Defending Monopoly
June 6, 2009 by Robert
Filed under Board Game Articles
If you’re not someone who’s deeply into the whole board game thing, I have a little surprise for you today. It might shock you, this revelation, when I whisper it into your ear.
Here it is.
Most board game fans hate Monopoly.
It’s true. Pick up that dropped jaw. Monopoly. The Family’s Favourite. Old Faithful. Good old bloody Monopoly!
They hate it.
You want to know why they hate it, right? Well, we need to start there before we can build any case for the defence. So let’s have a look at just a couple of the big problems.
It’s a Roll and Move game. “Roll and Move” is a vile term for many boardgamers. It terrifies them. “Duck and Cover” is less scary. Even “Bend and Spread ‘Em” is preferable. There is nothing the hardcore boardgamer hates more than the indignity of having to roll a dice and then – imagine the humiliation – MOVE ONLY AS FAR AS THE DOTS ON THE DICE TELL YOU. There’s no strategy here, they say. Nothing but luck, as you move around the board hoping to (in the early going) land on the big properties or (in the endgame) avoid that big fucker of a hotel on Mayfair. Luck is a bad word. No 4-letter word shocks the hardcore boardgamer like the word we shall hereafter refer to as “the other L-Word.”
Player Elimination is the next big problem. How can anyone love a game where a player can be obliterated and thrown out of the game two hours before the end, leaving him twiddling his thumbs and wishing death upon a small metal boot? And yet, families have managed to endure this nightmare for generations. There are coping mechanisms. Often, mum wants to go bankrupt so that she can sneak next door and continue her affair with the neighbour, who works out. Sometimes the son wants to lose fast so he can escape from his father’s body odour. There are ways and means to deal with it. After all, an early eliminee can go and make cocktails, or phone an ambulance in advance of the violence that inevitably erupts when someone lands on that big fucker of a hotel on Mayfair.
Another thing that really winds up the boardgamer is that people think that a board game is Monopoly. Not that Monopoly is a board game. No. That a board game, any board game, is Monopoly. If you tell someone you’re having a board game night, they think that you’ll be settling in for a heavy session of Monopoly. You and your buddies, chugging beer, reading Community Chest cards and winning Beauty Contests. If you tell someone you like board games, you will get Monopoly for Christmas. This is guaranteed.
Monopoly has earned its place, though. That’s the thing. It’s hiding in every home. It might not get brought out very often, but it’ll be there. Stashed in a dusty cupboard, like hidden porn. It’s the board game equivalent of the sleeper cell. It sits in the dark and waits, and eventually gets put on a table. And then it works its magic.
Yes. I said “magic”.
Monopoly is a game with a theme. That theme teaches us that in a capitalist world, a few people get very rich and everybody else gets fucked. It’s a socialist game at heart. Five people sit down to play Monopoly, and only one person walks away happy. The rest walk away broke and angry. That’s life. It’s a game of chance, a game of opportunity. You roll a dice, and a possibility presents itself. You have a choice. Either you invest and try to be a bastard like everyone else, or progress passes you by and you end up living on Old Kent Road. Until you land on Mayfair and find out your place. In the gutter. The person who wins Monopoly is rich and happy, sure. But he is hated. When he dies, he won’t be missed. He has to get what pleasure he can from two things – wealth (represented by meaningless fake paper notes, unlike the real world’s meaningless real paper notes) and the devastation and poverty of his fellow man.
Monopoly is a game with a message. It’s fun enough, but the fun is a disguise. Monopoly is a letter bomb sent through time by Lizzie Magie, and that letter contains a statement more powerful than most of the other boardgames that are adored and championed.
We should be proud that Monopoly stands forever in the foreground of the landscape of our hobby. Forget about how fun it is. That a message so grim is fun at all is the true achievement.
I thought I had known everything there is about Monopoly. I thought I learnt that by the time I was 14. Truth is, I didnt. Not until I was 22 and in university.
I lived with some friends, one of which was a Monopoly demon. She was an agressive competitive player, who loved the game because she usually won. I was the sensible one who owned the game, so that made me banker.
Sat next to me was the hot girl who the banker had a crush on. She sat next to me so that she could every now and then, subtly sneak money out of the bankers tray, whilst flitting her eyes at me. Noone would notice until all of a sudden, she had the means to pay off a heavy fine without mortgaging any property.
There were other people as well, who were negotiators. They would purposefully buy any property so that they could sell it on later on if they hadnt collected all the colour rank.
If you wondered how the game played, this is a picture of a typical game; http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=60812539&albumID=396594&imageID=844570
Notice the sea of red around the jail. It still gives me nightmares to this day.
Are there multiple hotels on properties there? What witchcraft is this?!
Thats what happens when you are slightly drunk, cant be bothered to read all the rules, and want a winner within 4 hours.
It was taken at around 3am, so I make no apologies for what happened.
Just to point out as well that paper clips and pins make excellent makeshift hotels as well, for future information.
A man afraid to house rule is a man afraid to live.
