Automated Monopoly hasn't figured out that people just don't like Monopoly

>Approach your average American and say you enjoy board games. I guarantee you, nine times out of ten, you’ll get a response something like: “You mean like Monopoly?” (And the other ten percent will challenge you to a game of Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne.)

He's got this wrong by at least two orders of magnitude. I can find 1000 people who LOVE Monopoly before one that has even heard of Carcassone.

It's a Mensa/BoardGameGeek delusion that people are as disgusted with games of chance as they are. People LOVE dice. Remember, people LOVE casinos. People may not love being dominated during an entire game, but people sure love dominating for an entire game, and if you play enough games, you get your turn. And contrary to popular Mensa/BGG belief, more people have completed a dozen games of Monopoly than have ever seen the front of a Settlers box.

It's not, unless you ruin the game with the $500 every time you land on Free Parking rule.

A great way to speed things up is to use calculators. Instead of paper money changing hands, we'll typically give each player a pocket calculator to add and subtract from their cash total.

Since out-bidding for properties seems to aggressive and likely to lead to family fallouts, that part just gets dropped from the game. This makes it more boring and take much longer to finish.

I wonder how that works out with an automated version. Does it have rule variants built-in?

Though there is a train of thought that it's lack of enjoyment is the best thing about it:

http://www.downtimetown.com/2009/06/06/defending-monopoly/

That quirk aside, it's a stupid game. It communicates that wealth is a zero-sum game, and encourages a mindset whereby ideas about wealth are oriented around ownership of real-estate. These are both brain viruses in the anglosphere, although causation is unclear. And it's laborious.

A better wealth game is Pit/Billionaire. It's zero-sum, but that reflects the reality of the setting (commodity trading) and has interesting social dynamics. Consider this valid tactic: make a deal with someone not to pass taxman across, and you both aim to stick with that principle over several rounds.

Settlers is great because when played between nice people or with children, it can be played as a non-zero sum game that everyone gets something out of.

Scotland Yard has a better take on central London geography, and has team dynamics, lateral thinking and requires risk judgements. Flexible on the number of people you have to play.

The likes of Monopoly give board games a bad name. There's other awful mainstream board games though - I thought of Ludo.

The average game store in the U.S. is a Toyrsus. Toysrus carries dozens of board games from exactly two different companies: Hasbro and Mattel. Toyrsus carries basically zero board games from any other companies. Hasbro and Mattel have figured out that if you offer parents the same games they knew as a kid, they'll buy them; and if you offer games with the same characters as TV shows, the kids will want them. And so that is what is in the stores.

There are a tremendous number of good board games in the world. These are not offered for sale at Toysrus, and therefore do not have any significant sales in the USA.

The existence of Monopoly and the fact that this crummy game continues to be offered for sale is a demonstration of the power of monopoly in the board games industry.

In retrospect I know why: it has a self-enforcing feedback loop that leads to the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. Thus the outcome of the game is often determined very early, but the game still drags on for long, being not much fun for most players.

The same feedback loop can be found in "The Settlers of Catan", though less (the poor don't get poorer, it's just that the rich grow ever faster). I liked it too, but it's not fun for too long.

An example where it's done differently is Dominion, where resources for development and resources for winning are distinct, but mixed into the same heap. During your turn you take a fixed number of cards from that heap, so if you have many winning resources, your progress actually slows down.

And of course there are also lots of games where the current position doesn't really affect your chances to progress. In the long run I like those (and the ones with negative feedback loops) better than the ones with positive feedback loops.

  1 hour of randomly acquiring properties.
  30 seconds of trading between other players.
  4 hours of randomly resolving the winner with odds established by the last steps.

The reason that nobody ever finishes is that they're far too nice. You're supposed to be destroying everyone, not floating them loans to keep them in the game. Every time I play a 'casual' game, that kind of junk happens, and it's incredibly dumb.

I've got into it a few times with family but been left frustrated when it seems as if you can play perfectly and still lose regularly.

Games we tend to like: those where everyone is actively playing most of the time: Boggle, Scategories, Pictionary, poker, chess.

Games we tend to dislike: those where 1 or 2 people are actively playing and everyone else is doing nothing: Monopoly, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, Dominos.

It feels like Monopoly could be a better game if only it had better rules. There should definitely be a trading and negotiation phase in there, and some way for players to stop a player who's getting too far ahead.

Maybe a decent, well-known, alternate set of rules for Monopoly would make all of those monopoly sets out there less useless.

For those that don't know.

I recently played a few games of U-Build Monopoly which despite its abundance of board gimmicks is a great improvement because of the abundance of complex strategic options at every turn and the flexibility of sound short game options.

http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-18361-U-Build-Monopoly/dp/B0036...

Could anyone name a few?

I would highly recommend the following over Monopoly: Carcassonne, Medici, Taj Mahal, Tigris and Euphrates, Mensa Connection, The Confrontation, Civilisation, Age of Steam, Dampfross (Railway Rivals), The Lord of the Rings board game.

While the story is disappearing into time, and is perhaps an over-egged story of folk woman vs. corporate greed; there is a marked similarity between Elizabeth Maggie's "The Landlord Game" and what became Monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlords_Game (it appears an apostrophe is parsed out... it should be The_Landlord's_Game).

Its intent was to demonstrate how monopolies grow, and how once they exist they are hard to overcome. I.e. not fun. Which might explain something about Monopoly today :)

There's more at http://www.antimonopoly.com/original_boardgame.html

As for Monopoly = Ubiquity, it's probably the first game that comes to mind. But in the past 3 years I've played plenty of others (Cranium, Risk, Balderdash, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble) in social settings and had lots of fun. Batteries not required.

The point of Automated Monopoly is probably all the free media coverage Monopoly gets as a result.