Just overheard from my daughter (playing various online games with her friends)
“I would rather die than play Monopoly. It’s the WORST game.”
Fair? I think so…
I think the worst game I’ve ever played is Neuland. It’s amazingly frustrating.
Monopoly is usually high on lists like this. I’m not sure it’s the worst, but it surely is the worst among hugely-succesful, millions-sold games.
I rather liked Monopoly back in the day :). But then I like long, interminable games and we tended to add “house rules.”
Among board games I played as a kid, I found Clue excruciatingly boring after I’d played it two or three times.
Uno.
nm
I love Monopoly. But I play by the actual rules. When you don’t put $500 under Free Parking, and you hold the auctions the way you are supposed to, the game usually takes about an hour, and never more than 90 minutes, even with a lot of players. My cousins and I play it a lot, and we play it with 4 & 5 players all the time. We bring games in, in about 75 minutes.
If you put too much money in the game, no one ever goes bankrupt, and if you don’t hold auctions, some of the monopolies never get sold, and then the game goes on forever. I have been out-voted into a few games like those in groups that like to use “house rules.” At the two-hour mark, maybe half the people hold monopolies, but they can’t bankrupt the people who keep landing on Free Parking (it’s the most landed-on spot on the board), or landing on Go, and by another house rule, getting $400 instead of $200. The game is just going round the board passing money around, with no suspense, and at the two-hour mark, people decide to call it, with the winner being the one with the most cash-on-hand (not the one with the most assets, who is usually ME). And everyone is in kind of a sour mood.
When my cousins and I finish a 75 minute game, we frequently want to begin another one, especially if it was a shark-eat-shark ending. Our games are exciting, fast-moving, and suspenseful. They also require lots of strategy, planning and paying attention. “House rules” games are mostly luck.
**Monopoly WITH HOUSE RULES is a terrible game. But Monopoly played BY THE ACTUAL RULES THAT COME WITH THE GAME rocks.
**
The worst games I’ve ever been involved in, to my personal taste, are some specialty versions of Trivial Pursuit. If you end up at the tail-end of a party, because your ride wants to stay late, and then everybody but you wants to play the Sports Edition of Trivial Pursuit, OMG, what a terrible evening.
But FWIW, I like the Genus Edition or Trivial Pursuit. And I played the Silver Screen (IIRC, it was called that) Edition, and that was fun. There are probably people who think the Sports Edition is the greatest game ever.
When I was a kid, around 7,** I played a game that was** meant for kids IIRC, 6-12, and was** horribly unfun, called Uncle Wiggly**. Something about getting an old rabbit to the doctor, who was a possum.
In general, I love board games. I can’t think of too many bad ones. The bad ones don’t stay one the market. Enough people must be playing Monopoly by the rules, that it’s getting enjoyed, considering it will turn 100 in another 15 years, without ever being out of manufacture. Albeit, it has roots in a game invented in 1903 called “The Landlord’s Game” invented in 1903, so really, it’s over 100.
Clue (aka, “Cluedo”) goes back to 1943.
Anyway, I think Monopoly is the oldest branded board game still in manufacture. Which is to say, of course, senet, chess, mancala, backgammed, parcheesi, etc., are lots older, but as a copyrighted game, with a name that is a word, which a company has exclusive right to manufacture, and whose originator and provenance can be documented, it’s the oldest.
Which is not to say people haven’t invented others, and there were some long before Monopoly, but they didn’t last, while Monopoly endured. That’s my point.
However, I will concur that, played by house rules, Monopoly is a terrible game.
TL;DR: Monopoly is fast, fast-paced, and exciting if you play by the enclosed rules. If you make up a lot of additional rules, and skip stuff in the official rules, like auctions, the game is not exciting, and goes on forever.
I play on-line Monopoly a lot, against 3 opponents. It is laughably simple to win 90% of the time with opponents set on expert. My challenge is to see how quickly I can win, I’ve won a couple under 30 minutes.
Once you have a commanding position, the dice rolls are rigged to prolong game time, and it’s not even subtle. I set 1 or 2 players on tycoon and 1 or 2 on beginner, and they play with exactly equal stupidity.
