The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly (2010)

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158 pointsksangeelee142 comments

If you drop some presumptions about the players you can go even faster--

Player 1: Roll a 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11 or 12. Don't purchase, so it goes to auction. In auction player 2 buys for 100% of their cash.

Player 2: Rolls a 4, lands on income tax. Game over.

You’d be surprised how few people know about the rule for auctioning property that is not purchased. I’m guessing most people learned to play without reading the actual rules. It’s just passed down by copying the actions of your older siblings.

Exactly, even this run is using house rules, as the official rules state that you are required to own all properties of the same colour before building, and also that houses must be built evenly on each property.

this isn't true about either the blog post (buys boardwalk and park place, purchases houses evenly on this complete property group) or the comment above (no houses or hotels are involved)

You are correct, I guess my reading comprehension isn't what it used to be. I thought I saw an error and got blinded by the rush of posting a correction.

The blog buys both BW and PP, and buys houses evenly.

As someone's thats read the many country's and state's constitutions, all major holy books and heavily weighted side-books for different sects

Its surprising I haven't thought to read the rules for Monopoly yet

Could be an onion headline. Constitutional lawyer has never read the Monopoly(R) official rules.

I bet you haven't read the UK constitution.

Because it isnt a single document

> I’m guessing most people learned to play without reading the actual rules.

Wait, Monopoly has rules?

Or, due to how tedious the game can sometimes be people ignore it because it’s too mouth work.

> due to how tedious the game can sometimes be people ignore it because it’s too [much] work.

The view that the game is tedious is directly caused by not reading the rules.

Monopoly is in an odd position where everyone is convinced they know what it's like, and yet nobody knows how to play it. Turns out, if you play it according to the rules, it is not at all similar to the version with rules you made up.

It still is not fun as a game though.

- For people uncomfortable with cut throat competition, this game is winner take all.

- For competitive people, victory is 90% luck and therefore unsatisfying.

- The game is decided halfway through the game time, the rest is the inevitable victory of the leading player.

I've played the game a number of times as a deployed troop just for something to pass the time which can also be mildly entertaining for some people.

Our customized house rules are quite fun and move the game along faster as well:

* Eight players setup as four joint ventures.

* Joint ventures share cash and properties, but have two separate tokens on the board.

* No rent collection while in jail to dissuade camping out.

The end game becomes tense as your team has back to back rolls.

So the venture can't collect money if either partner is in jail?

Yes. Legal fees tend to scale to what ever you can afford so it seemed like a fair rule.

Seems like an accurate emulation of the real capitalism, as intended by the game creator.

The worst thing is it is a knock-out format, which is inherently anti-social.

I think the typical house rules (no auctions, cash on free parking) are to make the game more tolerable for younger children.

Auctions are complicated, and a child with little money is angered when their sibling gets the property they landed on for a discount.

Income tax is tough, but there's a chance of getting it back, so please pay Billy.

I didn't! And it's interesting I just read the 1st player who declines to buy can participate in the auction.

How often would an opponent be willing to pay more than list price? I guess to secure like the 2nd blue property. Otherwise it seems like should always just decline to buy and hope for good auction outcome.

And if your opponent good to auction too. Though maybe mortgaging properties if you have a good opportunity is worth it.

What other rules make the game more interesting/complex that the 'young kid' version might not know?

Often the “lesser” properties go to auction and it can be worth trying to get them for less than the mortgage value.

If you land on a high-value property you want to buy it outright mainly to deny the monopoly possibilities to others (high value being the orange, etc).

You don't get any reward for landing on "free parking.". Rewards for landing on that spot are a common house rule that makes the game worse; injecting money into the game slows it down greatly.

skipping auctions, and having money in free parking are why most people think monopoly takes a long time to play. It's like playing musical chairs but not removing any.

In part, but it still takes a while to play, and the outcome is obvious long before the end, leading to an anti-climatic slog at the end. This happens even if you play by all the rules.

"I got 6 hotels and half your properties are mortgaged. Let's play for another 15 turns until you happen to land on my hotel, then I will win."

