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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly. There are strategies to almost surely win but it makes the game boring and even annoying for everyone involved. So we usually added rules to prevent those strategies. If someone 'is better at that' it means he/she is a boring/non-fun player and no-one will play anymore after 1-2 games. In general; there are a lot of games really not fun at all for people who always want to win no matter what.

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I thought the point of Monopoly is to learn that monopolies are not fun, or fair

and interestingly enough, the inventor of the original Monopoly (Elizabeth Magie and "The Landlord's Game") created an alternative rule set called "Prosperity" that was intended to balance out the Matthew effect [1] but this was left out of Monopoly when it was allegedly poached from Magie's game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

The point of Monopoly is to make money for the owner of the trademark, and condition people to buy games based on inertia, advertising, and nostalgia rather than complexity, balance, or fun.

Fortunately we have a plethora of much better games now. I think monopoly will be a quirk of history soon. How many boomers have never played monopoly (and hopefully never will) because they have so many other games to play.

I don't understand. Boomers? People born between 1946 and 1964? I think most Boomers in North America and Europe have played Monopoly at least once. "Monopoly has been translated into 47 languages. It's played in 114 countries. It's sold more than 275 million copies. Hasbro prints $30 billion in Monopoly money each year, and well more than $3 trillion has been printed since 1935." -CNN https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/19/living/feat-monopoly-80th-ann...

Boomers? Did you mean millennials?

Was that an autocorrect from "zoomers" to "boomers"?

> And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly.

Monopoly is a bad game though. Play Acquire instead.

I am not like some kind of avid Monopoly player; I play a game on a dead rainy sunday afternoon at family gatherings. They won't have Acquire etc. They have scrabble, monopoly and a bunch of other older but very well known games.

I'm curious to learn more about those monopoly strategies and rules against them.

I think there are times for both kind of play. It's annoying when people only play one kind of way. It's like beating you is all that matters to them.

I have not played it with only adults for a long time, only with (young) children mixed and parents/family; there are a lot of examples to ruin the game (for me and kids and most adults except 'the winners' (woohoo! I beat some kids at a boardgame!)); one of them (one of the most annoying imho) being that if you pick up (at least) 1 of every monopoly and then refuse to trade/sell unless it's for crazy amounts. So no-one can have a monopoly; then it's just a tiresome waiting game, so people (esp kids, but me too as i'm bored already thinking about it) are going to forfeit or will just buy stuff at stupid prices hoping to get lucky (which they won't usually). You don't need to do that and you can just 'sit it out' but it ruins the game element completely. Ofcourse this requires luck with the dice but more often than not, the monopolies are quite evenly distributed in my experience. It depends what you get, but if you have this hand, then you will probably win by tiring everyone else out (especially because really no-one else cares about winning; we were just wanting to have fun).

> It's like beating you is all that matters to them

It does, which is weird considering this is not actually real life or real money; it's (can be anyway) a nice boardgame on a rainy sunday.

We had a house rule where no trading could happen until all the properties were owned by someone. Created a frenzy and lots of excitement waiting for the last one to be rolled on.

Most people mess up Monopoly in two ways:

* Common house rules prolong the game. Don't use house rules.

* People forget the rule that when someone lands on an unowned property and doesn't buy it, the bank auctions it off.

A game of monopoly should take about an hour. It's almost always those exact house rules that people create that make the game drag.

I find scrabble that way too. When people start blocking good letters just so that you don't use them, it starts to lose it's appeal.

This also happens with Ticket to Ride. But fortunately, most people I've played with, don't intentionally block routes they don't need at all

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