My favorite by-the-book rule that no one enforces is the interest on un-mortgaging a property: most people I’ve played with react with surprise at its very existence. I don’t like the idea of being able to treat your unimproved properties as a free source of cash with few consequences.
I’m not a fan of auctioning, but I think I’ve only played with it once or twice so I could change my mind.
I dislike overly-generous Free Parking, but don’t mind tiny ones that just collect the card fines and not the board fines and don’t have a $50 seed. Similarly I don’t mind the jail fines going under Just Visiting. If they don’t get ridiculous they don’t prolong the game too much since a single landing on a hotel or 4-house property in the latter 2/3 of the board can eat all of it up in one roll.
I did kinda like Monopoly as a kid, liking it enough to rent the NES game a few times because it was a game you could play with a lot of people. Since it was computerized, I was forced to play by the rules.
However, having done that, I can’t claim that the complains about the game are any less true, even when the game is played correctly. It still is quite long, and it is hard to actually get ahead. The winner is just the one who lucks out and gets a monopoly and thus can charge higher rent. You can trade, but no one but some little kid will trade to get you a monopoly unless you give them a monopoly.
People added those extra bits to the game to try and make it more fun, to mix things up. They stopped auctioning because auctioning isn’t fun. Sure, it didn’t work, but the fact people tried shows they thought he game needed things to spice it up. Hell, I’d argue that people must’ve thought they were more fun than the base game for those house rules to become the norm.
And I can see it. Free Parking adds the thrill of gambling or a lottery in the mix, and makes it where there is another source of luck beyond rolling the dice. So what if it makes the game longer? It’s not like most people I knew played whole games anyways.
(My dad did, though. It was part of the fun to pick up the game where they left off and keep the same game going. Not everyone enjoys games to win them or get them over with. And that’s why I think Monopoly took off–a different mindset than what we want in games now.)
Candyland is just drawing cards on a colorful background. Utterly boring and with no skill needed whatsoever.
Risk.
First, someone takes over Australia and then just sits there for a long, long time. No skill, strategy, etc. required to merely stay in the game.
A couple people quickly get booted and they’ve got hours to kill while the game continues.
The game drags on and on until people just give up. Time to go home.
We play Yahtzee a lot, I like the challenge or working the chances of making your point, or knowing what to try for, or burying your failures, it’s fairly complex.
Back to Monopoly, I play only on computer, so I’m locked into board rules, and I’m fine with them, I wouldn’t to ever want to see them change. I hate building lotteries or windfalls into it.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, no one on this board is in the target demographic for Candyland.
Heh. I remember cheating at Chutes & Ladders so that I’d lose back when my kids enjoyed the game.
Has anyone played the dice game - I think it’s called Left-Center-Right?
We went to a small gathering of couples for game night and it ended up being almost exclusively L-C-R, which is the most boring game on the planet. Zero strategy, zero subtlety, zero drama.
To this day it boggles my mind how into it the other couples were.
mmm
I was 11 when Candyland was invented, so I was never in that demographic. But I loved Animal Rummy. I actuall played Monopoly at six, but probably badly.
Yahtzee hack: Go in order.
Everyone must go for 1’s first, then 2’s…straight down the line.
It’s a nice variation.
mmm
Candyland and Chutes & Ladders were the first games I thought of as well, as I have children almost 6 & 4. Forgot how horrible a game both are, but, well, they do introduce basic gaming concepts, so you’ve got to start somewhere.
I agree that Monopoly is a decent game when played by the rules. In high school, it was my favorite board game, and me and three other friends used to play the shit out of it. On average, yeah, I would say a game runs 60-80 minutes.
I was never fond of The Game of Life as a kid. I mean, it was fun maybe the first two or three times, then it just kind of sucked. And I didn’t like how you can basically lose even at the very end because an opponent bet all their money on a number from one and ten and their number hit and they became a tycoon.
Monopoly by the rules everyone played with when I was a kid. I don’t often agree with Dane Cook (or think about him these days), but his take is spot on.
I have a vivid memory of playing Chutes & Ladders in kindergarten, and thinking “They’re teaching us that life is random. There’s no way to avoid going down, and nothing you can do to try to go up.”