Hacker News Reader

Comment by burgerbrain | Hacker News Reader

I've got to say, I find even Monopoly to be a terrible game. My strategy for the game can be summed up as: "buy the property if I can, otherwise pay rent if I have to".

I almost never stray from that strategy, and even when I do, it's not like those exceptions make the game any more interesting.

View on HN

Oh?

Mine, at least until people cotton onto it, is to be a "Slum Landlord." I buy and trade for the cheapest sets I can find, and then I put four houses on each property. Remember, they're slums, so you don't expect hotels. If I can corner the market on houses[1], no matter what the other players do, they can't bankrupt me with rents because they can't improve their properties.

This doesn't work in a game where people ignore the housing shortage rule, of course. But If you toss that rule out, I don't think you're playing Monopoly any more.

[1]: There are 32 houses, so if you own 21 houses, it is impossible for anyone else to upgrade a three property group to hotels. If you own 25 houses, no other player can upgrade any group. It's fairly easy for two players to control the property market and kill the other players off.

The limitation on housing is the key to the game's structure. Most people don't seem to play it this way (letting players build hotels if they have the money, regardless of the number of actual plastic houses remaining), and it screws the game up. Not to mention house rules like "free parking" artificially adding money to the game.

I think they play it that way because the houses always get lost, so you never know how many there really are supposed to be. So you use stand-in pieces, with no limit.

Well, every set I've ever had came with extras, and the number you're supposed to use is printed right there in the instructions.

Assuming you didn't loose the instructions too......

Monopoly's instructions are printed on cardboard and are part of the box. Hard to lose unless you are loose with that sort of thing.

Not in mine. Mine came on a tiny booklet.

If you lose the instructions then the odds are there are many other rules you're not following.

Whenever I play people almost never want to trade with me, especially for a set.

When I read your comment I started tinking about Settlers of Catan. I think SoC is more interesting than Monopoly, but there is still way too much luck involved for my taste. I have been trying to come up with a way to take the luck out of SoC, but haven't come up with a good way yet. Of course, one might need to stray quite a bit from the original design. Any ideas?

Some of these might help:

http://boardgamegeek.com/forum/2017/the-settlers-of-catan/va...

Full disclosure: I abhor Monopoly.

The "fun" part of Monopoly is trading with other players. It's actually a pretty acceptable game as far as diplomacy goes. The worst problem with the game is that it very quickly devolves into a situation where two players have a decent chance to win, everyone else is royally screwed, and the game still has about an hour to go. Also, it's terribly reliant on luck: while it is possible to actually be good at Monopoly(i.e. there are strategies and skills that will seriously increase your chances of winning), a few bad rolls and/or a player adamant about not selling X property or trading Y player (this happens a lot IME) can leave you completely out of the game.

> it very quickly devolves into a situation where two players have a decent chance to win, everyone else is royally screwed, and the game still has about an hour to go.

In that situation you can play the two big players off against each other. Offer a deal with Big Player 1 that benefits you (e.g. allowing you to get a group) and tell him that if he refuses, you'll sell all your assets to Big Player 2 for $1.

Whenever some player doesn't buy a property and it goes up for auction, the players' bids are interestingly strategic. The optimal strategy at that point is not to "buy the property if you can", at least in a game of more than two players — two players using that strategy will bankrupt each other quickly, paying $3000 for Vermont Avenue and the like, and someone else will win. (It's probably not the optimal strategy in a two-player game either, but that's not as obvious.)

If the other players will bid less than the sticker price, then it's a better strategy to decline the sticker price and pick the property up in the ensuing auction. Under some circumstances (e.g. all the other players are broke) you can pick it up for a song in this case.

For those who are fuzzy on the rules: http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm

Are you sure you aren't thinking about the children's variant of Monopoly?

Monopoly proper is all about trading, which is in turn all about risk management, probabilities, and leveraging your holdings. If your strategy for Monopoly can be summed up as "buy the property if I can, otherwise pay rent if I have to", you aren't actually playing the game.

You can have pretty interesting Monopoly games. Mine usually end up with interplayer corporations, loans for building and investing, bailouts, mergers and similar.

At this point you aren't really playing Monopoly anymore. You've developed your own game using the Monopoly pieces.

As long as everyone plays by the game rules, any out-of-game interactions (such as agreeing to pool money and property) don't mean you're not playing monopoly any more.

A suggestion to you and anyone else who doesn't like Monopoly - given the chance, try the video game versions of it. The game progresses much faster, the standard rules are enforced, and you'll start seeing the strategy of the game peeking through behind the monotony of dice roles and rent payments.

It's all about getting monopolies, and preventing other players from doing so. Luck is still part of the game, but certain parts of the game (go to jail, advance to nearest unsold property/boardwalk) give weight to certain parts of the board.

In our household, we like to play with the speed die, which adds an additional strategy that I like: It forces players to advance to the nearest unsold property, or if all are sold, it advances the players to the nearest unmortgaged property.

To prove your point, you can buy or trade for one of each color property. Then announce "I refuse to grant any monopolies ever, it is highly unlikely this game will end in finite time" These kind of things are not possible in a modern, well-designed game.

You are not playing optimally. Monopoly is far from perfect, but there is some more depth than that.

Here's two questions: - How many houses is optimal for most sets? - Would you rather have both utilities or two railroads?

That's the point though; you don't have to play optimally, doing so doesn't really make the game any more interesting.

I know what you mean. It doesn't get interesting until you start making deals and trades with the other players, especially when everyone agrees to relax the rules a little. The plotting starts to get messy as you try to figure out who is getting screwed worse in a given deal, or when you have to work out three-way trades.

I find a much better game if you're into "deals" is Risk. You know you've had fun when the cleanup involves finding all the pieces that were put on ballistic paths in the final forfeit gesture of the game... good times.

Risk is incredibly frustrating, though. I cannot tell you how many times 18-man armies have been mowed down by lone men

Are you playing the Spartan version of Risk, by any chance?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com