It’s a festive time of year for many right now, and nothing helps to build happy family memories like a good board game! As a kid I loved Monopoly – I even have a small collection of variants…
Someone should come up with a complete revision of the monopoly rules where all the properties are already owned by one player, and the other players are actually moving around from place to place trying to build support for a rent strike. Cheaper properties are easier to build support in, because their occupants are working class and have the most to gain, while properties like park avenue and boardwalk are inhabited by the PMC and thus require more effort/resources to convert. The ultimate goal of the game is for all the regular players to unite their different factions and overthrow the much more powerful landlord player, who gets to do shitty stuff like shut off utilities or bribe police officers to put players in jail.
That way you would still get a helpful representation of capitalism, but it wouldn't end the same miserable way every time, with people getting squeezed out one at a time. The game would end with all the players still playing; either the regulars manage to coordinate their strike, or the landlord achieves some win condition that ends the game - maybe having all the regular players in jail at the same time, which could be more or less difficult depending on how many players the landlord was up against.
Someone should come up with a complete revision of the monopoly rules where all the properties are already owned by one player, and the other players are actually moving around from place to place trying to build support for a rent strike. Cheaper properties are easier to build support in, because their occupants are working class and have the most to gain, while properties like park avenue and boardwalk are inhabited by the PMC and thus require more effort/resources to convert. The ultimate goal of the game is for all the regular players to unite their different factions and overthrow the much more powerful landlord player, who gets to do shitty stuff like shut off utilities or bribe police officers to put players in jail.
That way you would still get a helpful representation of capitalism, but it wouldn't end the same miserable way every time, with people getting squeezed out one at a time. The game would end with all the players still playing; either the regulars manage to coordinate their strike, or the landlord achieves some win condition that ends the game - maybe having all the regular players in jail at the same time, which could be more or less difficult depending on how many players the landlord was up against.
Oh and there would be riots :elmofire: