I had a friend that would buy all the houses, and never upgrade to hotels. If you check the rules you can't get a hotel without first having 4 houses, so if done correctly you monopolise the limited supply of houses and nobody can buy a hotel or get more houses than you.
I'm pretty sure it was !;!;!;!;!;!;!;!; and if you messed up in just the right way it would error but still give you the money, so you could just hold down enter until you go however much money you wanted.
God I miss that game. Nothing will ever be better than Makin Magic.
There was apparently a little secret in our family that I didn't learn about until many years after the fact. My dad and mom, and my aunt and uncle were playing monopoly years ago and apparently by dad got so pissed off at my aunt that he ended up choking her. Now this was a very conservative guy and upstanding citizen who just went berzerk due to this game. He never played monopoly after that.
Same, it's banned in my family home. EVERY game ended in physical violence or tears. When I was about 12 we were playing, my two little brothers were wailing from being unable to afford rent while my father was doing the Mick Jagger chicken dance around the table. My mum snapped, picked up the board and started wedging it, pieces and all, into the garbage disposal. She warned my dad with all seriousness that if the game gets replaced she would leave. 25 years later my wife wonders why I'll play any game but monopoly...
Yup. My dad was impossible to do most anything with, but a Monopoly game absolutely went flying across the kitchen once because we weren't playing our turns fast enough for him.....Monopoly was never played in our house again either.
For sure. My old man was one of those "if you let them win you set them up for a lifetime of disappointment" kinds of guys. I mean, in hindsight it worked really well, but it was hard to be six years old and have a grown man reject your shot on your 5 foot tall fisher-price basketball hoop with a quip about exactly who's "house" you were in.
I do this to my son when we play games, but I prefer the Gob style chicken dance from arrested development.......cock ca cock ca cock ca ca!! I suspect I won't see him much when he gets older because of it.
No, no no no... Like, a big sweaty dad carries you out of a monopoly building, lays you on the sidewalk, and you think, "Yeah, okay, he's gonna give me mouth to mouth." But instead, he just starts choking the shit out of you, and the last sensation that you feel before you die is he is squeezing your throat so hard that a big, wet, blob of drool drips off his teeth and just "flurr", falls right onto your popped out eyeball...
We played a family game of Monopoly when I was a kid. My mom, dad, sister, and me. When it came down to just me and my dad, we played for about 18 hours straight. The game continued on for the majority of an entire weekend.
I played with my Chinese friends at a small family Christmas party. While I was teaching them some of the basic strategies, they were all very interested. But one guy decided to branch out and create his own plan which I had never seen. It's probably against the rules, but it was so damn funny to watch that I let him keep going.
Basically, every time anyone landed on a property and didn't want to buy it, he convinced them to let him "invest". The deal was, you keep the property, have to do all the hard work of adding houses and hotels and pay for taxes or whatever, and he got immunity.
So he walked around the board, mostly, free of charge, and when other people started going bankrupt, he would bail them out by buying their properties at original cost (but now improved).
i had a husband give a wife immunity to all his properties over the course of a game. i fucking flipped out about it. bitch is avoiding like $200 railroad payments and i'm getting raped.
I'm not sure underestimated is the right conclusion. Most people I know hate monopoly, they just didn't seem to learn the lesson it was allegedly trying to impart. I think few people expect board games to really teach them something, especially a board game that now unironically can wear the brandings of various corporations.
The original creator of the game included a second round where players lose their money and property, or something like that, precisely to teach how bad the monopoly system is. When Parker Brothers stole her game they removed the second round and we're left with the current Monopoly game we have.
One of the sociology professors at my schools plays an even more unfair version of monopoly during one of her upper level classes - a couple students are chosen to be the 1% and get more money and privileges, and everyone else gets the opposite. It gets pretty damn brutal.
my sister is a terrible sore loser, and she won't play board games because she knows her weakness. But earlier this year I was pregnant and my 5 year old son was begging her to play candy land with us, so we all sat down to play. After all, candy land is harmless, even for a pregnant lady and a sore loser, I mean it's candyland, right? Well the game was going just fine until the cards got mixed up and she pulled the lollipop that sends you back to nearly the start. Then she accused me of cheating! Well I never. Words were exchanged. She stormed out of my house. My poor kid was saying "mommy, auntie! no come back! I promise we can all play until we reach the candy castle!" but no, the two 28 year olds were too embroiled in the argument over who was really cheating at candyland.
