Something a bit different today. I usually talk about politics and philosophy around here, but today I decided to discuss something that’s way more important for living a good life.
I like the board game Monopoly a lot. It’s a great little game. It’s not my favorite board game of all time or anything – not even close – but if I’m with a group of people who have a couple hours to kill, and there’s a Monopoly board in the room, I’ll suggest a game.
That suggestion is rarely met with enthusiasm. Monopoly has a reputation as being a boring slog that takes hours or even days to complete. And it has somewhat earned that reputation, but that’s only because (almost) everyone plays the game wrong. If you play the game right, it’s rather short.
I learned to play Monopoly when I was an undergrad. Me and a few other guys would regularly have game nights where we’d play Riskopoly, a crazy combination of Risk and Monopoly, where you use the money from Monopoly to buy risk pieces and the amount of money you get in Monopoly when you pass “Go” is determined by the amount of territory you control on the Risk board. That game really does take hours to play. But one night one of our regulars couldn’t make it and we didn’t have enough players for a proper game of Riskopoly. So we experienced hands figured we’d take it easy and just play a game of Monopoly. We all knew what we were doing and played efficiently. The game took 15 minutes from start to finish.
“Bullshit,” I hear you say. But I swear to God, 15 minutes. Now, that’s with some very experienced players who motored through the game without hesitation. But if you’re playing at home, the game should take about an hour, hour and a half tops. To cut the game down to size, you just need to follow two simple rules.
When someone lands on a property, if they don’t buy it, it immediately goes up for auction. Highest bid wins the property. Even the person who landed on the property to begin with can participate in the auction.
Free Parking is just a blank space. When you have to pay money due to a Chance or Community Chest card, that money goes in the bank. Don’t put it in the middle of the board for Free Parking. And definitely don’t seed the Free Parking pool with a $500 bill.
These rules are in the actual game rules, but they’re infrequently followed. The first rule is one that most people don’t know about. The second rule almost everyone knows, they just prefer to play differently. But both of these rules are essential to making the game fun because they make the game go faster. Auctioning off unpurchased properties gets properties out of the bank and into the game. And Monopoly only ends when every player except one is tapped out of money. Having “house rules” that inject extra money into the game obviously makes it take longer.
Really, the common Free Parking house rules ruin Monopoly. No one likes to lose the game and everyone likes to get a huge windfall. But Monopoly sucks when it takes forever, and the reason most Monopoly games take forever is that everyone in the game is kept afloat by a sea of cash from Free Parking. (Consider: if you got $10,000 instead of $200 every time you pass “Go,” the game would never end because everyone would gain money faster than losing it. The Free Parking house rules have the same effect.)
A standard Monopoly game can be broken down into three phases. In the first phase, everyone goes around the board and buys up properties as they land on them. Properties should go out the door pretty quick. If you’re smart, you’ll buy every property you land on. If you’re not smart, you’ll pass on a few properties, but then that property will immediately go up for auction and someone smarter than you will buy it. There are 28 properties on the Monopoly board, out of 40 squares. The average dice roll takes you 7 spaces. That means you’ll land on about 6 squares per circuit of the board, or about 4 properties. In a typical 4-player game of Monopoly, that means that most of the properties will have been landed on at least once (and thus bought) by the time that all four players circle the board twice. Roll the dice, buy the property you land on, and pass the dice to the next person. Hell, pass the dice before you pay the bank, there’s usually no reason for them to wait on you making change before they roll and move their piece. If you’re just rolling, moving, and passing on the dice, this can take as little as 5 minutes. With your friends and family, playing causally, this can take you 10 to 15 minutes. It shouldn’t take more. If it does, it’s because some asshole’s not rolling the dice when it’s their turn.
The average property costs about $200, and after two circuits of the board, you’ll own about 7 properties, costing you about $1400. You start the game with $1500, and have passed “Go” twice. So now you’ve got a stock of properties and $500 in the bank. So does everyone else, give or take the luck of the draw. Now the fun part of the game begins.
