While I am a very big fan of chess this forum however is for all board games (even imperfect ones) I was thinking we start a threads dedicated to the "regular type" board games that have large appeal. The first one i thought of that I still play with friends and love is of course Monopoly.

Of all the board games this is 100% my favorite.


House Rules - I tend to like to play with 3/4 house rules 1 very common 2 not so much

1- 500 in free parking to start - all payments to the bank go in the middle - if you land on free parking you get it all.

2- roll snake eyes collect one of everything - this seems to be less played and almost no one I played with (outside of family or family friends even heard of this)

3- 400 for landing on go

4- use x amount of houses/hotel for the entire monopoly. For instance if you held all the green and wanted 4 houses you would need a total of 12 from the bank. With the limit amount of houses (32) This becomes a problem later in the game so as a remedy you can lay 4 Across the top of them (you still pay for 12)


Strat (if you call it that)
Personal Strategy was always to go for the "big Blocks" (the Greens and the blues + shortline railroad) making a full side of the board yours that way when anyone passed it by you'd collect. The problem is they are always the most wanted properties and someone always wants all the railroads. However if you ever do get the full block its so crippling that almost no one can survive 2 passes if you have it hoteled.

I remember as a kid family friends games going on for hours and hours even multiple days where they would count out the money and store it for next weekend. I was only about 9 or 10 so they wouldn't let me play but i would always watch the arguments that ensued. I can also remember the day they stopped playing when they finally realized that one guy had been cheating the whole time (bringing in 100's and 500's ) but man some times it was really fun to watch.

Anyway lets hear some story's, rules and strat

1- i always start with 500 in free parking myself.
2 - i have never done, but i kinda like the idea of it
3 - i did 500 for landing on go typically
4 - i dont think ive done that either.

i like the snake eyes rule though. i dont think i have any other house rules so to speak.

monopoly is my fav board game though. alot of us play on pogo though, its free!

Isn't precision throwing the key to Monopoly? :-)

400 for landing on go is an official rule im pretty sure.

my friends and i usually made the rules custom by changing those governing trades. we basically made it so you can only be bankrupted if no one is prepared to bail you out, making the games longer and more skillful, since the skill of the game is in the trades. we also made all forms of trade legal (ie my gf sucks at noticing people landing on her properties, and a friend of mine once said he would alert her if someone landed for half the rent).

generally the cheaper ghetto monopolies are the ones to focus on, because it is so easy to get hotels on them. and the first person with hotels is at a huge advantage.

Putting money in free parking destroys the game, imo

I have some very detailed house rules that add a huge amount of skill to the game and eliminate a good portion of the luck. I've played the game successfully with a bunch of people before and it's gotten good reviews! I'll post them later because it'll take 15-20 minutes to write em all out

1 - I hate starting with 500 in Free Parking, I don't like increasing the net capital in play like that. I do have payments go to the middle though, so Free Parking is still worth landing on, just less so.

2 - Never heard of this, interesting but as I said I don't like adding money to the game.

3 - I used to use 500, but I stopped for again, the same reason I mentioned in 1/2.

4 - I'm pretty sure this is an official rule...

Strategy: Locking up the Orange/Red monopolies is the quickest way to win. The balance of "go to" cards, combined with all the ways to go to jail, makes that corner get crossed significantly more often than any other corner of the board, so your hotels will get hit a lot more often.

I think the official rule says that you have to build evenly on each property and if the bank runs out of something, then that something can't be built. So if you chew up all the houses with four on some properties, and get it down to fewer than 8 remaning, then the guy with Park Place and Boardwalk can't build it up to a hotel no matter what, since he can't get the houses first.

i found this site pretty useful when i was initially researching ways to gain an advantage in monopoly. there are also some good links at the bottom for anyone who is interested.

i'm a personal fan of the railroads as a starting strategy especially. some people tend to overlook them and i'm able to take advantage of this by making unbalanced trades. the main problem i encounter with this occurs later in the game - without expanding properties beyond railroads or single properties there's a very small chance of winning.

the people i typically play monopoly with have rather short attention spans and don't last long playing a full game unfortunately.

votes on best monopoly variation?
i'm in for pokémonopoly

Growing up no one would ever play monopoly with me. Even still I always get the, "No way, that game takes too long" blah blah blah stuff I've had to settle for playing it on my phone and that's no fun!
But yeah, railroads ftw.

come play sometime

I love people who are all like "monopoly? Omg that game takes days why would you want to play that?".

