Why thousands of board games are buried beneath Mankato | Hacker News Reader

Why thousands of board games are buried beneath Mankato

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114 pointsPaulHoule34 comments

Georgeism of the precursor to Monopoly or Monopoly itself aside: it seems pretty obvious that the world described by Monopoly game is not a fun one. The lucky one gets to charge all the other players rent for just existing which he can then use to charge even more rent.

Maybe you think I’m being too literal here. But the concept of “monopoly” is the same.

That's the point. You can start everyone in the same place with the same resources, operating by the same rules, and eventually one player through an accumulation of luck and skill will own all of the other players. It's no way to run a society.

edit: Monopoly was originally called "The Landlord's Game" for a reason. Do you want to play the landlord's game?

And this is literally true, OP your interpretation is exactly how it was designed:

> Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, …… as a way to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth

( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game) )

The less outright-capitalistic part didn’t survive in the rules.

I thought it would be too tedious to write out everything about the Landlord’s Game since it was shared here a few months ago. Which is why I only winked at it by mentioning Georgeism (it’s there, literally in my comment).

The history aside, the game Monopoly describes the concept of monopoly quite well and how it is a bad thing.

I think we were confused by what you thought you were being "too literal" about.

It's called Monopoly because the winner is the one that gets the monopoly, and because The Landlord's Game originally had a second phase called "Prosperity." "Monopoly" and "Prosperity" go well together.

I'm still confused, actually. The game is not a depiction of Georgism, it's a depiction of the world as it is. The solution is Georgism, which Magie thought would lead to Prosperity.

> I think we were confused by what you thought you were being "too literal" about.

Are you sure that you’re not being very literal yourself? (See my last paragraph here.)

> It's called Monopoly because the winner is the one that gets the monopoly, and because The Landlord's Game originally had a second phase called "Prosperity." "Monopoly" and "Prosperity" go well together.

Ok?

> I'm still confused, actually. The game is not a depiction of Georgism, it's a depiction of the world as it is. The solution is Georgism, which Magie thought would lead to Prosperity.

“Georgeism of the precursor to Monopoly or Monopoly itself” means that the designers were motivated by that particular ideology. And if the game is a critique of something then it makes sense that the game itself won’t represent that reality but will represent the critique of the status quo which will motivate said ideology as a solution to the problem of the status quo.

People will say landlords do work too. They’re busy, right? However none of the work they do is necessary as owner and can be contracted out to management. If they do labor, such as maintaining a property, sure that’s value producing labor, but is only coincidentally occasionally shared with the role of raw ownership (landlording)

Leave it to America to turn that game into a massive commercial succuss, while somehow using it to teach people the exact opposite message.

It's worse than that - the game was, and remains to this day, an world-wide commercial success, despite that anyone who played it a couple times hates the experience; what's more, most people hate it for generic reasons like "playing it with my family sucks", not realizing it's the game that's structurally anti-fun, nor that this was intentional, nor that it's because it's mirroring the real aspects of the American economy.

Talk about tricking everyone into participating in a direct, visceral lesson, and somehow failing to actually teach anyone anything.

The worst part is that while Monopoly has its flaws, a good part of what makes it so "unfun" is house rules.

Played by the rules (or using the official "short game" rules), it is not that bad. There has been a lot of progress made in board game design in the last few decades and there are way better options today, but if you are stuck with Monopoly, just read the damn rulebook, it will improve your experience a lot.

A game should take less than an hour, involve a lot of negotiation, and be pretty aggressive (gameplay-wise!).

Disagree.

Monopoly without rule modifications is nearly unplayable.

Specifically, the monopoly dynamic.

Curious to know what are your rules modifications.

By terrible house rules I mean things like collecting money on "free parking", limiting trade or not auctioning unbought property.

I have yet to see commonly practiced house rules that improve the game. I am sure there are, but most people who know enough about game design to actually improve on the game typically don't play Monopoly.

Removing the monopoly requirement for building.

The free parking win all money on the board gives everyone a comeback chance

The big problem with that rule, and it is a common theme in most house rules, and in many games other than Monopoly is that it puts back into play money that should have been destroyed.

Games have a fine tuned balance between resource sinks and sources, if you break the balance, for example by removing a sink, as it is the case here, you break the game. Here it tends to result in much longer and boring games.

Plus, it is a poor comeback mechanism. If you don't have property, cash alone is not enough to get you back into the game. Monopoly already has a limited but better designed comeback mechanism with "repair" cards.

Are everyone necessarily being tricked? I wouldn’t go full Occupy Wallstreet mode if someone at work asked me whether I liked Monopoly or not. I would just say the usual thing about the snowball effect.

