No, it’s the opposite. By concentrating properties in the hands of who wants them most, it means rental prices go way up. High rent = shorter game. It doesn’t take too long once the hotels start coming out.
nm
I’m still not 100% sure I’m parsing this correctly, but, in my experience, people who play Monopoly somewhat regularly have figured out some of the basics strategies and concepts. Otherwise, the game is deathly boring and you stop playing it.
I don’t play it often these days, but Monopoly is one my favorite board games when played with at least 4 people and according to the rulebook. It’s a rich game with a lot of depth and skill, balanced by a bit of luck. On the luck-skill continuum, I would put it somewhere around the backgammon level: a game that looks, perhaps, like it’s governed mostly by chance, but in which the better player will always rise to the top in the medium-to-long run.
Nobody I’ve played with ever seems to want to trade anything. They’re too scared of other people getting a monopoly to trade to achieve theirs. They’re content with just going around the board endlessly until people die of old age (a game mechanic which should probably be added. You die after a certain number of die rolls, and the taxman takes everything you have in back taxes so no chance of your kids carrying on your legacy).
I will always oppose Monopoly whenever anybody suggests a board game - especially as we have a whole bunch of others in the games cabinet. Luckily Lego Pictionary tends to sway even the most die-hard Monopolista 
I think this is the real problem. I’ve NEVER seen people try to play Monopoly without house rules somewhere involved. And those house rules (like fines to free parking, or no one EVER exercising the option to auction a property instead of buying it outright) are always terrible and make the game more swingy and luck-based.
Combine that with this:
And it’s why most people seem to just not understand why the game is awesome.
I’ve played a lot of Monopoly on Pogo[sup]*[/sup]. In my experience, the first player to develop a monopoly to 3 houses is going to win. Rarely this happens to two players at once, in which case it’s a matter of who gets reamed first.
Monopoly is exactly what it says on the tin: A real estate trading game. If nobody trades, the game goes on until everybody quits.
*: Last year Pogo displayed a 20 second ad every 15 minutes. Some months ago Monopoly was changed to a 45 second ad every 7 to 8 minutes. I now only play it when I have a free pass to Club Pogo, which has no ads.
@ The Hamster King: I have tried losing at Diplomacy. It’s not easy – the first few games I was ever in all got abandoned after the 4th turn.
Yeah, I don’t even see how you can have a game without a trade involved. It’s the most important mechanic of gameplay. It’d be like playing Texas Hold 'Em with no betting involved, just deal the cards, and whoever has the best hand wins.
That’s how I won the other day. I had two of the green properties and one of the utilities, while my buddy had the other green and the other utility. I asked him what he wanted for the green, he asked for my utility and $100. I gave it to him and immediately started building houses. A few passes around the board and he landed on one of them with three houses. I offered to take the utilities in lieu of the rent he owed me. 
Think of the inventor of Monopoly (relevant link)!
I think it depends on how seriously you take the game. Most of the time I do not take games very seriously at all. If I lose, no biggie. If I win, no biggie.
Sometimes I’ll get focused on a game and it doesn’t matter if I have an opponent or not (say, Chess, for instance). I’ll get frustrated if I can’t remember a pattern/strategy. Then there are games that I have to take seriously because my opponent is taking them seriously. Where the time between turns literally feels like infinity. Where you have to scrutinize every move, to be sure that you screw your opponent out of his move. Where if you do not win, the pressure has built to such a crescendo that the only thing you can do is scream and rant at your friend for beating you at Othello.
I try my best to stay out of such ‘serious’ games…
My freshman year in college, about 10 years ago, a guy got together a group of people on our dorm floor to play Monopoly once a week. I seem to remember him taunting us about how likely he was to win. We had 6-8 people, and he won the first two weeks, maybe three. Then the regular players figured out how to play and it became much more difficult for him and we started getting other people winning most of the time. Given the quality of the school the players weren’t idiots, just not familiar with the intricacies of the game. Once we all picked it up, it became much more interesting even though it was obvious luck played a significant role.
I’d say the luck/skill is tilted more toward luck than Texas Hold’em, but there’s a lot of subtle things that go on that most people don’t realize one bit. The properties are hardly ever worth face value outside a Monopoly, so the skill of knowing how much to pay for each one at auction is extremely important. Pouring all your money into one decent monopoly with 3 houses will win the game if you’re the first and get at all reasonably lucky, and most people aren’t willing to make the potential sacrifices.
…bolding mine.
Is this a Freudian slip?
It’s more like a Freudian… ah, what’s that term for the place you throw dirty laundry?
I love you. Will you marry me?* I CANNOT stand “money in the middle” rules variation.
What pisses me off even more is that the kid’s monopoly has Mr Moneybags Spare Change as a part of the regular rules.:mad::smack:
*If you are a boy-type person. I am in Canada, and I could marry you if you were a girl type person, but my boyfriend would want to be involved somehow and that is just too much even for me.
I bought my son a new version of the Monopoly game that uses hand held palm size versions of a credit card/calculator/ type device that replaces the money. Each player gets one. There is no “Free Parking” booty in this version.
I was pleasantly surprised as the game went quickly unlike the hours it use to take. There is also a round plastic center that’s placed in the middle of the now round board that the hand held devices go into to tally/total/subtract etc… It’s all battery operated and fairly simple to figure out.
With this version of Monopoly if a player doesn’t buy a property he lands on that’s not owned it must be put up for auction. This is emphasized more so then in any other version of Monopoly I’ve played. Not that I’ve spent my entire lifetime playing Monopoly…anyway; there are a few other rule changes, I was pleasantly surprised at how much more effiecent it was to play with the modern gadgets. It was fun 
That’s not a rule change. That’s how standard Monopoly is (supposed to be) played. Same with no free parking booty. (You may or may not be aware of this–it’s kind of ambiguous with your wording.)
Also, casual players may not know this, but there is a limit to the housing stock. There are 32 houses and 12 hotels. Creating and managing housing shortages becomes a strategic point later in the game. You might, say, choose not to upgrade that 4-house monopoly into a hotel, in order to keep those four houses from going back into the housing stock. And your opponent can’t get around this rule by, say, improving his 3-house monopolies immediately to hotel monopolies. You have to be able to put four houses on the monopoly before improving to a hotel.
The last time I played Monopoly, it was a three-player game and I got completely creamed for no reason other than unlucky dice rolls. Before I even made it around the board once, I managed to land on “Go to Jail” three times, and also drew a “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” card. By the time I finally passed “Go” for the first time, the other two players had passed it three times, and each had at least one monopoly going, so even when I wasn’t landing on “Go to jail” I was landing on already-owned property.