It's an annoying and stupid game. It's all about being a landlord. One or two players are lucky and they are the only ones having a good time. The rest of the players are spending their time losing.
"Well ackshually, Monopoly was originally called 'The Landlord Game' and was all about how landlording was bad" — I don't care, you're still spending an evening pretending to be a landlord to your loved ones. The game is completely unenjoyable because it emulates capitalism too well.
Fuck off with competitive boardgames. Give me games that are merely facilitating having fun and being social and where only nerds keep score, like charades or pictionary .
I'm pretty sure the second part to the "well ackshually rant" is that Monopoly isn't supposed to be fun and you're not really supposed to play it if you already get the point. Of course it sucks.
The third part of it is the official rule for fast play which makes the game more fun if still boring.
If you do not wish to buy the property, the Banker sells it at auction to the highest bidder. The buyer 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.
back in high school, i was with a group that played loose with the rules (which I didn't care for, because it makes the game last forever, and defeats the purpose). the house rules let us make any sort of agreements on buying/selling properties as long as they were consensual. So I would "sell" or "rent" properties in exchange for immunities if i landed on others' squares.
at the end of one game, I only owned Park Place and Broadway with hotels, and just sorta sauntered around the rest of the board waiting to get lucky and bankrupt the others. it wasn't "fun" per se, but it made people mad enough that we stopped playing, which was what i wanted anyways.
i can understand monopoy is boring, especially by todays standards. but
Fuck off with competitive boardgames
nah. if i had more people to play with i would, i mostly get solo board games.
I was gonna say, competitive board games are fun if they're fun. Concordia is a great time.
Skip monopoly for Ticket to ride, catan, modern art, Las Vegas, cosmic encounters or wing span
:eric-andre:
I love being locked out of a game because a 9 is never rolled.
honestly it's one of those games that I enjoyed at first because it wasn't Monopoly and I simply never had fun with it but to each their own
wood for sheep is funny but the game is really draining because of whatever undiagnosed social disease or trauma i have
Scratch a Liberal: Weimar Germany Edition, except it makes the liberals the "good" guys and leaves out the part where they call in the freicorps to kill Rosa Luxembourg and help put the Nazis in power.
It's pretty much amongus in card game form.
My FLGS had players reskin the game (Secret Palpatine) so it wouldn't scare away business.
That part DOES exist. The last couple of Fascist policies are Assassinations. One of the only two ways for liberals to win is to assassinate Hitler. Except if Hitler has been playing correctly, he has been giving no indication that he's Hitler, so it's unlikely the liberals will pick Hitler. Instead, they're more likely to kill another liberal, thus making there be less choices for chancellor, thus making it more likely Hitler will be chancellor.
Hot take: Monopoly is not fun to play. There are so many good games out nowadays if you're still playing Monopoly that's kind of on you.
I'd recommend Spirit Island, a game where you all work as different elemental gods who help am indigenous population fight off the (literally) white colonists on an island.. It's collaborative, it's different every time you play, and you can choose which empire to fight against (England, Prussia, etc) and they all play differently.
The original creator of monopoly was a leftist who created the idea specifically to demonstrate how landlords are bad. However the creation ended up running away from the original creator and became a incredibly popular yet incredibly disliked board game for families to initiate arguments with.
Anyway here's the source: https://youtu.be/B7nFA19Gzrw
there's this game called The Farming Game that is hilarious. i think it's from the 70s or 80s. a game might last 40 minutes. the board looks like monopoly, but it isn't at all. and, as someone who has been in US agriculture for like 15+ years, it feels so real. it basically shows you how completely risky it all is, and that critical resources / means of production are locked behind seemingly random social connections and gossip. like if you have the money to buy some specific piece of equipment, you can't buy it unless you have a card giving you the option to buy. that is something that you might randomly draw from a stack, or someone might sell/trade it to you. it's all very "yeah, i know a guy who is looking to sell one of those. i can introduce you. or not." you can obscure your cards and your money too if you want, or be open with everything.
you don't swallow up people's farms. you're basically just trying to amass a net worth of a certain amount, including cash, land, equipment, that all have fixed appraisal values. you have to keep your number in mind and estimate where others are at constantly. when you think you've got enough, you call for a sale... if you have over the amount, you win. if you fall short, you get penalized like some fat number for creating a "market panic" or something like that.
anyway, the real funny stuff is just how stacked the game is against everyone ever getting anywhere. you start in the hole to the bank for like 25% of the book value of the farm you inherited (basically you take on an operating loan). like 80% of random events ("Farmer's Fate") go against you. shit weather. insect eating your crops. tree takes out fence, cows got out. injure yourself. equipment breaks. fucked up your taxes, hire accountant. there are dozens of cockups. you can take on subsidized debt to stay in operation up to a point, but the terms still suck. you always end up paying back 20% more than you borrowed. some random events absolute hose people with outstanding debts. there are so many years where you make it through the year and you basically paid like $500 for the pleasure of farming. you even have some shitty job "in town" to make a little scratch in the off season, which you immediately sink into your farm, of course. when i was a farmworker IRL i would play it with other farmworker friends in winter and we all cracked up constantly, because it is such a shitshow.
but all you really need is for everything to go right and have an absolute banger of a year or two, and you can cash out and retire to never farm again, which is its own hilarious win condition for people who love aspects of the work but are constantly teetering on the edge of material ruin.
you don't have to know shit about crops or anything. it's all explained and mostly about trying to run a risky set of enterprises. 2 players is doable, but 3+ is more and more fun. everybody i pressured to play it ran out and immediately bought it after a game to show others.
edit: lol, i looked it up. apparently the World Bank had it translated into Russian in 1994 to show them what farming was like under a capitalistic system (spoiler alert: it sucks). too bad they didn't do that 10 years earlier.
The farming game is a staple at my family events, everyone loves it! You are competing but you're not ruining each other like Monopoly. It's light-hearted and everyone can bond over how shitty everything is towards you.
This sounds awesome, I'm gonna check out the tabletop simulator version of it with some friends if possible.
it also needs to be noted that Elizabeth Maggie’s original concept for the landlord game was never in the commercially sold monopoly.
Charles Darrow Stole the idea and chopped out the part of the game where everyone looses their money. Which is what makes it go on forever and be a shit time for all.
Also look up Illuminopoly. It’s an actually fun way to play it.
The game is completely unenjoyable because it emulates capitalism too well.
it doesn't emulate capitalism well enough. For example, the landlords go to jail way too often.
Well ackshually, Monopoly was originally called ‘The Landlord Game’ and was all about how landlording was bad
People drag it out to fuck by not following the actual rules, like saying "free parking" gets a bunch of money or that landing in a space and not buying it means it's automatically put up for auction. It's supposed to be ruthless and shorter but people drag it out because it is fundamentally unfair - which was the point of the game, lol.
Convinced Monopoly is sustained on people buying epic media reference reskins as a gag gift then never playing it.
Monopoly can be fun if you treat it like real capitalism(eg everyone is constantly attempting to sneakily cheat, steal, and make deals with the bank) cheating improves games
Monopoly: Cheaters Edition has mechanics that encourage that and it's a big improvement.
It was designed to be unfun as an object lesson, but you are right that it’s pointless to play an unfun game once you already understand said lesson
there was also a different ruleset based on Georgist ideals that was designed to be more fun. it was scrapped when the game was commercialised
I thought it was meant to be rigged and unfun as capitalist critique from a Georgist
yeah, you would play the unfun "landlord's game" first and the fun version after that
Yes, also the person who goes first has 50% greater chance of winning than anyone else. Very bad game.