I have often had uncertain outcomes at the end. For example, I had orange and red Monopoly with houses; the only other Monopoly with houses was green. Advantage was clearly to me. The third opponent bankrupted on green, I got the real estate tax card, forcing me to sell three houses right before my lone remaining opponent ran my gauntlet, then I hit green, jail, green again.

Sure, but thats like an extra 25 minutes instead of an extra 4 hours.

My wife and I decided out of the blue to play monopoly today. As it had been so long I had to read the instructions and found that out. We were both quite surprised!

Well played! And this strategy is actually easy to execute.

The probability for executing this strategy is: P(3)+P(5)+P(6)+P(8)+P(9)+P(11)+P(12) * P(4).

Plug in the numbers from https://statweb.stanford.edu/~susan/courses/s60/split/node65...

(0.0556+0.1111+0.1389+0.1389+0.1111+0.0556+0.278)*0.0833 = 0.07407036

So 7.4%.

Times the probability that player 2 decides to bid all of their cash for a single property…

I could see my kids easily getting into a bidding war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

https://freakonomics.com/2008/12/16/an-all-pay-auction/

You don’t even need that second roll. If, in that auction, a player bids more than the cash they have, they go bankrupt immediately (https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/monins.pdf doesn’t say such bids are disallowed, and does say “The buyer pays the Bank the amount of the bid in cash” and “You are declared bankrupt if you owe more than you can pay either to another player or to the Bank.”)

This can happen after the first player rolled a double, so the first player’s turn doesn’t even have to be over for a player to go bankrupt.

You don't need the first roll either.

At the very beginning of the game, offer your opponent $1,600 in return for a 50% stake in all the rents they collect for the rest of the game.

Your opponent accepts, and you can't pay. Game over.

These deals aren't allowed by the rules.

As far as I can tell, they aren't explicitly disallowed. The rules do disallow lending to another player:

> MISCELLANEOUS… No player may borrow from or lend money to another player. [1]

I could see two arguments: First, board games rules generally do not need to contain a list of everything not allowed. In Risk you are not allowed to gift your tanks to another power in exchange for them not attacking you. By this logic, you're right, such deals are not allowed.

On the other hand, most players I've met treat Monopoly as "anything goes" in terms of between-player business deals, so long as they are not restricted by the rules. The fact that the rules explicitly disallow lending, but not any other deals, could point to other deals being allowed.

...I expect you're right, making deals is not allowed in the rules. But disallowing them would certainly turn a dull game into an even duller game.

1. https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/monins.pdf

Any sufficiently advanced game of monopoly is a violation of SEC rules.

The PDF doesn't mention trading rules. You can refer to tournament rules or Monopoly computer games for what is or is not allowed -- and these types of trades are not allowed.

> The fact that the rules explicitly disallow lending, but not any other deals, could point to other deals being allowed.

The rules explicitly allow particular kinds of deals and not others:

    Unimproved properties, railroads and
    utilities (but not buildings) may be sold to any player as a private
    transaction for any amount the owner can get; however, no property
    can be sold to another player if buildings are standing on any
    properties of that color-group.

You don't even have to play. Just declare you win and if the other person agrees it's game over.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

This might have been the lesson the original creator had in mind, that capitalism is somehow a fool's game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game

I thought I was the only psycho that played Monopoly with ad-hoc negotiations (literally, everything is a negotiation).

You would pay 10% of your wealth for income tax, so you could always mortgage your one property and pay the 10% of the mortgage value.

Newer editions remove the 10% option

[edit] Per the Monopoly Wikia the British edition was always a fixed amount and the US edition as well since 2008.

Wait whaaaaat how come nobody told me monopoly went to flat tax!

Technically, the old system was a flat tax. The new system is a tax that's a flat fee. Flat tax almost always refers to a flat rate, not a flat fee.

whaaat? I never knew there were auctions if another player didn't purchase. does it occur when a player doesn't have the money to purchase yet too?

the fandom wikipedia page says "Interestingly, this is one of the most-often overlooked aspects of the game." ya don't say.

The problem is the auction mechanic is too complex for young kids so it rarely gets taught.