What I mean is: approximately everyone played Monopoly an had a bad experience. That bad experience was by design, and meant as a lesson, demonstrating how certain economic ideas lead to bad outcomes. Approximately nobody connected the dots here.

Many love the game. One of the most requested games. What forms your everyone has a bad experience idea? Just something you noticed?

> What forms your everyone has a bad experience idea? Just something you noticed?

Locally: everyone I remember talking to played a variant of the game as a kid, and didn't like it. Matches my experience too. Hell, the most fun I had with this game as a kid was grabbing the box and spending half a day alone role-playing with the little plastic houses.

Globally: the game has meme status for what I described. Things that get to the point of being memes tend to be broadly representative.

> the world described by the Monopoly game is not a fun one

Hell, it's not even a fun game :/

The version of monopoly we have wasn’t designed to be fun, it was originally created to criticize capitalism and point out that it’s unfair and was spread among groups opposed to capitalism. Ironically a guy ripped off the game from these groups and claimed it as his own, renamed it Monopoly, changed some of the rules to turn it into a real game that people would actually want to play, and made a fortune off of it.

Wow! To see Mankato on HN is amazing. They had an incredible punk scene back in the day, when Billie Joe would come through to see his GF. Highly recommend Pagalias pizza!

I love seeing Star Tribune links on HN. They still run on infrastructure I designed, as far as I know.

Further reading: https://www.mankatofreepress.com/news/lifestyles/green-day-f...

The documentary called "Ruthless: monopoly's secret history" covers this story quite well. It's streaming for free on SBS in Australia and PBS in the US

Mankato city council passed a year moratorium on marijuana stores. Mankato is just a no fun zone

There was a brief time on the early web where Mankato (Minnesota) had, and was proud of, it's joke website describing Mankato city as a near-tropical paradise due to local hot springs. This was "well known" back in the 90s. Back then it came up as one of the only sites about Mankato. Now google is useless and can't return any results other than spam.

This it? First result for me for “Mankato Hot Springs:” http://city-mankato.us/sibley.html

Second was an article about the page.

> Anspach played Monopoly in Czechoslovakia as a child, Pilon wrote. Later, in Berkeley in the early 1970s, he played with his wife and sons. But with an oil crisis developing and consumer suffering on the rise, the game's message seemed less fun. "The board game rewarded something in play that hurt people in reality," Anspach thought, according to Pilon's account.

A somewhat well-known fact is that the creator of Monopoly created it in 1903 as anti-monopoly social commentary:

> American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool, to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies.[0]

The creator of the original game was relatively radical for her time:

> Taking out a newspaper advertisement, she offered herself as a ‘young woman American slave’ for sale to the highest bidder. Her aim, she told shocked readers, was to highlight the subordinate position of women in society. ‘We are not machines,’ she said. ‘Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.’[1]

Anyways, it seems this "Anti-Monopoly" was, in fact, more of an "extension" than a rebuttal. It appears that the creator (Ralph Anspach) was aware of that and actually crusaded to bring public awareness to the origins of Monopoly, partially to weaken the intellectual property rights of Parker Brothers.[2]

Also of note, these games were destroyed after Anspach lost the first court case but he ended up winning on appeal, despite federal congress passing a statutory law specifically to address Monopoly vs. Anti-Monopoly! To prove the historical connection, you can read a report[3] to the Committee on the Judiciary which talks about the justification for the law, in context of these board games. Due to this law, Parker Brothers and its parent company, Hasbro, continue to hold valid trademarks for the game Monopoly. (And OpenAI can trademark "Generative Pre-Training").

Anti-Monopoly was, however, exempted from the new law; after winning appeals, Anspach later reached a settlement with Hasbro and markets his game under license from them. It is still published by San Francisco University Games to this day[4] and can be purchased on Amazon[5].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)

1: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170728-monopoly-was-i...

2: https://archive.ph/C2FDO

3: https://www.ipmall.info/sites/default/files/hosted_resources...

4: https://www.universitygames.com/games/family/antimonopoly

5: https://www.amazon.com/8509-Anti-Monopoly-Spiel/dp/B000LPA9F...

My parents had a copy of Anti-Monopoly II and we played it as kids. The game seemed poorly balanced as the monopolists always won. Maybe that was the lesson it was trying to teach?

> The creator of the original game was relatively radical for her time:

Relatively radical for that time makes you far more radical than people are now.

There is an episode[1] of NPR's Throughline that covers some of this. That episode was excerpted into a Planet Money episode[2] as well.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1108728257/do-not-pass-go

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1151367036/story-monopoly-ame...

I just assumed they were buried cause they were sucking kids into a jungle world and Robin Williams isn't here to save them.

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