In the second phase, you keep on moving around the board, but your focus at this point is on trading. You win the game by getting monopolies and building houses (and eventually hotels) on those monopolies. A scattered collection of properties is worthless. Trade properties with other players to get monopolies and start building. This is the best part of the game, and involves the most strategy. You want to be spending most of your time in this phase. Whether you win or lose a game of Monopoly depends on how well you make deals here. You can find websites which will tell you exactly which properties are the most valuable (the orange properties) and which are the least (the greens are a trap, although they’re not quite the worst). But don’t look this up. Figure it out for yourself; have fun making crazy deals.
This part is great because you start to get into the heavy deal-making before all the properties are bought up. So if someone lands on an unbought property and snaps it up, that can cause a dramatic shift in bargaining position. The point where the last orange property gets bought up is a point of high drama among experienced players, because now someone can make the orange monopoly, and any player who has an orange property wants to be that person — or they want to be handsomely compensated for allowing someone else the privilege. For experienced players who all know what deals are fair, this can take 5 minutes to sort everything out. With your friends and family at home, this will take 30-45 minutes of haggling. Feel free to go a bit nuts with this and stretch this part out; again, it’s the most fun part of the game. Just make sure you’re spending your time negotiating. Endlessly circling the board without assembling monopolies guarantees a boring game.
The third phase starts when everyone’s got their monopolies and starts building houses. Skill is out of the game almost entirely by this point. It’s luck of the draw. If you land on someone else’s built-up monopoly, you’re going to take a huge hit and might be out of the game. If someone else lands on one of your built-up monopolies, you make a nice chunk of change and can afford to upgrade your properties a bit (and get a bit of a cash buffer in savings in case you land on someone else’s property). It’s good to be in jail at this point; the worst thing that can happen to you is landing on someone’s monopoly, so being in a position where you don’t move for three turns is a huge asset. There’s still some strategy at this point of the game — when some money comes in, how much do you invest and how much do you save? But mostly you’re just rolling and moving, like in the first phase. The outcome is determined by the luck of the dice, but if you negotiated well in the second phase, the odds will be on your side. As you gain the ability to extract more and more from other players as they land on your monopolies, people will start to go bankrupt and drop out. Again, if you’re motoring, the winner will be clear in about 5 minutes. More casually, this could take 15-30 minutes.
And that’s it, that’s the game. If you’re zooming, it’s over in 15 minutes. If you’re taking your time, it’s an hour to an hour and a half, with most of the time spent in the fun second phase. I don’t recommend zooming. Have a glass of wine and offer your nephew the craziest trade he’s ever seen. Laugh at yourself for having done it, and at him because of the look on his face as he tries to work out if it’s a good idea.
From this description of a typical game of Monopoly, it’s clear why those two rules I mentioned in the beginning are important. Without property auctions, you can be stuck in the first phase for a much longer time, and that phase is pretty boring. It’s just rolling and moving. And with massive amounts of money sloshing around the board from Free Parking, the third phase takes forever. And the longer the third phase takes, the less the strategy from the second phase matters, and the more the game just feels like a matter of luck.
Sorry to spend so much time doing a strategy breakdown of a century-old game. But it really can be a lot of fun if it’s played right, and it breaks my heart that so many people don’t like the game because they change the rules in ways that make it worse. So give Monopoly another try at your next family game night. Insist on playing with the proper rules, promise the game can go fast if you actually play right, and then set the tone by having fun with negotiations in that second phase. You’ll be glad you did.
And if you don’t like the game even when you play it right? Well, you only wasted an hour.
FINALLY, SOMEONE SAID IT.
FTR, I disagree that there’s not a lot of strategy in phase three—the timing of when you pour all your funds into houses and hotels matters a *lot.* If you can cover your properties in improvements just before your opponents land on them, and just *after* you get past *their* hotel’d spaces, the game’s well in hand.