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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Usually people don't pass up the chance to buy property though. It's not that there's a house rule against the auction, it just never comes up unless you have someone who is already losing badly that lands on a space that has somehow not already been snapped up.

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Right, that goes back to my original comment:

>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.

Other than maybe the utilities, when is it not advantageous to buy a property you land on? Until an opposing monopoly exists, there is a net positive value to each turn, so you have plenty of resources and if all you do is deny the property to someone else, you essentially get it at 50% discount by mortgaging it.

You always buy everything. I can't believe people are arguing about it. Here is the game:

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.

To clarify, if you send a property to auction you can still bid on it. You can even use this technique to over extend a competitor.

On the flipside of over-extending, last time my family played we included auctioning. Didn't take long for my brother to realize he could send it to auction, bid $1 (which no one challenged because we were focused on the partially-completed colors we had), and immediately mortgage it for free money to buy houses on the properties he did care about.

That's genius!

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