The biggest problem is the house rule of putting the fine money in a pot.
If it was taken out of the economy, then the money supply would gradually decrease and the game would end.
The biggest problem is the house rule of putting the fine money in a pot.
If it was taken out of the economy, then the money supply would gradually decrease and the game would end.
A good house rule that counters the above problem states that anyone who lands on the free parking gets all the cash in the pot. That really changes the dynamics.
Great review of monopoly by the way. Though no mention about how everyone fights over the pieces? If I don't get to be the battleship, I refuse to play. And heaven help you if the resident asshole gets the car: he presses down on it so the piece etches tire tracks into the board.
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What was states is that the house rule was the problem. By removing that extremely common house rule, one institutes gradual economic death, thus allowing faster resolution. This doesn't fix a great many fundamental problems, but it is not a problem to be fixed.
I find that a good chunk of the play time is the dealing out of the "money," so one day, I just said "screw it" and gave everyone an index card, wrote "1500" on it, and told them to do the math. Now my Monopoly games only last 'two' hours!
Great review. We mostly stop after one person is bankrupt and the one with most hotels/houses/monopolies wins then. But we do have the thing with the pieces. I get the doggy, or I will wipe the entire board out. Well, I mostly do by winning anyway, but you get the point. My mum doesn't even join any more and my brother and father only join when we have nothing else to do... for about a day.
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A truly classic pain in the ass
Monopoly is one of the most ubiquitous board games ever made. It's been translated into nearly every language in existence in the last hundred years, every country has its own version, there's collectors editions for everything from Star Wars to NASCAR, and just about every household in America has one shoved in an attic or closet. Every year, McDonalds invites us to clog our arteries in the vain hopes of getting Boardwalk and Park Place. Hell, my house has three copies of the damn thing, including that one with the debit cards instead of cash.
And yet, I can count the games actually finished on one hand.
Monopoly's mechanics are solid, house rules or no. You just go around the board, buying up property, passing Go, and occasionally getting your thimble thrown in jail. Once the properties are bought up, the human element comes into play, as you try to trade your way into a monopoly (that is, all the properties of the same color). Once you have those, you start building up houses and hotels, in hopes of bankrupting all other players.
At least, that's how it's supposed to end.
The problem with Monopoly is, it's really easy to get stuck where nobody can do anything but just go around in circles. If you get some players that know what they're doing, they won't willingly give you that one property you need, unless you give them the much better one you have but have no hopes of monopolizing. Even worse, you can get cut out of the loop within the first ten turns if the dice hate you; lose out on the best properties, and you're on a long shoe ride to oblivion.
And then there's the biggest flaw: its length. If there's only two or three players, the game is over in about one or two hours at most. But since this is often dragged out at family get-togethers, you can probably expect the full six players. At this point, the game's length skyrockets past the limits of human patience, to where even the Buddha would be tossing the board and f-bombing his grandmother for taking her sweet time rolling. I've personally been locked in games lasting over five hours , and even then we just had to call it. This is even worse when you get that guy who just has to win. Only Twilight Imperium has ever tried me like Monopoly has. Just leave it in the closet.