Besides my aversion to mafia games, I won’t play secret hitler because they somehow didn’t call it “Designated Hitler”.
I used to palm the candy cards in Candyland after they appeared once. Managed to finish games in under a lifetime without kids knowing.
Eventually told the kids when they were older and they thought it was hilarious.
I too love, absolutely love (and am very good at) Monopoly when it’s played by the rules. When played by the rules, a games lasts between 45 and 90 minutes. The games drags on when you introduce too much cash into it with “house rules,” like putting $500 under Free Parking, or giving double payouts to people who land directly on Go. It also drags if you don’t hold auctions. It generally takes no more than three rounds of the board to buy up all the properties if you hold auctions, but if you don’t, there can be properties that don’t get sold until eight or nine rounds of the board, making it much harder to get monopolies.
Also, you really need at least four people to make it interesting. That’s true of most board games aimed at adults, but this one in particular doesn’t work well with three, and fails miserably with two. I have an extended family who likes to play board games when we get together over holidays, so I’ve played lots of games of more than four, and I had a mother and a cousin who were big sticklers for the correct rules. Mostly they are annoying, but it’s important for this game.
Yeah. I hate Life too. I think the idea is supposed to be that the game just happens to you, like life itself, but that is so depressing, it makes the game no fun whatsoever.
ETA: Once played a game called “Anti-monopoly.” Rules more complicated than the infield fly rule. Gave up halfway through. Don’t know if that qualifies me to hate it as much as Life, which I was forced to play many a time as a child.
I played Stratego a lot with my brother growing up. The key to the game is successfully guessing the opponent’s pieces then acting with the correct pieces against them. I bent or came close to breaking the rules. I’d take a piece that can’t move, like a bomb or flag, and act like I was going to move it, then pretended to change my mind and move another piece. Or I’d take a piece that couldn’t move very far and act like I was going to move it really far (to make it look like a weaker piece) then again look like I changed my mind and move it a shorter distance (the legal distance). My brother would always assume the wrong thing about my pieces and frequently blow up on bombs or die against strong enemies he thought were weaker.
Was that cheating? I never moved a piece illegally. I can’t say I feel good about it in retrospect. But the game’s all about deception and figuring out your opponent’s pieces. So maybe I did play in the spirit of the game after all. I’m not really sure after all these years.
I don’t get people who like Monopoly (even by its faster, actual rules) - because it’s not a *game. *It’s an object lesson in why capitalism sucks - as in, once a player starts snowballing it’s impossible to catch up, players get eliminated in the middle of the game and are either pissed or bored for the remainder of the time, and the end state is one person happy and owning everything ; everyone else annoyed at them.
I mean obviously there are thousands of games with one winner and everyone else loses ; but none that crown their king so early, so ineluctably that 3/4th of the game is just going through the motions - and worse, that just erase whatever the other players have/had accomplished. It’s a soul crushing experience. As it was originally designed to be :).
You know how you like stuff you are good at? I am very good at Monopoly. I don’t know why I am so good at it-- I’m average at board games in general (my mother, on the other hand, never lost a game of Clue), but I really rock Monopoly. At some point when I was a kid, it dawned on me that the most landed-on square was Free Parking (maybe because of the number of times people won the extra money everyone always wanted to put under it), and somehow, with the exception of Go (probably because a lot of cards send you there), the closer a space is to Free Parking, the more it gets landed on. So the best monopolies border Free Parking, and Boardwalk/Park Place is an expensive investment that doesn’t get landed on very often, between cards that send people to Go, and people getting sent to jail. My friends would be having a tug-of-war over Boardwalk, while I’d be raking in money with the orange monopoly that no one else cared about (also, both a six and eight away from jail).
I dunno. Monopoly is open to a lot of analysis. There are probably books written about it. It’s a game that benefits from strategy. It’s got just enough randomness to make it interesting, but the players really have a lot of control.
Well, yes - plenty of cards send you to either jail or GO and the average result of 2d6 is 7 so the properties within 7 (+/- 1) spaces of either square are statistically the best. In the case of jail, it’s even easier to figure out the BEST spaces since you can only get out with a double, so properties 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 spaces away are extremely valuable (as are their monopolies) while every odd property sucks outside of monopoly purposes.
But that’s exactly what I’m saying : the player who gets the orange monopoly is just going to destroy everyone else, period. There’s no better property, no way for other players to avoid his soon-to-be hotel’d to crap squares. The same is true of light blue, although not quite as much because they’re typically cheap-is to land on even when all built up. Built-up orange just destroys. So whoever snags orange typically wins, and wins bigly and ain’t nothing nobody can do about that. As soon as that monopoly is established, the rest of the game is just rolling dice until that guy/gal wins.
The only time you should place a hotel in monopoly is if you can immediately buy the houses back from supply,don’t just place hotels because you can!
I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t discover the point about the orange monopoly until after I played the game regularly, so I’m not 100% convinced the game has to play out in the way you describe, but it seems a reasonable premise. That being the case, the obvious counter-strategy is to ensure no-one is able to gain the orange monopoly. OK, it is possible for someone to get lucky and land on all three spaces before anyone else, but barring that, this strategy is easy to execute. In particular, never agree to a trade that gives a player the orange monopoly, unless the terms are so outrageously in your favour that you think you can bankrupt them before they get a chance to develop it. Then the game becomes more interesting again.
Sure. But then one player who had wisely adhered to the unspoken “never let anyone get the orange monopoly” MAD agreement has to sell some of his stuff and… yes. Or someone is dumb enough to be convinced to sell his orange for outrageous amounts of money and back to square one.
