I need clafication on a rule in monopoly. Here is the situation, a player lands on a property with 3 houses, owes $700, and raises $630 from mortgaged property. Can he then make a deal with another player to sell his property in order to raise the required amount, or is he bankrupt?
I thought that was up to what you decided in terms of selling your properties. If you agreed to deals before the game, then he should be allowed to sell stuff.
Yes, he can make a deal. Now, in terms of strategy, it’s not a good deal to make for the other player, as the player who needs the deal is basically lost anyway and there’s no point propping him up for another couple turns, but the deal is legal.
But it helps one of the other players. What usually happens when I play is that the non-bankrupting players try to buy as much of the property from the losing player as possible to prevent the bankrupting player from getting a lot of mortgaged property. Otherwise the first person to bankrupt someone else comes out with a much stronger position than all of the other players. There are usually only one or two monopolies before the first round of bankruptcies the way we play; getting all of those missed properties is extremely valuable.
This does lengthen the game a lot. The prices paid for the bankrupt player’s properties are always way out of line with the face value of the property. At the end of it, the bankrupt player usually has a lot of money and either quits (an interesting parallel to the dangers of real world taxation policy) or uses the money to buy one monopoly. It is also interesting because after the first player bankrupts, all of the other players have so little cash that they can be close to bankruptcy themselves - an allegory to the 2008 housing bubble.
We used to play using the rule that the bank auctions off property that people can’t afford to buy. But we stopped doing that because during one game we mortgaged all of our property near the start, and had to go around and round the board for about an hour before any of us could afford to unmortgage our properties and start collecting rent. It also had the effect that a lot of the properties were sold for almost nothing to after the bidding wars for the good properties.
I don’t like the mortgaging properties rule because at the start no one is collecting rents because they have mortgaged their property to buy more property. When no one is collecting rents, it takes forever to improve property, or really do anything to get the game moving.