Monopoly The Game

2023-12-06

Oddly enough I had a dream about this and I thought it would make a good blog post. This will be a departure from the previous two blog posts I have done which are more thoughtful and reflective, I am not sure if it is a good idea but here goes.

The game of Monopoly is one of my least favorite games for numerous reasons, it is very long, there are few choices, the mechanics are boring, the pacing is slow, and I always have a terrible time playing. My wife loves the game -I think mainly due to nostalgia- but I keep trying to get her to throw it out when we have cleaning sessions. I have only played the classic version, here is a copy of the rules: https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/00009.pdf . Also the rules call for an auction when someone declines buying a property and I have never played with that rule -perhaps doing that would help the game be mildly more interesting but I doubt it.

I was curious to see alternate rules for monopoly so here is a google search for Monopoly house rules: https://www.google.com/search?q=monopoly+house+rules . There are lots of interesting results but I mostly took inspiration from the mechanics of playing other board games.

So I wanted to float some house rules to totally change the game of monopoly and hopefully fix the things that I find broken. You as a player should make decisions that are meaningful and impact the game, the game should be shorter, and the pace should pick up and peak towards the end. Here is a list of some of the mechanics I do not like:

1. Rolling dice to move around is very random and doesn’t give you a lot of opportunity for strategy
2. There is no scaling to the number of players, if you play with two people or with eight people everyone starts with $1.5K dollars and so in the latter case you are flooded with money
3. The optimal strategy is always to buy all of the property you land on, there is not a lot else to do with money so you mostly want to buy everything and trade it when advantageous
4. If you get lucky and get a monopoly you are in a super strong position because you can scale with houses and hotels. It is hard for other players to catch up.
5. Open ended trading takes forever. Unless your group puts some kind of social pressure you could be stuck with players prolonging routes with one side deal after another
6. Jail is an odd mechanic. You can still collect rent in jail while incurring no risk of hitting other player’s properties, an ideal end game position
7. Going first gives you a strong advantage

There are just some of the issues I see. So my goal in introducing the following rules is to reduce the randomness and give players many more options.

• Only start with $500 and $100 dollar bills
  • Makes set up quicker
• No auctioning
  • Auctioning is a confusing and time consuming mechanic in my eyes
• Players start with ($6K / the number of players)
  • This will cause less of a scaling issue than the normal rules. If there are only two players the money will be split less than if there are six players. Given that boardwalk costs $400 I feel that this is a good balance of money.
• Instead of rolling the dice you can pay the bank $200 to move 2 - 12 spaces. You are NOT allowed to do this on consecutive turns, and choosing a number cannot count as doubles (which allows your to roll again)
  • This gives you a lot more opportunities to use money in creative ways and will allow you to get that monopoly you have been looking for without having to rely on chance. Also $200 should be a lot of money in the beginning and should be a huge opportunity cost. Towards the end of the game it should still be costly and not something you can do every turn. This action shouldn’t be used consecutive turns because it can become too powerful, so a max of every other turn seems balanced.
• You can trade, buy houses, sell houses, mortgage, etc. only on your turn after your dice roll and paying rent, which will keep trading transactions short
  • I feel trading is a core part of Monopoly but you should only trade on your turn. Also if you land on another player’s property and have to pay them rent you cannot sell anything you need to have cash on hand. This will force people to have some reserve of cash and hopefully speed up the game a little.
• Selling houses and hotels are not allowed
  • Houses and hotels are a big investment but their main function is to extract wealth from others. It takes a long time and seem contrary to their intended purpose to sell them so I dont think you should be allowed to do it. Buying houses and hotels should be a risky investment, one you have to live with.
• If you mortgage a property and another player lands on it, they have the option to buy it from you for the mortgage price, they still have to pay to have it un-mortgaged from the bank
  • There should be some risk to mortgaging your property aside from just not collecting rent. Also it allows others to get that monopoly if they force you to mortgage your property.
• The game ends after a single player has gone around the board 10 times, count up all of the players money and add it to the property value, the player with the most value wins
  • I dont want games to last forever. It is annoying to have to count up money but also have to calculate and add up all cash and property mortgage value. However that seems better than slowly allowing people to go bankrupt, dwindling the amount players have to work with, and spending hours on a single game.
• No collecting rent in jail
  • Just a small tweak to make jail worse in the end game
• On your first time around the board, if you land on another player’s property you do not have to pay rent and you can roll the dice again
  • This will give the first player a much smaller advantage and doesn’t crush your chances if you get unlucky and continually land on other people’s property. This seems especially useful in a six player game when you go last.

I did play a homebrewed version with my wife and the game did feel better after using some of the tweaks above -still- not amazing but much better. I think it could be perfected more but I can only play Monopoly so many times before I long for a different game like Agricola, Puerto Rico, or the like.