I mean, this is the game (and, indeed, the socio-economic lesson !) : you can’t stop deleterious monopolies from emerging. At best you can delay them. That’s why we have regulations, people ! 
Ah, yes. House-hoarding. The best way to win. I actually got very nervous when I was straggling in a game after getting the “make repairs” card, and someone put a lot of houses on Boardwalk and Park Place. But then they replaced them with hotels, I bought the houses, put them on my orange monopoly, and the money started coming in.
You have a very poor understanding of how to play the game, I’m thinking. If you know what the optimal strategies are for winning, then the goal is to work to keep someone who is on his/her way to that optimal strategy from getting there, or, at least, if they are going to get there, setting yourself up with a competing strategy that allows you to keep up. A person who has nothing but Orange and Red monopolies won’t beat someone who has every other monopoly on the board.
However, yes, in general the game does tend to snowball. And the more important aspect is that people get eliminated, which sucks for the sequential losers, who don’t get to continue participating (except by kibitzing).
I disagree. Orange is nice, but red is almost as nice, though it costs a bit more to build it up (and which monopolies are the best vary by the state of the game. Early on, the first two sides of the board are better; later on, sides 3 and 4 rule.) I mean, sure, eventually the winner ends up with orange, because they end up with everything, but the winner isn’t always the person who first owns the orange monopoly. Being able to have enough cash reserves to build it up is important. Almost nobody ever ends up with a natural monopoly in a four-player or more game. Trading must be involved. I’ve won games starting out with any of the monopolies. Yes, orange is nice, but most games, I’m not going to end up with the orange monopoly as my starter. Quite often, I’ll have to trade an orange property to somehow who will get the orange monopoly, but I will have (hopefully) gotten enough in my trade with my negotiating skills to outlast his orange monopoly. I mean, that’s the whole point of the game.
I have forgotten the name of the game, but the board was full of squares with stock symbols on them. You rolled the dice, moved the token, could buy/sell stocks. Prices rose or fell based on dice rolls and actions taken from the board.
I quickly discovered that, due to the stock groupings and the way the board was laid out, one stock would NEVER lose money and would in fact make huge gains and go through splits, etc., always increasing in value. I made it a point on my first play, to buy as many shares of that stock as I could (AT&T, iirc) and I never lost the game after that. Got rather boring.
You’re not playing it correctly. Ladders are for kids, chutes are for grown-ups. 
I refuse to play Monopoly anymore. It’s just not fun. It’s also left-wing propaganda about the evils of ownership slowing grinding out every last dollar from those less fortunate.
However, if you ever have a chance to play Monopoly Empire, it’s actually a good game. It’s much simpler, quicker, and easier for players to stay in the game.
I had a similar experience with Supremacy. In that game, once a certain number of nukes have been detonated, everyone loses. Early in the game, I had a windfall of the resources needed to build nukes. So I built them, enough to destroy the world plus extras. For defense? No, following the Atreides’ maxim, to control it. Of course you can also guess how it ended. 
I can enjoy cutthroat games, as long as it remains friendly, but many people can’t. So we either adopt house rules to make games more cooperative, or we don’t play them.
I think that crosses into strategic simulation rather than game.
I’m thinking of a couple of games that were invented for works of fiction. The first is Martian Chess, invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for one of his Barsoom books. The problem is that it’s much easier to force a draw than it is to force a win. It might be playable if you’re a testosterone-poisoned macho man who can’t even fathom the possibility of playing for a draw (i.e., a Barsoomian), but for us Earthlings, a player who’s willing to accept a draw will actually win over one who’s not.
The other one, I can’t remember what it was called, but it was invented for Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s played on a chess-like board, but the board is three-dimensional, with two corners higher up, going down to a valley across the other two corners. And each player has pieces of a variety of sizes. You win by capturing all of your opponent’s pieces, but there’s something about small pieces not taking big pieces, and not capturing uphill (I don’t remember all of the details), which combined mean that if you leave your biggest piece on the highest square, you can’t lose. You at least can’t force a win against an opponent who’s trying to avoid a draw, unlike Martian chess, but it has the additional point against it that this one was actually marketed and sold as a real game, unlike (so far as I know) Martian chess.
Was it something like this?
The problem with Monopoly is that there’s hardly any strategy to it. It’s a roll-and-move game. You roll the dice, move to a square, and then respond to the space you landed on. The only choice players make is whether to buy an unowned space they land on. And that’s not a real choice; you should always buy a space if you have the money.
So the game is decided by random dice rolls and who lands on spaces they can buy before they run out of money. If you’re lucky, you’ll land on good combinations of spaces and other players will land on your spaces and give you money. If you’re not lucky, you won’t land on the right spaces and other players won’t land on your spaces.
Early in the game, it will be clear which players got lucky and have a good set of spaces. Those players will then slowly develop their spaces and collect all of the other players’ money. There’s usually an hour or so spent between the time when it becomes clear who will win the game and when that person will actually win. If you use the Free Parking house rule, it adds another hour to the game.
You’ve completely missed the point of the game. The game can be played just as well by shuffling up the deeds and passing them out to each player. The game is almost completely in the interaction between players and making deals. There are books and books about the math and strategy of Monopoly. Against players who only casually play the game, I will beat them almost every time in a four-player game. There is plenty of depth to the game.
As for snowballing games that leave players in the dust, Risk would have to be the classic one there. We used to play a good bit of it back in the day, usually with around 5 or 6 players. First, the games would last like five hours, but one or two people would be eliminated at around the one hour mark, leaving for many hours of just sitting around, drinking beer, watching TV, doing whatever. By hour three or so, we should be down to three players at the most. Then another two hours of struggling before the final army comes off the board.