The second problem is young kids make dumb moves causing themselves to go bankrupt really quickly which causes crying/tantrums/etc so parents and older siblings do everything possible to make the game eat up as much time as possible (e.g. house rule - giving out cash on free parking)

With full auctions and adults going at it, Monopoly is brutal, mean and not really fun for kids.

As a kid I would get knocked out super quick by my uncle, who would then typically have a 6 hour non-stop Monopoly throwdown with my mother after they eliminate the casuals.

Everyone else who played would get their feelings hurt but those two were absolutely brutal with each other and loved it.

> With full auctions and adults going at it, Monopoly is brutal, mean and not really fun for kids.

Monopoly is, by design, brutal, mean, and not fun.

That it somehow became popular entertainment anyway is...well, I’m not sure what it is. But something.

That's kinda the point. It's really a game about the evils of capitalism.

If they're playing for six hours after other people have been eliminated, either they're also casuals or they have house rules that are keeping money in the economy.

> does it occur when a player doesn't have the money to purchase yet too?

It happens when the player doesn’t buy, whether by choice or lack of cash. Technically, “yet” isn’t right, though, it’s always “any more” since starting cash is (far) more than the most expensive property on the board.

I read the rules of the Swedish version again.

It's very specific in that if it isn't bought, it HAS to be auctioned and it HAS to be sold and that any amount can be bid.

A very useful thing if you know everyone else is low on cash. More than once I've landed on an expensive property I wanted, but sent it up for auction knowing that nobody else could afford to bid up to face value.

Wait the person that landed on it can also participate in the auction!?

Wwwhat I need to see experienced people playing this game by the official rules or whatever the consensus is, since official seems to change over time too

Yes, everyone can bid. You can use this to get properties for less than the mortgage value and then immediately mortgage it.

That's been the rules for decades in the British edition (my family's older copy is from the 1950s).

Wait... if you land on a property and don’t buy it it goes to auction where other players can bid (and start a bidding war)? My childhood has been shattered.

Real monopoly dissolves down to a cutthroat game of diplomacy around the auctions and trying to trade for a monopoly.

It’s brutal and not at all kid friendly unless you like making children cry.

I think the idea is that this is the shortest game where the loser makes no mistakes. The four turn game in TFA has the loser making no decisions whatsoever.

Of course it ignores the auction rule, but it could be amended to say the loser buys each auctioned property for a dollar (or whatever amount.) The only decisions the loser makes in this case are their bid prices which are irrelevant. The outcome is the same.

Edit: Actually it's a bit more complicated than this, as buying all of the auctioned properties and mortgaging them would give Player 2 enough money to afford the rent on Boardwalk. Player 1 would have to bid close to the mortgage price for each property. That way if they win the auction they can mortgage it to get their money back to afford houses, and if they lose the auction it doesn't help Player 2 afford rent on Boardwalk.

This isn't right. After turn 1, player 2 has say $200 worth of assets (depending on what they buy). They can mortgage that for $100. Then they need to pay 10% income tax on their assets ($20). No problem.

Player two declined to buy any properties.

The essence of the game is to show how important it is to be the one making up (or interpreting) the rules. Thus everyone has their own. The best rules include "take a shot whenever you roll dice, 2 if you get doubles" and "articles of clothing are negotiable instruments of exchange".

The only memories of playing monopoly I have are with family.

I hope that’s not the same for you

> The only memories of playing monopoly I have are with family.

It sounds like the GP may have played with non-family members, but not retained the memories. The Monopoly games you don't remember are the ones you really need to worry about.

My favorite monopoly games are those where the players have played together before, and agree on a set of custom rules to the game in advance, and are fast-paced. I remember having rules added like loans and interest, and effectively unlimited freedom to make deals with players. Deals logged on paper, loan interest measured in turns and percentages, so much...fun. Actual fun though.

A game like this can even go fast paced where the next player is making their turn while you're still interacting with the bank from your turn, while someone else is calculating interest.

Doesn't sound fun typing it out but it was a blast.

My favorite variation included these rules:

1 - Double 1s or double 6s: steal any property from any player. 2 - you can build on any property you own. You’re not forced to build evenly and you’re not forced to own a monopoly on that color.

