Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Whenever you land on an unowned property you may buy that property from the Bank at its printed price. You receive the Title Deed card showing ownership. Place the title deed card face up in front of you. If you do not wish to buy the property, the Bank sells it at through an auction to the highest bidder. The high bidder pays the Bank the amount of the bid in cash and receives the Title Deed card for that property." - http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm#buyingproper...

Player 1 lands on two properties, but this auction does not occur.

This can easily be solved by simply saying "'no auction' house rule". Few people actually honor this rule anyhow. I don't object, I don't think it's a very good rule either. (Then again, I don't think it's a very good game, so my opinion may be suspect.) The biggest problem is the word "auction" is underspecified; it could mean many things and you'll spend more time arguing over it than playing if you try to take this seriously.

I have found it remarkable how few people play by the actual rules, and how few people realize they are not playing by the actual rules. Including some people who claim to hate the game because they are not following the rules. (Often this revolves around not using timers which the rules will often explicitly mention; my version of Scrabble does, for instance, though the online rules I find do not.)

Yeah, I noticed the lack of auction, too, since I always play with auction rules. (As well as the non-official (?) house rule of paying taxes/chance/community chest amounts to the "pot" in the middle, with whomever landing on Free Parking taking the amount.) While auction rules aren't that useful with 2 people, I think it's fun to have them with 3 or more.

Since you don't like Monopoly, I assume you wouldn't like Monopoly-Risk? I've yet to get someone to agree to play that with me, though I'm still not sure I want to. It's just like regular Risk, but battles are decided by games of Monopoly instead of dice rolls.

Have you ever played a game of Monopoly-Risk? It sounds like it would take days of real-time play.

Easily fixed: the auction does occur, but no one bids on the properties.

I have seen it argued that sells at auction does not admit the possibility of not selling it. I do not remember if that was tournament rules or not. You can then buy it for a dollar, if you like, it won't change the results.

If you're going to rules lawyer, you gotta do it all proper like.

I'm not arguing this will necessarily make the game any longer, I'm just saying this isn't a by-the-actual-rules game. It shares this in common with probably 99%+ of all games of Monopoly that are played.

It is not uncommon for games to fail to cover cases in the rules, such as nobody even bidding a dollar for property in Monopoly. Jenga sort of crashes if you get the game into a state where there are no more levels with removable pieces, or at least strictly read mandates that the next person to move is a loser, which is an undesirable outcome.

Using an auction maybe you could make the game shorter by getting player 2 to buy properties, thus loosing money, so when he lands on something player 1 buys she has none left.

Or the auction does occur, someone bids all of their money, and the next turn that person goes bankrupt (making the game take, what, 5 seconds?)

Or the bid goes through with $1.

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