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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

These techniques are also useful for parts of more complicated games, like battles in Risk.

That said, I agree with the author that it's weird how little social engineering people put into their games. I refuse to play monopoly or Risk if the house rules prohibit entering complicated agreements with other players like forward contracts, lease-to-purchase agreements, variable-interest rate loans, swaps, and what have you.

I still haven't gotten anyone to play with me under free banking rules where everyone is free to print their own currency, but I'm really excited about the idea.

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I usually play Monopoly with Credit Default Swaps, and the ability to repackage properties into CDO's. When I play Risk, there's an added element of forex which makes the game more interesting. But all Risk games inevitably end up with someone saying "I'm not beaten yet. I still have armies in the Ukraine!"

I have literally lost a friend over a game if Monopoly 10 years ago. I can't imagine going through the same ordeal with those rules! Although since I work in Finance the thought excites me!

You cannot do this with people who take the game too personally, obviously!

Since a large part of it relies on trust (a loan without collateral puts you at huge counterparty risk) it sort of only works if you play repeatedly with sort of the same people, so they have an incentive not to screw you over.

How would printing your own money work in Monopoly? Since the objective is to bankrupt all opponents, there is never an incentive to accept their currency as payment.

They will probably offer their currency at a discount to incentivise to take it anyway!

Of course, that promise is only credible if they aren't near bankruptcy anyway, so I suspect that specific rule won't change much in how the game is played.

(Things like selling shares in one's properties, on the other hand, makes it possible for the game to go on for a really long time. Some games turn into complicated interlocked arrangements where nobody wants anyone else to fail lest the whole thing comes tumbling down -- much like in the real world. At that point the game is less about winning and more about finessing your way around a financial system.)

I refuse to play monopoly because it’s a horrible game.

It was literally designed to be a horrible game: it was originally a teaching tool for Georgist economics, attempting to illustrate that rent extraction made one player rich and everyone else broke. Then you're supposed to flip over the board and play "Prosperity", the alternative economic system in which all players prosper.

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

And many older people don't like boardgames because it is the only one they know. Fortunately, game designers like Teubner (Catan) knew how to make fun games.

What have you tried to do to make it more interesting? I find that when a group wants to play a game I don't like, it's significantly easier to swap in some fun house rules than swap out the entire game.

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