A 2 player game would last an hour, maybe 2 tops. 4 player still took some time but was still fun and exciting :P

Also, with these rules the balance of the game shifted. BW/PP are good, but not the best. Utilities and railroads are pretty lame. The winning properties seemed to me to be, from best to less best: Orange, Red, Pink, Yellow, Green. Orange and red because they’re properties most likely to be landed on after leaving jail. :)

Many years ago I was at a church singles retreat, and someone suggested playing Monopoly. At 11:30 at night. With an early worship service scheduled the next morning.

A couple of people groaned about the late hour and how long the game would take.

So I suggested some simple rule changes that make for a faster game.

The pastor's daughter said "we can't do that." She pulled out the Monopoly rules, pointed to the relevant chapter and verse, and said "Look. It Is Written."

People drifted off to do other things or just call it a night.

In hindsight, maybe I should have gone along with her literal interpretation of the rules. After everyone else gave up, it would have been just her and me playing until the wee hours. That might have been nice!

So I suppose that church hews to the doctrine of "Sola monopolia"

This isn't a legal Monopoly game at all. When you land on an unowned property you have to buy it or auction it. "No action" is not a legal option.

No one is required to purchase during an auction, everyone could pass.

Simply insert in the directions in the appropriate places "...put the property up for auction and everyone passes immediately."

Well, OK, here we run into a bit of a problem, in that the rules don't actually specify how the auction is conducted, so what happens if everybody passes is kind of just undefined. What you say is one reasonable interpretation. However, there is no interpretation that leaves these games as the shortest.

What would you imagine happens if everyone passes? It would be absurd for the rules to require a player to bid who does not want to bid, particularly if they did not write that out.

Why would it be absurd for the game to require that? It could just require that the person landing on it bid $1 as penalty for landing there. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Besides, you can always immediately mortgage a property so it's always worth buying it for less than the mortgage price. The only situation I could imagine where everyone would pass is if everyone has exactly zero dollars, no houses and no unmortgaged properties, so nobody can afford to buy it for a dollar. In that extremely rare event, triggering bankruptcy of whoever landed on the property seems more reasonable to me than "nothing happens" because at least it advances the game.

No, it could require that, but it doesn't.

That's what I'm saying. If the rules don't say what happens if everyone passes, assuming that no one gets the property is a very reasonable assumption. Assuming that we're requiring people to make $1 bids, or that the landing player has a "penalty," is an unreasonable assumption if the rules don't say that explicitly.

Well, you're assuming that passing is an option. One possibility would be that if you're bidding first, since there's no prior bid to pass to, you must bid; you can bid 0, but you can't pass. The rules just say it's an auction; they don't even say that you take turns making bids (or that this occurs in the usual turn order, or who starts), rather than it being more of a free-for-all! Like I said, it's all kind of undefined.

EDIT: Actually, a better answer for how to interpret it -- all players passing is impossible, because if all but the last player passes, then the last player has won the auction (for $0) by virtue of everyone else having passed; they don't get to a chance to pass, because they win the auction before it'd ever be their turn to pass! This is actually a pretty natural intepretation and I think how some of the video game adaptations handle it.

The rules specifically say "Any player, including the one who declined the option to buy it at the printed price, may bid."

May bid. No player is required to bid.

Assuming that, while the rules don't say so explicitly, what they really mean is that the last player in the circle is forced to take the property is unreasonable. That's a fairly complicated rules. If that's what they meant, they'd have said it, not left it up to the players to work out.

Sine they didn't say it, it's much more reasonable to think that they just assumed everyone knows how an auction works in real life. No one is forced to bid on a Picasso when it goes on the block. It doesn't get foisted on the last person on the bidding bench who makes no bid.

https://www.officialgamerules.org/monopoly

If you do not wish to buy the property, the Bank sells it at through an auction to the highest bidder. The high bidder pays the Bank the amount of the bid in cash and receives the Title Deed card for that property. Any player, including the one who declined the option to buy it at the printed price, may bid. Bidding may start at any price

So in this case the highest bidder is no one. As a result, no one will get the property.

Discussed at the time:

The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly: 21 Seconds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408549 - June 2010 (26 comments)

Neat.