A socialist game at heart? Either that, or Monopoly is an incredibly sinister deliberate attempt to indoctrinate the principles of heartless, unrestricted capitalism into innocent children in the guise of fun, of course. YEAH.
In truth, Stu, it’s a Georgist thing. But lets call it Socialist, for simplicity’s sake. Hope to see you as a regular on here, Stu, by the way. Your input would be a benefit to all.
Wow, well put sir.
How can anyone hate a game that has a Batman edition?
http://www.boardgamebeast.com/batman-monopoly.html
Though, not owning the game, I wonder how some of the Chance/Community Chest stuff works in a Batman context. Nobody’s giving Batman a speeding fine! And who’s giving Batman a tenner for his birthday? He’s a billionaire!
Though the Monopoly universe in general is a bit weird when you think about it. Everybody knows someone in prison they can go visit, planning permission for hotels are dependant on already owning houses on a location, Dogs and inanimate objects can be tycoons…
Hopefully Ridley Scott’s Monopoly movie will address some of these issues.
Can Batman win beauty contests?
Nobody actually does in Monopoly. They only ever come in 2nd place.
Poor ugly Batman
I can kind of get why some people are “downers” on monopoly, in my mind there’s a fair bit of crossover with the current casual gamers on Wii debacular, I’d imagine quite a few board gamers are dissapointed that “this” is all the general public thinks of when they think of board games.
I kind of get that, kind of.
But monopoly is beast. A towering juggernaut of genius striding across the board game landscape. It’s straightfoward to play, easy to pick up but with enough depth to challenge a dedicated group of players. It’s exhilerating and infuriating in equal measure. It divides players into factions in one move, and unites them in another. It teaches the young guns that Granny still has a few tricks up her brandy stained sleaves. It creates the sort of arguments that can divide family units for generations!
But most of all from a mechanical sense it sits with in a space where victory lies on just the right mix of skill and luck.
Monopoly is great. I cant get anyone to play it though. I was gonna buy it in this big wooden box thing. Answer me this though, is it actually in the rules that you can do under the table swaps? Plenty an argument over that.
Another big reason people don;t like Monopoly is that they don’t play it by the rules:
http://www.criticalmiss.com/issue10/CampaignRealMonopoly1.html
Gist of above article – the widely ignored auction rule prevents the game dragging on interminably forever.
I’m one of the people that can’t stand it. I used to enjoy it, then I began to dislike it without really knowing why. Eventually, I figured out why I couldn’t stand it.
Now I refuse to play it without it being some sort of theme game – StarWarsOpoly or the like.
It *is* a roll and move game. There’s a tiny bit of strategy, but really, it’s sort of like blackjack. A good game of blackjack is just running a set of rules. Hell, when I played $1 blackjack in Vegas, half the time the dealer just made choices for people if they didn’t pay enough attention.
It’s just not that much fun.
But it is a gateway game – people play it, then realize they can play, say, Scrabble, or Sorry, or Parcheesi. Then, hey, this Catan game is a lot like Monopoly, kinda. And then before they know it, they’re playing 8 hour games of Twilight Imperium 3 or Diplomacy.
Thomas, me lad, two above me there, what-ho! I must confess that in my youth I played it without the auction rules. My shoes were blown off my feet and my glasses blown off my face when my girlfriend pointed out I had been playing it like AN IDIOT for my entire childhood.
For me, the essential way to play Monopoly is TO THE LETTER. Auctions in, no silly house rules.
Monopoly is what it is – a fucking classic.
Funny.. My two oldest boys are fine young men. Polite, well-educated, decent human beings(just don’t tell them I said so). When we get together to play Monopoly, all bets are off. We turn into thieving, conniving, manipulative bastards. Side deals, cheating, robbery are all on the table, though there is some honor amongst the thieves.
The game is not won, until someone gets pissed and flips the board. Yeah, just a great game..
Too right, it’s by the book or nothing in my house these days.
I think that this is something that testifies to the genius of monopoly – how many people there are who insist that their particular crazy set of rules are THE only way to play.
My wife continues to try and enforce her “rule” whereby any fines a player receives are placed in the centre of the board and then “awarded” to the next player who lands on Free Parking. It’s madness!
Ergonomic Cat man, there’s more than a tiny bit of strategy involved, the ‘nopoly is all about the strategy. If there’s a criticism it’s the high amount of chance involved, but mechanics involving lots of luck don’t automatically equal little strategy, if anything it’s the opposite.
Yep I absolutely love Monopoly. The thing I especially love about it is that you can take the basic game and completely fuck with the rules and still have a great time with it. IMO the roll-and-move stuff is fine – it is simply there to promote some migration of wealth, and to instigate all the interesting interactions / off-board wheeling and dealing that make Monopoly so much fun. The movement isn’t the strategic bit, it isn’t meant to be.
Incidentally, what’s with all the EA branding all over Monopoly these days? I was in Toys’R'Us today and you couldn’t move among the Monopoly games for EA logos.