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Comment by philsnow | Hacker News Reader

Consider Monopoly: it has an elimination mechanic but it's almost a mercy, because quite often in games you know from a few minutes in that you're not going to win. I'm thinking of race for the galaxy here: whoever's engine gets started first pretty much walks away with the game, but you still have to play twenty more minutes of the game.

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The rubber band mechanism in RftG that gives the runners-up a chance to win is that once someone's "engine has started", everyone around the table is going to have a pretty good idea of the phases that someone is going to play. Then you can use those and your own phases to effectively get more actions out of a round. The lead player is still the one expected to win, but it's not usually a done deal by any stretch.

How much RftG have you played?

The dynamic you describe is my experience in approximately 20% of 4 player games, maybe 30% of 2 player games.

Really skilled Race players see a wide variety of paths to victory in my experience, so if someone has a lead on one strategy, you pursue a different strategy and it’s not usually not obvious who will win.

Have you played the latest Star Wars monopoly? It's not simply a reskin - the same basic rules apply but there is a team mechanic (players are on the light side or dark side, and their team must win in order for the player to win) as well as faster gameplay, actions that can be taken during any players turn, and more. It's also much faster - a complete game with four people takes an hour.

A standard game of monopoly, When played according to the official rules, Takes around 45 minutes. Most people introduce a bunch of house rules which prevent money from draining from the economy, making the game last forever.

The two biggest offenders: (1) Money for free parking (sometimes it's a flat $500 or whatever was collected in taxes), and (2) not forcing an auction every time a player declines to buy property.

The first one makes everyone rich and causes rents just go back and forth for ages. The second one makes it take much longer to get monopolies on property groups.

Even without house rules, it depends on the way people play. In my family, monopoly is played in a very anti-social way, where the main goal seems to be preventing other's victory or advantage.

The strategy everybody follows is basically "buy everything you can, and decline all bad trades". Buy everything, of course, to prevent others from making full property groups. Since there is no such thing as an equal trade, no trades are made.

As you can imagine, since nobody has full property groups, the game takes forever, it's terribly boring, and pretty much boils down to luck.

The inability to get an equal trade shouldn’t stop you from trading anyways, as it misses that there is huge relative advantage of having a monopoly, even if it means you have to give someone else a “better” monopoly.

This is because if two players complete two monopolies first, they are basically guaranteed to be among the final two at a 4+ person table, as their early monopolies will quickly drain the other two or more players who refuse to make these trades and are therefore wasting time walking around, during which they’ll grow weaker and weaker due to your monopolies.

Knowing this, it almost doesn’t matter if the trade is equal, so long as you’re trading for a post-jail monopoly (pre-jail tends to be low value), because the winner, once you and your opponent have your improvements, will be decided by chance, as one of the two monopolists will bankrupt one of the other, more behind players first, and then take all their money and property, almost certainly netting themselves several more monopolies and funds for improvements.

House rules is one thing. I know from experience its usually people trying to keep everyone in the game as long as possible

Games that lack meaningful player interaction generally struggle to create interesting rubber-banding. It's a very tricky thing to get right (king-making in 3+ player games is a huge problem that tends to tug against allowing strong player interactions - consider 2-player chess vs. 4-player chess)

Comparing RFTG to Monopoly made me barf up a little, frankly.

Monopoly isn't even a bad game if you do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822820

Somehow a particular set of house rules got popular enough to make everyone hate monopoly. It turns a game of high stakes, high commitment resource scuffling, into a game where you either get knocked out fast or are given enough free assets that you can only lose in the slowest, most agonizing way possible.

It's kind of funny how a game designed to heavily favor aggression to make a point had that entire point negated by house rules.

People feel the need to introduce a social safety net into a game of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism. Maybe the game made its point after all.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/02/introducing-moder...

An interesting read

I thought you were going to say its a mercy because of how horrible it is to play Monopoly in the first place :)

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