Game Review: Monopoly

2/29/24, 10:09 PM

Monopoly — a classic American board game. And a classic case study in poor game design.

Many¹ folks have been asking for my compiled list of reasons I dislike Monopoly, so here we are. Enjoy :)

Pieces and Packaging

A big part of a game’s appeal is its look and feel. I’m happy to report that Monopoly does fairly well in this category. Even among ubiquitous board games, Monopoly stands alone in the sheer quantity of crossovers with other brands.

There’s Star Wars Monopoly, National Parks Monopoly - my friend recently got Squishmallows Monopoly. If there’s a version of Monopoly you want, there’s a good chance it already exists.

In terms of component quality, Monopoly is unremarkable. Most editions contain thin paper money, slightly less thin cards, plastic houses and hotels, and metal player pieces. The base edition has an unremarkable, utilitarian board design filled with text, property group colors, and empty spaces. For its time, it’s a reasonable design, but modern game boards are typically a little more interesting to look at.

One flaw I always notice (at least in the standard version of Monopoly) is that 4 houses do not fit nicely on a single property color header.²

Instructions

Monopoly has utilitarian instructions to match its game board. Again, the instructions are an artifact of their time. Reasonable care to handle edge cases is provided, but the length and lack of color or diagrams means that most players will never successfully read the rules.³

I do appreciate that the instructions provide a variant for a shorter game. The designers clearly recognize that the early game is a slog, so players can follow the variant to spare themselves the pain of slowly buying up properties at the start of the game.

Gameplay

Monopoly is fundamentally a snowball game — getting ahead early provides a lasting advantage that can be difficult to overcome. The first player to establish a Monopoly, build 3 houses, and extract a huge rent is typically the significant favorite.

Monopoly also leans toward luck rather than strategy. While Monopoly is not totally devoid of strategy, luck usually dominates the outcome. First-time players have a reasonable chance of winning once they grasp the basic rules. Among experienced players, the game is a crapshoot for who can acquire a Monopoly and get someone to land on it first. Careful strategic play is possible, but rarely enough to overcome poor dice luck.

Quintessentially American, Monopoly is a great example of an American-style game. Gameplay is relatively interactive, and the game is largely zero-sum. Trading, auctioning, and extracting rent from other players are all cornerstones of the game, and solidly American-style mechanics.

Pointless bookkeeping

One of the worst parts of Monopoly is the huge amount of pointless bookkeeping the game forces upon you. The best example of this is rent on unimproved properties. Outside of the railroads, utilities, and maybe Boardwalk, most unimproved properties charge a negligible amount of money when you land on them.

The early game consists of looking up who owns a property, and then making change for $1 bills in order to pay someone $14, only for them to pay you back $22 a few rounds later. Unless you’re trying to teach young children how to make change, these transactions are silly.⁴

Until monopolies are established and houses are built, the rent amounts are so small that they have no practical effect on the outcome of the game. In life, there are many activities that consist of bookkeeping drudgery, but they usually come with a refund or at least a cool game concept.

Few meaningful choices

Monopoly is a game largely dependent on luck. This is not an issue in and of itself. However, Monopoly actively offers players choices, and then uses random chance to invalidate the outcome of those choices.

One of the primary choices a player has is whether to purchase or auction off a property. In practice, this is a choice which is usually obvious. If it’s early in the game or a purchase completes your Monopoly, buy. Otherwise, auction is likely a better option (to save money or just get the property at a lower price).

The other major choice a player has in Monopoly is how and when to cut a deal to acquire a Monopoly. Only lucky players will acquire a full set without a trade; other players must trade with each other to have a chance at victory.

Negotiating this key trade is usually the most interesting part of Monopoly. After the trade is complete, strategy generally converges on buying as many houses as you can afford and hoping other players land on you before you land on them.

Protracted Endgame

Few players actually complete a game of Monopoly by rule, with resignations or abandonment of the game being common. And for good reason.

