Defending Monopoly

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.