Monopoly

This article is fucking 'Murican. Expect copious amounts of Freedom with an infrequent side of Awesome.

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

""Another case of Monopoly related violence, chief." "How do those Parker brothers sleep at night?" "

– The Springfield police, commenting on the typical results of a regular Monopoly session

It fucking sucks. While it may suck a bag of dog shit, it is (after Chess and Go) the most popular tabletop game ever made. Go figure.

Monopoly was originally an adaptation of an obscure game known as "The Landlord's Game," which was intended by its designer, Elizabeth Magie, to be an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, and explain the benefits of the single tax theory of Henry George. However, since "The Landlord's Game" was made by a woman who was also a Quaker, nobody gave a shit, which was why Charles Darrow was able to modify the original game and sell it off as his own original creation. Also, he chopped out half of the game, namely, the second half where everyone loses all their money and an Important Lesson is learned about capitalism. Which is why it sucks. Imagine if 40k didn't have a turn limit, and you just played until the opponent was tabled, and both of you got two free units every turn. (Isn't that just Apocalypse though?)

As an historical aside, Mr. Monopoly is an amalgam of William Randolph Hearst (the newspaper billionaire who owned most of Congress and started a war) and Samuel Insull (the fellow who monetized electricity).

How to play Monopoly

1. Go around for 3 hours
2. Land on Boardwalk with someone else's hotel on it
3. Flip the board
4. ????
5. Profit!

No, really?

Yah rly. The winning condition is "when everyone is broke except for one player." Aside from how "last man standing" boardgames suck, it's possible to play a game that never ends. Try this: get one of the Monopoly computer games, tell it to play with 4 computer players and 0 human players. Put it on 'fast', and come back in a few hours. All four players will have hundreds of thousands of dollars each, with no signs of anyone "losing."

The only way to win is to convince one of your fellow players to do something stupid, like sell you a property you need to complete a set.

This game takes forever. No, I am not kidding you. You, the person who wanted to play the game, will be the only one left after 5 hours of straight gameplay who still wants to play. Everyone else will have lost patience, fallen asleep, run out of snacks, died of old age, or some unholy combination of any or all of the previous four. I seriously played one game of Monopoly for THREE MONTHS with my grandmother. My grandfather left after the first three weeks. I have no idea who won. In that time, I probably could have made a pretty awesome character in ANY RPG SYSTEM (yes, even Rolemaster), and have had four or more truly memorable moments in a campaign.

Most modern iterations of the rules focus on either the game ending when the *first* player becomes bankrupt, or for an arbitrary value of cash and property to be reached. These, along with oft-unused house rules, can actually speed up the game and make it suck infinitely less.

Monopoly license everything...

It is no small joke that Monopoly have made a version of itself to cover just about everything under the sun. You're into normal vanilla monopoly? Get lost, there is way too many weird and wacky flavors to take, although you may get sick after having them.

Here is a concise list of some of the different kinds of monopoly available:

• Batman and Robin;
• Beatles;
• Big Bang Theory;
• Bob's Burgers;
• Cthulhu;
• Deadpool;
• Despicable Me;
• Disney Princesses;
• Disney Theme Parks;
• Doctor Who;
• Dot-Com (where the properties are all Internet companies like Google);
• Dragonball Z;
• Sailor Moon;
• Dublin (the actual city);
• Edinburgh (the fucking city as well);
• Actually, name any fucking city. There's a Monopoly of it;
• Fallout;
• Fortnite (suprisingly good for it's source material);
• F.R.I.E.N.D.S.;
• Game of Thrones;
• Gay (not even fucking lying);
• Ghostbusters;
• the Golden Girls;
• Guardians of the Galaxy;
• Halo;
• Harry Potter;
• Lego;
• Lord of the Rings;
• National Parks (like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and shit);
• The Nightmare before Christmas;
• Nintendo (which is not to be confused with the individual Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon versions of Monopoly);
• Northampton (the city, seriously);
• Pirates of the Caribbean;
• Pokemon;
• Powerpuff Girls;
• Rick and Morty;
• Royal Family;
• Simpsons;
• Spongebob Squarepants;
• Star Wars and a fuckload of variants:
  • Star Wars Limited Collector's 20th Anniversary Edition;
  • Star Wars Episode 1 Edition;
  • Star Wars Classic Trilogy Edition;
  • Star Wars Original Trilogy Edition (apparently there is a difference between the "classic" trilogy and the "original" trilogy);
  • Star Wars the Clone Wars;
  • Star Wars 40th Anniversary Special Edition;
  • Star Wars with a goddamn Rubik's Cube because that makes a fuckton of sense;
• Stranger Things;
• Street Fighter;
• Super Mario Bros;
• Supernatural;
• Toy Story;
• The Walking Dead;
• Transformers (both G1 and Movie versions);
• 2010 Fifa World Cup South African edition;
• CHEATERS EDITION;
• Guildford (the town in Surrey);
• Yu-Gi-Oh;
• Zelda.
• Warhammer 40,000
• Women (aka Cheater's Edition 2.0)
• team fortress 2

And Twilight. GOOOOODDAAAAAMMMMNNNNNN.

