gentleman’s agreement to “fail” to ask for rent on Boardwalk for the rest of the game from the person who trades it to you.
There are a few “advanced” (and officially prohibited) techniques that rely on such agreements – options, where I pay you money (or property) now in exchange for your promise to purchase and give me a specific property if you’re the next player to land on it; partnerships, where you give me a property for a share of the money it earns in the future (e.g. I own two of three pieces of a Monopoly, I acquire the third from you in a partnership for free, in exchange for some portion of the future rents I collect on that property); immunity (and the temporary version of immunity: free lands); etc.
I have a book that includes pretty detailed explanations of how to implement these (e.g. a pretty genius version of the free land, where the person whose turn it is pays a certain amount of money as “insurance” against landing on another player’s property on the next roll) called “1000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games” by Jay Walker and Jeff Lehman, a couple guys who were Cornell students in the '70s and were part of some of the first big tournaments. Forbes.com says Walker is the same guy who founded Priceline.com (and also that he was sued by Parker Bros. for writing the book, though it doesn’t say why).
I think it would be pretty interesting to play with these rules, but my expectation is that with fairly equally matched players who have an understanding of the consequences of the new rules you’d wind up in ties or long slogs a lot more often than without these kinds of rules.