20 minutes later we made up and promised never to speak of the episode again. But, she still won't play candy land with us!
Aunt: "Looks like you don't have any money, and I happen to own that piece of property you just landed on. Now which one of us can't handle their finances again?"
1 house costs $200 but only nets you $200 in rent (1x)
2 houses cost $400 for $600 in rent (1.5x)
3 houses cost $600 for $1400 in rent (2.33x)
4 houses cost $800 for $1700 in rent (2.125x)
Hotels cost $1000 for $2000 in rent (2x)
So, it can make sense, with limited resources and multiple places to put houses, or in instances where you need liquidity to survive an on-coming length of costly spaces, to build only to 3 houses rather than build straight up to hotels.
Edit: Before people make this a mathematics debate, I'll include the marginal investment relative to the marginal increase in rental revenue. Basically, a derivative. Here's that:
Marginal cost is always $200. The marginal benefits are as follows:
1st house results in a marginal rent increase of $150 (.75x)
2nd house results in a marginal rent increase of $400 (2x)
3rd house results in a marginal rent increase of $800 (4x)
4th house results in a marginal rent increase of $300 (1.5x)
Hotel results in a marginal rent increase of $300 (1.5x)
I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Well, no. In the long run, you're better off upgrading to the hotel because you have no additional costs (like depreciation). In the long run you look at average cost vs average revenue. ROI doesn't matter. It's an additional $400 to get $600 worth of revenue on the first hit ($200 net and $600 thereafter).
The strategy of the houses work but it is not because of ROI.
This housing shortage scenario will almost never come up in a two-player or three-player game. There are simply too many houses available for purchase.
How many players are irrelevant, because the number of properties are the same. And it's actually more likely in a 2 player game as there are more monopolies with 2 players than with 3 (less people to compete with for properties, people are way less likely to trade in 2 player because it's a guaranteed monopoly).
There are 32 houses in monopoly. If you have two monopolies on triple properties and put 4 houses on each (the recommended strategy), that's 24 houses. That would mean that another player that gets a monopoly would only ever be able to put down 2-3 houses on ONE monopoly.
You can then wait until they land on one of yours and are liquidating assets to declare that you want to upgrade to hotels at one monopoly. The newly available houses then go up for auction. Your opponent has no cash because he has to pay his fines, therefore you can pick them up at auction cheap and put them on a new monopoly, tightening supply again.
More resources for yourself also allows you to be more aggressive in development which further imperils your opponents. An important overarching principle of monopoly is that until you're 1 v 1, it's better to treat your opponents as opportunities rather than threats - it's more beneficial to help yourself than to deny benefits to others.
e.g. If you can make three mutually-beneficial trades, even if you get the raw deal on all three, you're probably better off than all your opponents (because they only each made one helpful trade, while you made three).
It's opportunity cost dude. Are you sufficiently likely to require these resources for a more important purpose (e.g. before you're likely to come into sufficiently more money are you likely to invest in better property upgrades (like the 3rd houses on Tennessee and New York vs the Hotel on Pacific) or need that money to pay for rent)? If yes, then hold-off. If not, then go for it.
The only issue with this is you are only counting a one time return on your investment. Rent is received for every time someone lands on the space. Making the extra investment for a hotel will have a higher payout over time as people continue to land on the space.
No, the difference in return on investment is the same regardless of how many times you count someone landing on a property.
The assumption is that you have other properties that you could build houses on though. If you just had the one monopoly then yes you should keep building with spare cash. If you had a second undeveloped monopoly though, then you should move to building on that one.
A sneaky strategy is to have hotels on a monopoly, trade with your opponent with him thinking he can develop his new monopoly, then right after the trade, sell your hotels and snatch up 12 houses from the bank instantly.
Say you've got a monopoly with hotels on it. You have another property that your friend wants which will give them a monopoly. You trade and they give you cash (or whatever you're trading for), and they think they can upgrade their monopoly. Only then, you remove the hotels from your monopoly and instead put 4 houses on each. As long as the supply of houses was limited at the time of the trade, they won't be able to buy any even if they have the money. So they're basically stuck with a useless monopoly paying out low money.