The longest possible game is playing with family that don’t like or don’t know the rules and like to put money on free parking.

That's when you sneeze or find some other reason to bump the table hard enough to lose the places of all of the pieces. "Ooops, I guess we'll have to pick this game up later"

Be the banker, embezzle the hell out of the bank, never worry about making rent. Eventually you’ll be discovered: “Hey! You’re cheating!”

“Huh? I thought that’s what this game was about. Y’all started it with that Free Parking nonsense.”

There is an actual official version of “Cheaters Monopoly.”

The rules are beyond convoluted, likely encouraging second derivative cheating.

What about the Lehman Brothers version instead of the one from Parker Brothers? That one has mortgage securities and toxic properties and the goal is to sell off as many properties as you can before someone calls time. The one with the least properties wins.

I (unfortunately) have a copy of that. It much more quickly results in tables being flipped; which I guess is good?

I played that version, for real. The lawyers got all the money and now everybody in the family hates each other. It took years.

For families I recommend Monopoly Deal since the games are quicker and the theme is similar.

Monopoly simulator is a fun little project. I had a very strange reason to build one once upon a time because a chef was doing a monopoly themed dinner and needed to know how much food for each square. http://blog.jdwyah.com/2013/08/the-statistics-of-monopoly-wi...

Turns out that the fastest game of monopoly is also the best

> Roll: 2-2, Lands on: Income Tax Action: Pay $200 (now has $1300), Doubles therefore rolls again

Wait, doesn’t doubles prevent the default action?

No doubles just means the player rolls again after resolving the action.

Speedrun - Monopoly 0:21 (Any%, RNG manipulation, glitchless)

Incoming complaints about how it's obviously tool-assisted

The Youtube comment are saying that this requires players to make completely irrational moves and I agree

I also agree but it’s still _possible_ in theory

The comments of the article are full of people coming up with ways to play entirely rationally and still end the game in 8 moves, they're worth reading.

There's nothing irrational about this. Choosing not to buy properties is not irrational. Choosing to buy Park Place and Boardwalk and then put houses on it as soon as possible is not irrational. In fact, my strategy when I play is to get a color set as quick as possible while saving my money by buying as few other properties as possible, then spending all that money on houses/hotels for those few properties I have.

Properties go up for auction if the player that lands on them chooses not to buy.

The losing player had the option to bid a total of $4 and get Electric company, Illinois Avenue, Pennsylvania Rail Road, and Baltic Avenue.

Mortgaging those properties would give them enough money to afford rent, and having a mortgaged property is still better than not having the property at all.

It is irrational to not bid up to the mortgage price.

The winning player can still bid to raise the cost to the losing player without winning the bid. In other words, the winning player can bid $100 for Electric Company, forcing the losing player to bid and pay $110 for Electric Company.

Right… but neither player made any bids, because doing so would make the game longer.

If we don’t care about players conspiring to shorten the game, player 2 can go bankrupt before making a move.

Player 1 lands on any property, and puts it up for auction.

Player 2 immediately bids $2000.

Player 2 wins the auction and bankrupts themselves.

It's irrational not to buy properties for less than the mortgage price M (half the sticker price). You can buy a property at auction for Y <= M and immediately mortgage it to profit M - Y.

Anyone want to roughly calculate the odds of this actually happening?

0 in practice, who decides to buy nothing? And even if player one declines to buy, player two can buy it via the auction.

Sure for Player 1, but if Player 2 reduces their cash by buying properties that still results in a loss. The premise is creating so much rent on Boardwalk that player 2 can’t afford it.

My sister often buys nothing. She has this weird idea that certain colors and utilities aren't worth buying. I beat her every time with my "buy literally everything" strategy.

She might not be wrong. Some properties are landed on more frequently than others, and some give better rents for their purchase price then others. Properties and sets don't all have the same game value.

You obviously have to balance that though, can't just buy nothing.

It's still almost always worth buying one property of each color, to prevent other players from building a group.

Remember that a property is still worth its mortgage price, so all properties should go for no less than that value at auction.

Maybe your sister doesn't like playing and/or wants the game to end quickly.