Then they get all angry when you don't put the bank oney on Free Parking.

One advanced monopoly strategy is to build 4 houses in your properties, but don't upgrade to hotel. That way, if you have enough, no one can build houses. This is sort of like setting up a block in backgammon.

Official rule is that you only get the standard $200 for landing on Go.

Any house rules that give additional money for stuff like landing on free parking decreases the strategy. For example, often you don't want to buy waterworks or railroads in the beginning, but that's not true if there is a whole lot of money.

PRO TIP: You can deliberately go to jail to avoid paying rent in late game!

One of everything? Everything of what?

I like this idea, but how many houses come with an official monopoly set?

32

The strategy is used to limit the building that people can do on dangerous properties like the oranges. It's best-used when you have 2 of the first 3 monopolies on the board.

It's often a massive mistake to build hotels on the first monopoly on the board. If you're in a good spot with weak monopolies and can slow down the growth of others, the strategy described is key.

This is what I try to do too, though I usually just buy whatever comes my way and try to trade for a monopoly red/orange if at all possible but I think not passing up on too many properties early is key

out of the bank 1 dollar,a 5,10, etc etc

real ballers use real $ when playing monopoly.

People tend to very harshly overrate the skill component in this game for some reason. I think because it has a lot of numbers?

Really though if you want, you can just buy every property you land on, never agree to any trade, and that'll give you incredibly close to a 50% chance to win vs anybody.

If two players decided to thoroughly research the game and become very strong players, we'd just have a situation where both players knew the value of all the properties so well in different board positions that neither of them could ever agree to a trade because they'd both know exactly who it favored, and the game would be back to 50% again.

obviously monopoly sucks HU, its gets more interesting 3+ way because even if a trade is more +ev for the other guy, it can still be +ev for you.

Monopoly sucks with less than 4 players, no doubt about it. Expert players are able to make trades that help out both parties, and increase their winning %s while lowering their opponents' winning %s.

how much collusion should there be? I know there are monopoly tournaments and even a world championship. It seems like you would be unbeatable if you could teamplay every game, so does it happen?

I mean, if you're working with a teammate, you can just dump off everything to your teammate and he's gonna have a pretty damn good shot at winning, though it's still gonna come down to the dice.

But if everyone is acting with self-interest, then deals can be both "collusionary" and beneficial for both individuals.


While the goal for the individual each time he or she makes a trade should be to increase his winning % while decreasing each of his or her opponents' winning %, it's not always feasible....And if you're playing with a couple of experts, it's also just hardly ever going to happen.

So the skillful Monopoly player learns to make deals that benefits both players, but benefits the individual just a little bit more than his opponent. But sometimes the expert can hold out for a better deal because he's already in a commanding position....And sometimes even though he's in a commanding position, he'll need to take somewhat marginal trades to prevent his opponents from making trades that will be even more damaging to his chances of winning.


I kind of love this game, especially playing against the idiots on Pogo. Unfortunately I have a bad habit of pissing people off and triggering spite property dumps to uninvolved 3rd parties. IT'S NOT MY FAULT I'M DAMN GOOD AT THIS GAME PEOPLE.

I personally like playing with money in the middle (Start with $50 and pay all card fines/board taxes into middle) because it increases the variance a bit and keeps people in the game. If you have no money in the middle then whomever gets the first monopoly wins a good amount of the time because it's very tough to build anything substantial unless you avoid their monopoly 3-4 times in a row.

Rules that I've played with are this:

The rule above
Once bankrupted, a player's properties go up on the market
No trading to get out of bankrupting (this just gives whomever bankrupted the player an almost insurmountable lead)
Limited # of houses/hotels, but if you have the cash available you can go straight to hotels at any time

It tilts me that so many people claim to love Monopoly and yet there are so few Georgists. Don't people understand the implication of Monopoly? Meh.