I don't understand at all why monopoly is the universal board game that every kid learns. It's a horrible game that drags on for hours. Even though I don't particular care for Catan it'd make a much better universal board game.
Well, inasmuch as it does that, it's teaching the correct economic lesson: when you allow for monopolies, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and social mobility (what a game designer would term "avoiding lame-duck scenarios") is nowhere to be found.
I'd say Monopoly is actually great to play with kids... once. Right after they develop naive libertarianism as an ideology. ;)
The dice roll of course represents that life is unpredictable. But I struggle to find the real world analogy where I go bankrupt because I randomly end up in a hotel in Park Avenue.
What strange shenanigans is going on that compels me to move so much? Especially moving into hotels when I previously lived in a house.
For that matter, if a property doesn't have a house nor hotel what am I paying rent for? The street?
Also, why can't I build a house on my property unless I own the two or three properties in the same area?
I also fail to see how one is supposed to learn anything about economics from the game other than just the basics that takes five minutes to explain.
Picture each set of colored properties as a separate country. You are an entrepreneur, so when you land in a country, you implicitly try to start a business there. The "base rent" for that country is the cost of doing business--corporate tax rate et al.
Each square within a country is an industry. As you build "houses" and then "hotels", you take over that industry. (Houses and hotels themselves make sense as markers if the industry you're taking over is real-estate; otherwise, interpret them as the symbolic equivalents for their own industry. For a manufacturing industry, this would be exclusivity deals with parts of the supply chain. Etc.)
When you've got a full set of houses on a square, you have a monopoly in that industry. This isn't as useful, though, as having bargaining/lobbying power from multiple industries that operate in the same country--having houses on all the squares. When you do that, you can convince the government to give you their contracts--to enforce the mega-monopolies for you, like in telecommunications or defense. These claims are represented by the hotels.
When you land on a square, and someone else has a monopoly there already? Your implicit entrepreneurial bid will be quite a bit more costly. But, of course, your customers expect you to expand into new territories, even if someone else controls them, so expand you must.
(I'm not sure what the railroads and such then represent, though. There aren't that many global utilities that actually give people power when they control them; the shipping-container era kind of fixed that. The internet backbone might seem to be a contender, but it doesn't really make that much money for the people who control it.)
A vanilla game of 4 player monopoly should take no more than an hour.
Now, that doesn't justify turning the game into a 4 hour slog, but it may help to explain why so many people use these "wimp rules".
It didn't, it was a bandage to cover the fact that Monopoly is not a very good kids game.
Also, fwiw, 99% of casual players I've seen overvalue the marquee properties like Boardwalk, etc., and undervalue the oranges, light blues, and reds.
This is the key one.
Monopoly changed it up by making it possible to become the evil landlord, and that's what made it successful.
Catan at least has the advantage of monotonically increasing building and army points: Given enough time and even barely rational spending, a player is guaranteed to reach 10 points, no matter how alliances form and splinter.
The biggest problem we encountered in both games was the "spoiler": The player who was not in a position to win, but was in a position to determine the winner. Either you try to impose hard-to-adjudicate rules requiring "rational decisions" or you accept that a long-running game may be decided by caprice.
Obviously it only works if you play with the same people regularly, but in my experience that's actually the norm.
I'm guessing you weren't actually following the rules[1]. If you do follow the rules you'll find liquidity gets sucked out of the game by continual reselling because you are only allowed to sell unimproved properties, and have to sell houses & hotels back to the bank at half price.
[1] http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm#sellingprope...
Once a few monopolies did crop up, it was the remaining unimproved properties that would be swapped most often for ludicrous amounts of money to allow, say, a cash-poor player to build a few houses in the path of the current leader.
I guess you are not a fan of Diplomacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)), either.
Most, if not all, games of more than two players where players have some free choice eventually boil down to "you can't win it alone. You need help or a blooper from your enemy"
And that is true in sports, too. In any distance running, starting at 800m, athletes collectively make a choice whether to run a fast race or a slow race with a very fast finish. A fast sprinter will not win a fast race, so runners with lower top speed will try to make a fast race. Still, they won't want to be running in the front, they rather have another runner with lower top speed burn energy doing that.
This gets more evident the longer the distance and the larger the advantage of running in the slipstream of an opponent. Road races in cycling are perhaps the ultimate example. If "the peloton" doesn't want you to win, you have to be extremely good _and_ lucky to win.
That rule is so rarely followed I end up in an argument with other players every time I play a game of Monopoly for attempting to play by the rules. People don't even believe that the rule exists, never mind make a conscious decision not to follow it.
The fact games of Monopoly always open with an argument is probably a big factor in me no longer playing Monopoly.
Catan's manual is short because it's excessively terse. I've never seen anybody successfully learn Catan from the instruction manual.
Also, while Monopoly has some absurd tacked-on rules, Catan has some strange edge-cases that confuse the game - like the trick where you can break an opponent's longest-road if you can plonk a settlement somewhere along it.
E.g. if [x] is your settlement, [o] is an opponent's and = is a road:
[x]==[0]= <-- you can build another road here [x]==[0] <-- you can't build another road
Whats more complicated, Chess, or Go?
Its not the only categorization rule, of course. I think "Chutes 'n Ladders" would technically qualify as a eurogame solely under the "simple rules" rule, but it fails as having no social interaction, no strategy element, extreme influence of randomness, being designed and marketed extremely strongly toward the 5 yr old mind, etc.
This doesn't necessarily mean Monopoly is more complex. It just means they used lots of words to describe what is ultimately a fairly simple game.
That's what I introduced to my daughter concerning Monopoly and she loved it. Helped her with the concept of basic math as well.