Monopoly Strategies!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Come on, who HASN’T played? (OK, I’m sure there are a FEW who haven’t, but I bet MOST of you have). Anyway, I was playing Monopoly last night and it was fun and all that, but I happened to hit on a REALLY good strategy. This probably won’t win you the game or anything, but it’s a HUGE help.

Ok. It was late in the game, all of the properties were already purchased, but no one had any monopolies. There was a trade between all players so that most of us got a monopoly or two. The player whose turn it was bought up about 20 of the available 32 houses. That player played his turn. Now, in between turns, everyone wanted to buy houses. There was not a large enough supply, so per the rules, we auctioned them off. Now, there were three players involved in the auction. I owned monopolies on the dark purples (Baltic and Mediterranean, $50 per house) and the greens (Pacific, No. Carolina, Pennsylvania, $200 per house). What happened was that I had enough to buy up all 8 houses for the purples, but not enough for the greens. When we bid, I ended up getting most of the houses for around $160 and rather than putting them on the purples and paying 150% of what they’re worth, I put them on the Greens and got a $40 discount per house. This is legal, far as I can tell, and a pretty good strategy when there’s a housing shortage.

I also stayed up late running up tables for each group, with total investment, return per hit, percentage of investment hits to earn investment back. This is for all the possible combinations of houses and hotels on each property.

So, does anyone else have any strategies they like to use for Monopoly?

(suprisingly enough, there aren’t too many websites dealing with this)

2

I’ve heard it on the radio when there was a report on the World Monopoly Championship that the most efficient properties to buy and put houses on are the orange ones.

Seems you have differant names for them so I will stick to colours.

The reason cited was that these had the greatest chance of landing thereon because there is the jail in the corner,and of course many players will either pick up go to jail cards, or they will land on Go to Jail, or they will throw three doubles in a row. The most probable throws from there are sixes, eights and nines.(seven is of course Community chest-unless its Chance)

Also there is a Chance card that directs players to the electric company just two along from jail plus there is a Community Chest card that directs players to the lighter purple just next to the jail.

IIRC there is also a Chance card that directs players to a pale blue just two before jail.

Add to this the houses are more affordable so you can quickly buy twelve up and help create the housing shortage plus the returns per house per/cost per house is supposed to be better than anywhere else on the board.

They have always been my favourites anyway followed by the light purples.

The railway staions are really a waste of time and the Dark Blues are hardly worth the trouble.

If you can’t get the Orange then go for Yellow followed by Red.

3

Yes, this seems to be a decent strategy. Jail comes into play a lot, and 2:6 of the doubles rolls to get you out will land you on one of the oranges. Also, the tables I worked up indicate that one hit on one of the oranges when fully developed will give you ~45%-50% of your investment, while one on the reds when developed will only return you ~40%. Good strategy.

Anyone else?

4

I forgot something else, if you land on the Chance just after Free Parking there is the possbility that you will get the card that says ‘Go back three spaces’ which again would land a player on the last of the Oranges.

There is a Community Chest card that puts players on the Railway Station next to the Oranges too.

5

What in the world has happened to the classic board games? I don’t know about Monopoly because I still have an old set, but I recently purchased Risk, Masterpiece & Stratego and was so disappointed to find all of the playing pieces made from plastic instead of wood (especially Risk!). The paintings in Masterpiece are on glossy paper instead of heavy weight cardstock like I remember from years ago. This results in the clips that you use to secure the price tags to the paintings don’t work right because they’re still adjusted for the much thicker card stock. And another thing- (bitch, bitch, bitch…)

How long before Scrabble tiles are made from compressed cardboard?

6
  • The greens are dogs. Expensive to build up and skipped a lot when people draw cards that move them.
  • The light blues and utilities are great at the start, when nobody has money, but after that they should just be mortgaged or traded.
  • The Purples are never payoffs, but you may get them cheap and with a lot of players it may be your only chance to have the fun of a hotel.
    - Key to every set, put the most houses on the last lot, since it pays off better.
7

The railroads are actually a pretty good deal if you can get all four and your opponents are cash poor. In addition to getting a $200 hit with 4 opportunities a round from each person, there is a Chance that sends the player to the nearest railroad to pay double the rent and another that sends the player to “Ride the Reading.”
Utilities are a bust…unless you can use them as “sweetening” when making a trade with someone else (to get something you really want). The best time to offer to trade 'em to someone is when they just landed on one.
The earliest person to start a development seems to have the best chance of winning.

8

Best strategy = be the car. The car always wins.

It was too hard growing up in my family to develop any kind of strategy, since everyone played their grudges (“I’m not trading with you because you broke my sled last winter”). I have a book somewhere about Monopoly that has a section on different player types. I think I’ve encountered them all over the years. The ones I remember are:
The Railroad Tycoon - must have all four, will trade everything else to get them
The Boardwalk Freak - will trade everything else to get B and PP
The Concealer - hides money under the board, until someone trades with her to give her a Monopoly
The Frustrater - never trades anything, ever, for fear of being ripped off
The Dealer - “I’ll give you one Red and one Green, plus $200 and my Get Out of Jail Free card, plus one free land on my railroads, for your two light blues and B&O, plus two free lands on your Oranges, plus you go get me another beer, plus this and this”

9

Aargh, I hear you about the Frustrater. At least half of the people I end up playing Monopoly with are Frustraters. They turn the game into a dice rolling contest. I offer ridiculously good deals that won’t even get me a monopoly just for the hell of it, because I know they’ll turn them down. “I’ll trade you a railroad and $400 for your Light Blue.” peers at me “No!”