It's the other way around. I think it's the worst game in the world.

A good change in rules is prohibiting people from buying with the purchasing price - i.e. every property is sold at auction. Best to also do a single round silent auction where the winner pays second place's bid (e.g. I bid 200, you bid 100, so I get it for 100).

With these rules you will quickly establish that some properties are not worth buying. These rules also have the benefit of making games ~30 minutes long because people run out of money extremely fast.

The specific sequence of rolls has 5 doubles (which can only occur one way) and 4 unequal pairs (which can occur two ways). Each double has a 1/36 chance of happening while the unequal pairs have a 1/18 chance. So that's 1/36^5 * 1/18^4 = 1/6,347,497,291,776 or about 1.5 times ten to the minus thirteen.

It's interesting that the last four digits of the denominator of the probability of the shortest game of Monopoly are 1776. I'm sure that has some kind of cosmic significance.

Nice, thanks

And don’t forget that Player 2 most also pick an “advance to Boardwalk” card out of a shuffled deck.

And the Player 1 has to get “Bank error in your favor, Collect $200" in their first turn, otherwise they will lack $50 to buy 5 houses in turn 2 (which I assume is significant in raising rent for Boardwalk to $1400)

According to the law of cosmic improbabilities, it just has to happen in that Case.

To quote Terry Pratchett:

> Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

If we say it’s nine rolls of two dice, and the probability of getting any particular pair of numbers in each roll is 1/36 (underestimate since we sometimes only care about the sum), then getting any specified sequence would be like (1/36)^9, around 1e-14. Of course then we’d have to get the gameplay right too

I'd be interested to see / write an algorithm for this

A breadth first search?

TIL games of Monopoly have a formal ending

Very timely. I just finished a four-day game of Monopoly this afternoon, winning by having hotels on Boardwalk, Park Place and the green properties.

For once: very apt username :) And congratulations. Not sure if I would have the patience for that.

A rainy weekend with a couple young kids. I normally wouldn't either, but I remember "being them" as a kid -- asking my parents/grandparents to play Monopoly whenever possible, so I try not to resist despite the time commitment the game requires.

Check you are using proper rules. There are many house rules prolonging the game (no auction, money collected on free parking, uneven house building, limiting numbers of houses in the game, ...)

After reading the rules you can use the time they save arguing rules and why some wants to use house rules ...

Houses and hotels are limited by the official rules. There are 32 houses and 12 hotels.

The limited number of houses is part of the official rules and also a key strategy. If you get a few monopolies and build them all to four houses, you block everyone else from building houses.

That’s commitment!

I would rather drive them to the nearest board game shop, have them pick any other game :)

I should crowdfund a Candyland/Monopoly cross-over.

You most likely weren't following all the rules. Monopoly shouldn't take more than about 45 minutes of game play if you follow all the rules.

Cool. I'll let my 7 year old and 5 year old know.

You could look for a different game, which would probably be shorter, and hopefully also less frustrating.

There are plenty of lists of "board games for children" etc, but I recommend ignoring any list that promotes games with dated mechanics, like Monopoly, Battleship, Ludo. (Monopoly has a very long losing phase, when it's clear who will win but the other players must wait to be made bankrupt. Battleship is almost entirely luck-based, Ludo even more so.)

I won't assume I can give a recommendation myself, as I don't have children.

(Except I see original Azul recommended, and I like that myself. And Indian Summer. And Copenhagen. And Kingdomino. And Santorini. I'm not sure about a 5 year old playing these though.)

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/childrens-products/board-ga... maybe, though I haven't heard of any of them (and they stick in Monopoly at the very end).

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2337832/game-where-5-year-o... / https://boardgamegeek.com/forum/34/bgg/gaming-kids

I thought Monopoly only used a single six-sided die, why are they rolling two of them?

You can't roll doubles to get another roll with a single die

You could roll it twice and compare the two results.

You're second roll "trying" for doubles just meant you took a second turn, so you've sort of turned it into bowling style scoring. Pick up the spare, and get another roll.

Because your understanding is wrong. The game uses 2 dice.

lol we find the person with the worst monopoly family rules of all time

[2010]

Added above. Thanks!

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