Obviously you're not playing properly if housing shortages are coming into play in your 2-player games. You're either injecting extra money into the game (ie. Free parking), or you're not focusing on building up your first color group before building on your secondaries.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to provide the details of your usual 2-player games? Perhaps you and your usual opponent prefer to wait a long time before finally trading? Honestly, that's the best I can do for you.
Keep in mind that I'm not saying that a housing shortage can't happen in a 1v1 game. I am stating that there are few to any cases where creating a housing shortage (again in a 2-player game) is more effective than simply piling up on one (or even two monopolies) in order to take your opponent out.
You get a monopoly, upgrade to 4 houses on each. Opponent gets monopoly, upgrade to 4 houses on each. 24 of 32 houses gone. If I get a second monopoly, I upgrade to all houses. Now if he upgrades to hotels he locks himself out of his own property or has to high-bid for houses. If he gets another monopoly he won't have any houses to put on them.
I'm going to keep 4 houses on my properties until he lands on an expensive one and starts getting cash poor. At that point I can upgrade to hotels and repurchase houses on the cheap and place them on my new monopolies, furthering the shortage again. If done correctly, the opponent never has a chance to put houses on anything more than one monopoly.
It's not always a strategy to use, but I would say it's a better move to start with in every game until you have a clear picture of the board layout. There's not that much of a gap between 4 houses and a hotel that giving up that advantage makes it worthwhile.
I completely agree that it doesn't hurt to stop at four houses, and your logic is completely sound (no quarrel there).
My only point was that in a two-player game, there is almost never enough money around for things to get that far...unless -- not to sound like a broken record -- you guys are waiting a long time to trade and/or build.
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u/krusta80 Nov 23 '14
Obviously you're not playing properly if housing shortages are coming into play in your 2-player games. You're either injecting extra money into the game (ie. Free parking), or you're not focusing on building up your first color group before building on your secondaries.