You think the above list is a joke? Then my dear friends you will truly weep, when you discover each one is very, very real... even Gay Monopoly, though it wasn't actually made by Parker Brothers, who sued its creators out of existence back in the '80s for intellectual property infringement.

P.S. Just in case you weren't depressed enough; every single version of Monopoly is literally exactly the same from a rules perspective. Every property and card gets renamed, but the functional rules of the game don't change at all. (Not true with Lord of the Rings Monopoly, Pokemon, Fortnite, and at least a few of the fifty or sixty Star Wars editions)

Monopoly for Millennials

"Forget Real Estate - You can't afford it anyway."

Instead you win with the most Experience Tokens, which conveniently look like social media upvotes (and downvotes).

The only thing funnier than the game is the meltdown it caused on the internet. Between the condescending tagline and blatant “how do you do fellow kids” theme, this makes the perfect gag gift for that one friend who takes himself too seriously. The only way to make it even better is if the game really did have participation awards for all the losers. Bet and the losers get paid in monopoly bucks winner takes the usable money.

/tg/-Approved House Rules

Not to be set back by the monotony of Monopoly, /tg/ has, after a period of discussion, decided that the following rules can potentially make a game of Monopoly strategic and more fun.

1. Landing on an unowned property incurs an Auction, not a sale. (See below.)
   1. Bidding can start either at $1 or the value of the property, with the former allowing cheap purchases and the latter ensuring that all properties will sell at or above their face value.
2. A completed color group is not required to purchase improvements on a property, with the exception of Hotels.
   1. Properties don't collect rent until there is a house on it. Not only does this remove the insanity of paying rent for an empty lot, it makes the utility actual useful, at least in the early game, as those will always be able to collect money.

All of these modifications actually bring the game slightly closer to the way it used to be when it was "The Landlord's Game," before Darrow got his hands on it.

The Rules Nobody Use

BREAKING NEWS: This speeds up the game, and makes it possible to complete sets without some player doing something self-destructively stupid, and it's already in the rules but nobody uses it!

If you do not wish to buy the property, the Banker sells it at auction to the highest bidder. The buyer pays the Bank the amount of the bid in cash and receives the Title Deed card for that property. Any player, including the one who declined the option to buy it at the printed price, may bid. Bidding may start at any price.

It's right there in black and white, per the Hasbro Official Rules.

The board gets sold off fast and everybody gets a weird portfolio of random properties, both of which make Metanopoly (see below) more fun and brutal. Note that there are plenty of other often-missed rules (no extra houses, no P2P loans, no Free Parking jackpots) that speed the game up, too.

The Lost Rules

(AKA "The Entire Second Half Of The Game")

The original "Landlord's Game" instructions contain additional rules - conspicuously missing from all subsequent clones of the game sold under the name "Monopoly" - to enable players to salvage the session after the whole experience inevitably turns to shit. Those which may still be readily applied to the modern game (the board's been heavily simplified since 1906) are excerpted and briefly summarised below.

At any time during the game, a "flat land tax" may be implemented by a vote of two or more players. After this vote, title deeds lose their value and land (squares) may no longer be privately owned, but otherwise players retain their buildings and other holdings and the game continues under the new rules:

• All land rent is paid into a public treasury to be used for public improvements.
• All railroad fares and utility rates are paid to the individual owners as before until the public takes control of them, at which point they become free.
• Land becomes public; buildings remain private. The land rent for landing on any square is always paid to the public treasury. If a square has a building on it, additional rent is paid to the owner of the building. Players may build on any undeveloped square they wish on their turn if they can afford it, provided no other player bids against him. The bid money is paid into the public treasury.
• Once sufficient money has accumulated in the public treasury to do so, the utilities are purchased by the government and become free. The railroads then follow, one by one, as the treasury can afford them.
• After all utilities have been nationalised, once money accumulated in the public treasury reaches a set threshold, it is used to build a free public college on one of the corner squares, and then a second on the opposite corner squares.
• After all utilities have been nationalised and two free colleges built, additional money accumulated in the public treasury is used, each time it reaches a set threshold, to increase everyone's salary upon completing a circuit of the board.
• If a player goes to college he takes a blue card marked "education" and when he gets four of these cards he exchanges them for a card marked "professor." At the game's end, this is counted amongst the other achievements of each player during the game to determine who won, "winning" in the original game being more akin to "achieving the most meaningful things with one's money" than "ruthlessly driving everyone else into financial ruination."

The full set of 1906 rules and original game board may be found here.

