Hmm…apparently this isn’t kosher under tournament rules. You have to halt development at four houses if you want to limit housing resources.
My opinion is that the best monopoly is the one with the highest expected rate of return (including player eliminations) on which one can most quickly and safely afford to build to three houses (with the large rent jump between two and three houses).
Early on in the game, it’s typically light blue ($450 to build to three houses) which has additional value in the late game for housing locks. Mid-game, it’s orange ($900) because of its cash flow and dark blue ($1200) because of its ability to eliminate people. Red ($1350) and yellow ($1350) can compete with orange/dark blue in the late game depending on the location of the player tokens.
Light purple and green typically have the problem of not being landed on often enough for the eventually winner to keep these developed for a substantial portion of the game without another monopoly or 3/4 railroads. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone win with green as their primary monopoly throughout the game.
Okay, so I thought I was a serious Monopoly player. I guess I stand corrected.
None of my friends will play with me. But then again, I used to be in Real Estate. 
Anyway, I prefer to buy the Magentas and the Yellows. The entire left side of the board between Jail and Free parking.
Anyplace that a card from either Chance or Community Chest sends you to will be a good investment as well.
I’ve got a tactic as well that usually works, but I’m not telling it here. 
I just want to chime in and reopen this thread to tell everybody about how I won an 8 player monopoly game with ONLY Green (and Oriental Ave) last night.
Basically, after all of the properties have been sold, none of the 8 players had any monopolies. I had 2 of the 3 greens, Oriental Ave, and the coveted Illinois Ave. One of the other players had 3 of the 4 railroads, which is what I was really after, and another player had the other 2 reds and the 4th railroad. After some negotiating, we made a three way trade that resulted in me getting the third green, the second player getting all 4 railroads (and some cash), and the 3rd player getting all 3 reds.
Since I only bought 4 properties, and so far had been really lucky in gaining without losing $$, I had enough on hand to put up 3 houses on each green. The owner of the red monopoly never had enough $ to build more than 1 house on each of his, so it wasn’t a major threat. My $900 spaces paid for themself REALLY fast though - they weren’t landed on THAT much, but with 7 potential victims, it happened enough that I helped bankrupt a couple of players. However, strangely enough, I was only able to CRIPPLE them, and the first of the 8 people went down when he followed a landing on North Carolina Ave with a landing on Short Line RR, and had less than $200 in assets left. This made him lose Park Place, which was quickly traded to another player who had Boardwalk, and then there were a couple of 1-2 blows for other players hitting Green followed by Blue.
We were now down to 4 players, each of which had a couple monopolies of their own going by now. I still only had green (with 4 houses per spot – yes the housing shortage came into play a couple of times!) and Oriental, but had a huge wad of cash from all of the rent I was collecting so that nobody else on the board could threaten me. The other two light blues were held by 2 other players, so none of us really had interest in seizing it.
As luck would have it, 2 of the remaining players got eliminated the exact same way - having to mortgage all of their properties and sell their houses after they land on my $1175 property, and then getting a final blow when they hit Park Place, Short Line or Boardwalk on their next roll. This resulted in me collecting 100% of my rent, and the last remaining player getting a whole pile of mortgaged property, but very little actual cash. By the time it was down to just me and him, he held every property on the board EXCEPT for my 4, but almost all were mortgaged and he didn’t have enough cash on hand to unmortgage them, and that last $1175 blow was more than he could take. The result - me winning with only North Carolina, Pacific, Pennsylvania (with 4 houses a piece) and Oriental!
Lesson learned here - in a large group game, hold onto your cash and get a monopoly and some houses up ASAP.
I won a four-player game with only a Green monopoly a few weeks ago. I suspect it was because everyone else was being much more conservative about building houses. I was running right at the edge of bankruptcy for most of the game, but I always had more houses on the board and eventually that paid off.
I don’t understand how they came up with this policy. It isn’t in the rules. And it certainly isn’t in the spirit of the game. It’s called Monopoly – not Let’s be Friends – for a reason.
When I used to play the game a lot, I found the yellow and green properties surrounding go to jail were great monopolies, if you owned both. If you only get to take one, the yellows seemed to pay off best, and you only need one green to keep someone else from getting that monopoly. The rents are high, and you can bankrupt someone if they land on one of those properties with hotels. Boardwalk and Park Place didn’t seem to get landed on enough to make them worth developing if you managed to get them both.
The trouble with any strategy is that you can’t control what unowned properties you land on in the first place, so you have make decisions along the way based on the actual circumstances, and the people you are playing with.
I don’t understand why people love the railroads though. Getting all four doesn’t seem to happen that often, and the rent doesn’t exactly send players to the poorhouse.
There are a couple reasons why it is great to get a RR monopoly. There’s a space on each side of the board, so you aren’t isolated to collecting $$ once (or twice if you’re incredibly lucky) around the board per player. In a many player game, there are going to be A LOT of people landing on the RR’s. $200 may not sound like that much, but the guy I was playing with last night was making about $800 per round off of them, and aside from the initial $800 investment to buy the 4 cards, it doesn’t cost anything to own them (there’s no RR repair card). There’s also a couple of cards which send players directly to one of the RR’s.
The utilities on the other hand…never understood the point of buying those.
I can see the point in a many player game. I don’t think anybody sees the point of owning the utilities.
Orange and Red are best, in that order. However the housing shortage strategy is a good winner too. I have bought the light blue and purple monopolies, which are easy purchases and trades as they are seen as the loser row. Then held built the whole row up to 3-4 houses each. The heavyweight monopolies were stifled and too slow to build because of the higher cost of the houses. Also stations and utilities become important in such a game.
Boy, have I been playing a lot of Monopoly lately – or rather, the tacky knockoff version that my daughter prefers.
In my experience, the best monopoly is the one you can get. It’s all very well to say, “I prefer the oranges, etc.” but if you haven’t got the cards, you haven’t got the cards. I’ll even take the green monopoly, even though I feel like it’s a bit of a death sentence (fusoya’s experience notwithstanding) – it’s just so darn expensive to build on, and usually by the point in the game where you’re ready to build, you’re kind of strapped anyway.
And statistics be damned, I do feel like the dark blue monopoly is the best one on the board – because there are only two properties, you can develop it rather quickly, and it’s just murderous to land on. Plus there’s that “Advance to Boardwalk” card. Almost no one can land on you twice and survive.
I’ve been playing Monopoly quite a bit online the last several months, and I’ve come to a major conclusion:
Should one player build a monopoly up to three houses each, and nobody else has a monopoly (or the money to develop one), that player will almost certainly win.