I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I certainly always feel like I deserve to have won.
> If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too.
https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...
Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.
From the point of an individual actor, I agree: it's always correct to maximize your agency, knowing full-well that there are factors outside your control that might unfairly sink you (or, unfairly cause someone to out-compete you despite shortcomings).
That in no way contradicts the idea that there may be ecosystemic benefits to providing resources to maximize the odds of success. To use a trivial example: if I'm a hardware vendor hosting an app store, the success of each app will be a blend of skill and luck. But if I provide tools like ratings, analytics, and discoverability, I can potentially increase the odds that meritocratic apps succeed. (Take it as read that poor interventions could also make this go the other direction.)
One curious quirk is that in the space of game design, this luck/skill dichotomy is flipped on its head, and turned into an explicit goal: that a satisfying game should permit the winner to believe they won on skill, while the loser believes they lost on luck. There's a great talk from MtG creator Richard Garfield on the subject [0]; I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions what inferences we should draw from this in the "game" of market competition. :)
“Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.”
When in reality, it’s luck and effort that matter. You can’t control the luck part, but you can control the effort part.
It's similar to health - a great deal of how healthy you are has to do with luck (e.g. genetics). If someone said "the health game is rigged so there is no use in trying to be healthy" we'd think they were nuts.
I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion from the story, it's setting up a situation that is pure luck, and asserting that people will take credit for their luck. It's not saying that everything in the real world is actually luck.
The game isn't just who can get a monopoly first, but who can also improve it the fastest. In my experience, players often overvalue the expensive properties due to maximum rent but don't take into account the capital and therefore time required to improve them.
Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)
Playing with common house rules tends to remove elements of strategy.
Not unlike real life.
Not necessarily. The games rules include an auction that is frequently removed in house rules. What's supposed to happen is if the player who lands on the space (Player A) doesn't buy it from the bank, the property is auctioned to all players.
Maybe no one owns Boardwalk yet, and Player A doesn't want to try and get the Park Place/Boardwalk monopoly. Or maybe Boardwalk is owned by Player B but Player B doesn't have any cash, so Player A thinks they can block the monopoly while paying less to the bank. Or maybe Player B does have the cash but Player A knows that B is desperate for the monopoly, so they want to drive the price up and force them to pay more.
There's more to than just rolling dice and landing on spaces.
>there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it).
Buying every property you land on immediately from the bank for listed price is not an optimal strategy.
1. Roll dice.
2. Buy whatever you land on.
3. When everything is bought, make a few deals with other players. This takes 30 seconds and is the only skill involved in the game.
4. Roll dice until game ends.
It's 99 percent luck.
An even better calculation would be how much it's worth to each player based on what they already have as well!
That might not happen every game but it is advantageous to get a monopoly sooner rather than later. Like I said earlier you can also factor in how much money your opponents have when deciding whether to go to auction or pay list price. If everyone is cash poor that opens up opportunities for you to get deeds for low cost, increasing the properties future rate of return.
The randomness in the game means you can't just pick one optimal strategy and apply it to every game and every opponent. And if your opponents change strategy (or your opponents change), you need to adapt your strategy to accommodate for that as well.
edit: As far as the math goes, here's one such article that goes over it: https://ideas.ted.com/heres-how-to-win-at-monopoly-according...
another edit: There's also a limited amount of houses/hotels the bank has, so there's strategy around getting houses first and leaving your opponents unable to build up their monopolies (another frequent house rule is that there unlimited houses too buy from the bank). If multiple players are trying to buy houses at once and there's not enough, the houses are auctioned again to the highest bidder (hello capitalism housing shortages).
You can also sell properties you own, or choose to stay in jail (frequent house rule is that you can't collect money while in jail, but this isn't an official rule).
I think you're underestimating the complexity of your proposed calculation, and think is simply boils down to calculating how often particular spaces are landed on times the amount paid when they are landed on. I mean, it does, but the second part is not so simple.
What you have is a fairly complex strategy game, and the rest is pure luck (called dice.)
edit: I'd really be interested in seeing what you come up with (or imo, at what point you'd bail out) if you were to attempt to solve Monopoly. I'm at pessimizer@yahoo.com
The way to win monopoly is in trading cards to gain monopolies. The winner is almost always the person who makes the most deals.
A player can win the game simple by making the most deals with other players, even if they are a loser in every single one of those deals.
It's far more a lesson on negotiations and trading - ie. business lessons, not capitalism lessons.