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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda surprised by all the hate on Monopoly.

It's a great game for learning. It teaches you to take risks early and slowly lower your risk tolerance over time to let your existing assets appreciate. It teaches you that the best values are at the extremes of real estate: you want to be either a luxury condo owner or a slum lord. It teaches you that capitalism isn't fair, because good strategy and hard work don't pay off if you don't get lucky. Come to think of it, maybe that last one is why HN doesn't like it. ;P

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Monopoly poisoned the expectations of generations of people about what a board game is. It's terrible not just because it's a bad game, but because it keeps people out of the hobby.

Most people play a modified version of the game, without the auctioning of property, and with additional money put into the game when landing on Free Parking. Most also play they game as children.

Without auctioning, and with the money from Free Parking, the game lasts longer, and is frustrating for the losing players -- particularly for children, who have to tolerate the gloating of the winning child.

It might be educational, but that doesn't make it fun.

IMO the version on the Nintendo Entertainment System (yes, the really old Nintendo) is the best Monopoly, because it plays by vanilla rules and takes care of all the bookkeeping, auction-running, and setup for you. Plays fast. Few enough buttons even non-gamers or kids new to gaming can keep up.

Plus I think you can play it multiplayer online with modern emulators, which is relevant to the current situation.

I wouldn't consider entirely replacing most board games with a video game version but for Monopoly I'd make an exception. Play the one on the NES.

[EDIT] a crucial factor might be that there's no hidden or secret information in Monopoly, so it converts to all-playing-on-one-screen better than a lot of board games would.

"It teaches you that the best values are at the extremes of real estate: you want to be either a luxury condo owner or a slum lord.”

I thought the best properties in Monopoly where the opposite of this? It's my understanding that the best properties in Monopoly are orange followed by green then either red or yellow. Mostly the middle of the road properties. Orange is the best because it's approximately a 7 roll away from jail.

You need to factor in frequency of landing and cost to build. Orange is in the sweetspot. IIRC, red gets landed on more often, but the extra $50/house makes it tough to build up. Green is crap on both accounts. Pink is less frequent but cheap to build. Light blue and purple are only good if you monopolize early and can drive a building shortage (get ready to be yelled at by anyone not intimately familiar with the rules). Boardwalk is mostly useful to tilt the balance in your favor on long games. (as you pass go and collect chance cards, $ in circulation go up over time, so it gets harder to bankrupt people)

The best property is the cheapest group of three you can acquire the quickest based on the rolls in your particular game, so you can buy up houses ASAP and lock up the housing stock for the rest of the game, thereby ensuring you will win, albeit very slowly.

Once you get 6 properties with 4 houses each, you control 75% of all houses.

This is especially true if you play strictly by the rules where you cannot buy a hotel without first having four houses - it's then impossible for anyone to surpass your edge by skipping straight to hotel.

It doesn't matter which group of three, so long as it's cheap enough to build out all the houses quickly.

But yes, orange is best because of jail

That's a pretty good hypothesis. I honestly don't know.

The reason I've preferred purple and (dark) blue is that they only require two properties to have a monopoly, so you can get monopolies sooner. It might be confirmation bias on my part, but my memory is that when I get these monopolies early it often prevents people from developing the orange properties. But like I said, I honestly don't know.

You're probably right that in the long run the orange properties would pay off the most based on being ~7 away from jail, but I wonder if games play out long enough for that to outweigh the effects of getting monopolies early.

I suspect that it depends on the play style of your opponents. A lot of people are too hesitant to trade in order to gain monopolies for multiple people early on. I've seen it play out this way with multiple parties not having monopoly and one party having one on Blue (or even purple in one case) and absolutely refusing to trade out of fear that it might help someone else.

The results are inevitable at that point.

We always played with a house rule that trades are not allowed until all properties have been purchased.

The best properties are the cheapest (brown and teal, then purple or orange). Houses are cheap, buy until there are no more left (don't buy hotels). You now have the Monopoly of houses. Sit back and collect money.

yes

> Come to think of it, maybe that last one is why HN doesn't like it. ;P

It’s demonstrably clear that the SV startup scene is a meritocracy where the best ideas get funded. Just ask Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes ;)

Monopoly taught me to never play Monopoly, so I guess I got something valuable out of it.

The biggest problem for me is that everyone plays by their own house rules.

^this shouldn't be downvoted

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