10

Monopoly strategy - buy everything you land on.

Exciting game.

11

My strategy: give up at a certain point, and play simply to piss off whoever’s winning/has the best properties. This consists mainly of trading whatever necessary to stay in the game, but never trading to the future winner.

Another good trick is old-fashioned cheating. No one pays attention nowadays, especially in Monopoly since most people spend their time obsessed over their next turn. So slip a hotel on or off the board and most people don’t even notice. If you don’t have a banker, making bad change out of the bank can work too. And of course, “steal money out of the bank before the game starts” is a classic.

I think this strategy is just a primitive defense mechanism against losing. If I can’t win, then DAMMIT, no one else should either. :slight_smile:

12

I play mostly three-person games, although the same basic principles seem to apply for larger groups. An important background point is that we play by the standard rules–i.e. you don’t get double for landing on GO, the fines etc. are paid to the bank, so you don’t get anything for landing on Free Parking, etc. This is important because it keeps down the money available in the game to reasonable levels–otherwise you have so much money flooding in that the game can go on forever. (For more about this topic, please see What is supposed to happen when you land on “Free Parking” in Monopoly? from More of the Straight Dope) Most of my family’s games last about an hour to 90 minutes.

(A couple of our house rules: We also don’t allow free landings, mainly because it draws out the game. Also, on the standard U.S. board, the first railroad is “Reading Railroad”, so whoever lands on that has to trade it to my father, because he grew up in Reading, Pa.)

It’s very important to build agressively–the overall strategy is to get three houses on each property of your key monopoly as fast as possible, to bleed your opponents dry before they have a chance to build. (We play so quickly that its fairly common for the game to end before all the properties have been sold).

With this way of playing, the Green monoply has a negative value, and it is almost impossible to win with them–the game doesn’t last long enough for you to get enough money to build them properly. In our games most times people land on an unsold Green they decline to buy it at face value and have the bank put it up for auction, and it usually sells for about 2/3rds face value, since it is only worth its mortgage value plus a couple of rents before you mortgage it to raise money to build your key monopoly.

Given the above, I’ve found that, in order of preference, the properties that give you the best chance to win are Orange, Light Purple, Yellow, Dark Blue, and Red. Light Blue and Purple (plus the railroads) are worth owning, but you can’t win with them. And, as mentioned above, Green is something you try to trick someone else into getting.

13

casdave wrote of the virtues of the Orange-colored properties:

What is this “housing shortage” of which you speak? Is there some rule that once you run out of the little plastic green houses that come with the game, you can’t buy new houses any more?

14

tracer inquired:

That’s right. Standard rules say that there are only 32 houses and 12 hotels available. Once those are gone, that’s it.

15

My meathods really dont rely on color persay, but still, I havnt lost any of my last 3 games, (I know not very much, but we play looong drawn out games). heres the thing. we play a scam game where you put $500 in the center along with all the taxes, etc…and get them on free parking. so, first off, I buy everything I land on. make sure you get 1 or 2 of the railroads----bribe land. since this is going to be a long game, take the chance and get B and PP as BEST as you can (Dk. Blue)because with an hour+ long game, someone is bound to land on it eventually.from there, you shouldnt have much money left, but now that you dominate the best piece of land (oh, I forgot to mention, when you buy a color, try your best to get all of them. try to work out a corner too, so that its bad territory to enter) and a big chunck of the land too, money will just keep rollin in, and boom. monopoly. Its all in wadgering

16

Tracer

Yup thats the rule and it is generally not a good idea to trade those houses for hotels or you will make houses available to your rivals.

You are not allowed to simply put down enough wonga to build hotels in one move, you have to have 4 houses on each property for at least one turn.

That is the true monopoly in this game.

17

AArgh, the free parking money game. It’s not too bad when you just put taxes in there, but starting with $500?!? That seems a bit extreme.

18

I just remembered:

Back when we lived in Berkeley (early 1970s) my dad used to treat the Free Parking square as “Eco Crisis.” This was similar to the “WAHOO” space mentioned in Cecil Adams’ article. If you landed on Free Parking, you had to take the top Eco Crisis card and obey its instructions – and the stuff on the Eco Crisis cards was FAR worse than any of the Chance or Community Chest cards.

For example, one of the Eco Crisis cards was “Banking Crisis” card. When this card was drawn, the bank (and all the money in it) was closed for the rest of the game. A new bank would immediately be created containing all the unowned property and all the unbuilt houses and hotels but NO CASH. The only cash allowed in circulation was whatever was in the players’ posession at the time the “Banking Crisis” card was drawn. Whenever one of the players paid a Luxury Tax, or one of the other payouts to the bank required by a Chance/Community Chest card, that money would go into the new bank, and ONLY that tiny bit of money could be used for payouts such as passing “Go” or mortgaging property or winning 2nd prize in a beauty contest.

Of course, if enough people landed on Free Parking, you might end up drawing the “Banking Crisis” card more than once, meaning that the tiny amount of cash accumulated in the NEW bank would be removed from play, too…

There was also the “Nationalization” card, which forced everyone to return all property to the bank, the “Housing Crisis” card, which automatically added one extra house to every monopolized property on the board that didn’t already have a hotel on it, the “Political Football” card, which was a false alarm and allowed the guy who drew it to roll again, etc… These cards could REALLY screw up a normal Monopoly game.