Monopoly has a long and ugly endgame. Once all or most of the properties are purchased and one or more monopolies emerge, the game degenerates into a tedious grind. Due to the way rent scales, it’s generally optimal for players to first build up a single monopoly to at least 3 houses before building houses elsewhere. In many cases, players prefer to hold onto properties to prevent more monopolies for their opponents.

This pattern sets up an endgame where most squares are irrelevant, either because they are mortgaged for cash or because they remain unimproved and charging negligible rent. Players often have to go around the board several times before anyone lands on a property that actually matters.

When a player does land on an improved property, this typically destroys their winning chances. It’s possible to survive landing on one improved property with cash on hand or enough unmortgaged properties, but once a player has to sell their own houses to pay off another player, their practical chances of winning go to zero, even if they’re not actually eliminated.

The result is an endgame that snowballs in favor of the player most ahead, and yet often drags on well past the point when the winner is all but determined. There’s usually several rounds of “zombie” players going around the board, hoping against hope that they can somehow dodge the leader’s properties for 10+ rounds to collect enough cash to unmortgage properties, rebuild their houses and whittle down the leader’s cash stockpile.

A comeback is exceedingly rare, but the tiny chance of one usually adds significant time to the game, which is especially detrimental while other bankrupted players are sitting on the sidelines. It’s not fun to move around the board waiting for your inevitable bankrupting, and it’s not fun for players already bankrupted to watch.

Weak Mechanics

Despite being a strategically simple game, Monopoly has several mechanics which add complexity to the design for no real gain.

Hotels are one such mechanic.

One theory is that hotels prevent players from reaching the hard cap on houses that can come into play. In my experience, though, starving other players of houses by staying on 4 houses on multiple properties rarely comes up or matters in a real game.

Hotels also give a small discounts when drawing the repairs cards, but otherwise add no additional behavior, and work as a 5th house in the vast majority of cases.

Community chest and chance are another example of complexity without cause. Why are there two separate piles of cards with random effects? Both can be either good or bad, and it’s not as if players are able to choose which to draw from.

The Chance and Community Chest cards are also criminally underused pieces of design space that could be so much more interesting without adding significant complexity.

Instead, we get this:

The flavor is the most imaginative thing about these cards. Most cards simply make a player gain or lose a fixed amount of money from the bank.

It’s not hard to come up with some better card designs that would add interesting options to Monopoly. Here are a few:

• Antitrust Law: Play this card to prevent the property group of your choice from being upgraded past 2 houses for the rest of the game. (Existing houses can stay)
• House Construction: Play this to build a house or upgrade to a hotel for free.
• Hostile Takeover: Play this card to choose an unimproved property owned by another player — purchase that property from that player for twice the sticker price.
• Business Acumen: Play this card to reroll a single die that you have just rolled. You must accept the new result.

I think these designs make drawing a card much more interesting, and introduce noncash, nonproperty assets with ambiguous value. I can easily imagine a player negotiating to acquire these cards or selling them to a player who can better utilize them.

The iconic “Get Out of Jail Free” card actually would do some work in this direction, but it is completely undermined by allowing players to pay $50 to get the same effect. “Get Out of Jail Free” is basically a $50 bill with an asterisk, when it could have been a unique and flavorful effect.

Conclusion

If I never played Monopoly again, I wouldn’t exactly be sad. It’s not a uniformly terrible game — clearly, it has captivated us for decades, or they wouldn’t have made 1667 branded versions.⁵ But it’s a game where the fun parts are infrequent and brief, and the boring parts are the norm.

It’s too serious for a casual background game, and too casual for core board gamers. I never choose to pick up this game if I can avoid it.

Rating: 3/10

At least there are 1667 versions.

Footnotes

1. Read: more than one ↩

2. Maybe you’re just not supposed to put the houses all on the color bar, but that’s how everyone I’ve played with does it. ↩

3. I think this is a big reason why many people don’t play with the auction — they simply don’t know that auctioning unsold properties is part of the rules. ↩

4. Even so, in a world of credit cards and instant bank transfers, making change is an increasingly irrelevant skill. ↩

5. https://monopoly.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Monopoly_Games_(Board) ↩