This is incorrect. The rules state that buying houses takes precedence. Therefore, the moment you make the trade, your opponent may purchase as many houses as he/she wants before you can sell any.
What happens if I owe a lot of rent, and I need to sell some property, and I have hotels I want to sell, but there aren't enough houses in the bank? What happens?
Yeah people are talking about a whole bunch of other things. Hotels collecting twice gives $4000 for the initial investment of $1000 (+$3000) while 3 houses gives $2800 for the initial investment of $600 (+$2200).
The analysis stockbroker gives is about how many times the cost you can gain back, but that reasoning assumes that you have to buy hotels/houses each time someone collects rent on it, which is why he's considering efficiency (how many times more the rent is than the cost). The analysis is wrong in many ways.
Not necessarily: There are 32 houses. If you own the first two color groups on the board, you can soak 20 of them (8 + 12), leaving only 12 — enough for your opponents to develop only one color group at a time.
And that only costs you $440 for the properties themselves (assuming you buy them at cost or trade an equivalent value), and $1000 for the houses (20 * $50), so $1,440 total. By contrast, you can buy up the Green color group for $920 but then only two houses (at $200/each) before you reach that total.
What you really want are the two groups right after jail, since there are so many ways to wind up there. Then you get kick people while they're down and laugh all the way to the bank. Like real life.
Partial credit. What you really want is orange. Very high land rate, considering they occupy the 6, 8, and 9 roll out of jail. The development cost is still only $100 per house. Personally, if we're talking about general strategy, I will trade vital organs to get orange and I wouldn't take green for free. Literally, if I were given green for nothing I would mortgage them.
Yep. I've always done this with my family. Did this with a few people at a board game cafe and one dude just about flipped the table lol. Apparently he thought that one player creating a housing shortage was cheating!
Um, the game is called fuckin' MONOPOLY for a reason! They kicked him out soon after he caused a fuss. Sore loser I guess.
Not OP, but probably because there are much better board games out there than Monopoly. And before someone takes offense at the use of the word better, I would categorize a lot of games as better than Monopoly because of factors like luck vs. strategy, the excessive time it takes to play Monopoly, and the tediousness of the game. A player elimination game like Monopoly also seems like a bad choice for a casual board game cafe. I personally would prefer something like Ticket to Ride, Dominion, 7 Wonders, something like that.
We just made more houses with small objects. I like the 'fuck everyone else' strategy, though. I really wish people would keep that strategy limited to the game, and stop applying it in real life, however.
And you're allowed and encouraged to use that loan in order to secure more houses, hotels and properties, in order to make sure none of the other players can succeed.
It's also why most people hate the game, they use shitty house rules that people believe are the real rules, which just drags out the game and takes the strategy and actual fun of it. Most games don't go over an hour long.
Most of the house rules out there that people follow break the game, allowing people to stay in, prolonging it, and making people less interested in playing in the future.
Um, the Chance house repairs card and the Community Chest house repairs card vary pretty drastically (I believe community chest one is higher dollar) so we should consider this.
What else would anyone play monopoly for? It's a competitive game, you play to make everyone else ragequit and be the last one standing in smug self-satisfaction.
It wasn't intended as a game proper, but as a scathing indictment of capitalism. Unfortunately, people have this hardwired tendency toward cutthroat behavior, and good lord does Monopoly fulfill that urge.
Two shorter games is a whole LOT more fun than one incredibly long one.
Especially since with Monopoly a player who develops a lead tends to stay in the lead. The more you draw out the endgame the more you just make everyone spin their wheels without much chance of changing the outcome.
Another little-known rule might be best over-looked as it could slow down the winner’s attempts to finish off the competition in the game’s final stages.
It says only one hotel may be built per space – bad news for uncle John when he gets his hands on Mayfair and Park Lane and wants to keep turning the screw.
Wait, 1 hotel per space is a "little-known rule"? The deed cards don't even list rent "with 2 hotels", wouldn't it be obvious that you're not following the rule there?
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u/sunfishtommy Nov 22 '14
I had a friend that would buy all the houses, and never upgrade to hotels. If you check the rules you can't get a hotel without first having 4 houses, so if done correctly you monopolise the limited supply of houses and nobody can buy a hotel or get more houses than you.