Special Rules to Make It Fun

Illuminopoly

Fixes Monopoly by replacing it with a different property-management game built around the shell-company mechanic from Illuminati. You're acquiring property... so you can modulate the house wiring and put fluoride in the water and control people's MINDS. (fnord)

Solarquest

This improves the game by replacing it entirely with a different roll-and-move real estate game.

• Solarquest at BoardGameGeek

Fortune Street

A vidya version of Monopoly that manages to be a much better game, in the same vein as Solarquest, by replacing it with a better roll-and-move real estate game with more choices and more finance.

• Fortune Street at Wikipedia

Monopoly: Deal

For the fa/tg/uy who's got no moral qualms about giving money to Hasbro and/or you have a bunch of Normie friends who still want to play this drek, here's your next best bet. It's a card-based version that focuses on trading in order to create complete property sets. Unlike its parent game it's fast-paced, requires some strategy and can actually be fun.

#OccupyBoardwalk

For the anti-American commies who are protesting on Wall Street, you can play the game as the 1%.

Powers for each of the pieces

• Wheelbarrow: Move an additional amount of spaces equal to your lowest die; gain an additional 25 dollars when passing Go.
• Battleship: You may fire at any piece directly opposite the Battleship, sending them back to Go. They do not gain money from passing Go.
• Money Bag: Gain $300 when passing Go.
• Horseman: Move an additional spaces equal to your lowest die; when the Horseman lands on an occupied space, the Horseman can choose to send all other pieces back five squares or to the Horseman's nearest property, whichever is closer; when sending a piece back to his property, the Horseman must accompany them.
• Thimble: While everyone else is arguing over who gets the more popular pieces, take an extra $500 from the bank at the start.
• Automobile: Move twice the number of spaces shown on the die.
• Locomotive: All railroads cost half as much; when rolling a double and not in jail, the Locomotive can move to any owned railroads instead.
• Loom: Pay half as much when renting; mortgages pay 20% more.
• Shoe: Same as Horseman.
• Dog: The Dog may take the roll of the previous player instead of rolling their own die.
• Iron: Oops, got removed. Congrats on being retro, I guess. Or you just didn't care enough to buy a new set. Probably that. Anyway, use the same power as Thimble.
• Hat: Same as Money Bag; Hats are classy.
• Cat: Ignore the first time you have to pay rent after passing Go because half the neighbourhood feeds you.
• Bike: Same as Automobile
• Hashtag: Start a smear campaign! Same rules as Battleship
• Emoji: You start with a Get Out Of Jail card.
• Penguin: Can move straight to Free Parking if you begin the turn just visiting in jail.
• Tyrannosaurus: Roll a six on the Go to Jail Square and you don't need to go.

Metanopoly

AKA how many ways can you get your opponents to derp. Use underhanded meta-game tactics to win, and none of it is "technically" illegal. Haggle, brown-nose, backstab, and generally play pre-WW1 European politics. Barter for everything, trick people with word games, do whatever you can to be the nastiest SPAH in a game full of SPAHS. Works well with 7+ players, and is great fun against that one crafty uncle who shows up at family reunions. You know, for a game of Monopoly. Goes shorter than most games because everyone either gets curb-stomped by one guy, calls everyone else a cheater, or gets so enraged that the game turns into a bar fight and you must use your Weeaboo Fightan Magic to escape unscathed. Which is how a normal game of Monopoly ends as well, but with less waiting for it to happen.

Waropoly 40,000

In the grim darkness of the future, there is only passing Go...

In other news, GW has just announced an official Warhammer 40k Monopoly game. Until that comes out, just use the above board. It'll be basically the same thing. And it's out. It looks pretty good except for the classic jail and free parking. But there is HERESY! with you being allowed to own the Planet of Sorcerers, The Plague Planet, Titan, and Holy Terra.

Touhopoly

In the grim future of Gensokyo, the Pentex corporation controls 98% of the habitable land.

Settleropoly and Talismanopoly

Shoot the guy who suggested playing Monopoly and go play Settlers of Catan instead.

Or, if you must play Ameritrash, go play Talisman, which is at least interminable in a way that can still provide somewhat interesting decisions for all players 30 turns in.

Board Games
Classics:	Backgammon - Chess - Go - Tafl - Tic-Tac-Toe
Ameritrash:	Arkham Horror - Axis & Allies - Battleship - Betrayal at House on the Hill - Car Wars Clue/Cluedo - Cosmic Encounter - Descent: Journeys in the Dark - Dungeon! Firefly: The Game - HeroQuest - Monopoly - Mousetrap - Snakes and Ladders - Risk Talisman - Trivial Pursuit
Eurogames:	Agricola - Carcassonne - The Duke - Settlers of Catan - Small World - Stratego - Ticket to Ride
Pure Evil:	Diplomacy - Dune (aka Rex: Final Days of an Empire) - Monopoly - The Duke
Others:	Icehouse - Shadow Hunters - Twilight Imperium - Wingspan