Is Monopoly broken or brilliant? Like Dominoes, Beer Pong, and Quidditch, Monopoly belongs to the rare class of games that are also traditions. Bankrupting your tablemates while rolling dice and running your fingers through that sweet, sweet paper money has proven utterly infectious.
The game has been around for an entire century, as Uncle Pennybags and his old-timey hat clearly indicate. During that time, an incredible 275 million copies have been sold, with official versions in over half of the world's countries. And whether you love Red Sox, Alan Turing, or, I don't know, horses, there's probably an edition for you. But all the celebrity from Monopoly is kind of strange, because Monopoly kind of sucks, right? At least many people who think critically about board games agree that it is clearly no good. Ultimate example of a board game is Monopoly. Well, this is Cat-opoloy. So this game is slightly less worse because it involves cats. On BoardGameGeek, for instance, it ranks 10,870th, below snoozers like Old Maid and Go Fish-- Old Maid, people. And according to board game critic Quintin Smith of Shut Up & Sit Down, it has numerous flaws. You often see who's going to win a long time before it actually happens. You can be eliminated, like, hours before anyone else https://oncasinogames.com/canada/. And it relies on a mechanic called roll and move, for every turn is at the mercy of a dice roll. I mean, there's literally a deck called "Chance," the polar opposite of skill. So what gives? Does half of the world just have terrible taste in board games, or is there something else going on? Monopoly is a terrible game. Monopoly may not actually be at fault here. In fact, all of our hate likely stems from the fact that we're playing the game completely wrong. And if you look at the history of the game, you'll see what I mean. Monopoly's roots are in a socialist folk game called The Landlord Game, designed by Lizzie Magie in 1906. There's a wonderful article in "Harper's" if you want to dive deeper into the backstory. I'll link to it in the description. According to Mary Pilon, author of "The Monopolists," the game originally taught people about the evils of monopolies by putting you in the shoes of greedy landlords. It was part of a zeitgeist led by Teddy Roosevelt against robber-baron American industrialists who were sucking the blood out of the economy. It was played in a way that was very similar to the game that you know today, with players hopping around the board, riddled with railroads and properties with really high rents. But there were some key differences. Players were all given equal chance to buy property before the game started. You could move in either direction around the board, provided you were debt free, of course. And it was all wrapped up in this anti-capitalist, monopolies-are-bad package. Also "Go" was labeled "Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages," because, I don't know, socialism. So where did we all go wrong? Well, the interesting thing about The Landlord Game is that even the original patent mentioned that players can change the rules. And change them they did. For example, the 1920s Quaker community took strongly to the game and made a lot of changes that shaped the game to be the one that we know today. ALL: Thanks, Monopoly! Prices for properties were placed on the board, so good Quaker children wouldn't scream and yell auctioning them. And since many Quakers lived in Atlantic City, all the real estate properties in the games were changed to streets from there. Baltic Avenue harbored the poor African American communities, which why rent is so cheap. And Park Place was the site of segregated beaches and these big hotels, where rich out-of-towners would stay. So if the specter of American racism and classicism bums you out, don't worry. It gets much, much better. In 1935, a man named Charles Darrow cloned the game, sold it to the Parker Brothers, and Monopoly was born. They slapped a mascot on it who is the spitting image of Andrew Carnegie, and threw in a game piece in the shape of a top hat as nod to those cigar-puffing fat cats. In the hands of Parker Brothers, Monopoly flipped from being a game that critiqued the ugly side of land ownership to a game that celebrated it. Monopoly became this unholy union of socialism and capitalism, baked in with conflicting principles and governed by rules that are frequently broken. And this makes the game, well, messy. At its heart, Monopoly is not a bad game. It's just that we're playing it wrong. Because of the game's branding and prevalence of money, we assume that it's just a board game version of the Rich Kids of Instagram. But this makes it bad. And it runs against the original game that Lizzie Magie designed. So then what's the right way to play Monopoly anyway? For one, don't try to accumulate too much cash. Spend it really, really quickly. To quote the 2009 Monopoly world champ, the real object is to bankrupt your opponent as quickly as possible, to have just enough so that everybody else has nothing. And if you think that's really, really dark, this dog-eat-dog ecosystem was absolutely Lizzie Magie's intention. She wanted to use the game's rules to show the player how monopolies could drive up real estate prices and wreck communities, something that's playing out right here as I'm filming this in New York City. In today's design vocabulary, this is what's known as procedural rhetoric. It's the 1910 equivalent of stamping passports and "papers, please" and how it makes you reflect on the dehumanizing aspects of post-9/11 immigration. But this critical aspect is lost, because we all just want to be big-shot millionaires, counting our dollars and giving ourselves no-interest loans from the bank. And this usually manifests itself in the house rules, which may seem great, but actually kind of break the game. For instance, when you roll snake eyes, you get a cash bonus, or land on free parking-- oh, free parking. Most people think that when you land on free parking, you get paid a super-sized purse that has been collected from everyone's losses. Not in the rules anywhere. I checked. But here's the rub. This cash infusion does awful things to the game's balance. Money is intended to be a limited resource, just like in real life. But these rule changes keep pumping it back into lucky players hands. The result is a game that lasts forever, since you only lose by going bust. And that's one of the reasons why people say Monopoly is so boring. Over the years, other bad mechanics have wormed their way into the game, like the introduction of hotels. We can blame this one on the Quakers, who we can't blame for much. But they also gave us oatmeal, so we'll let it slide. THEME SONG: Nourishment for breakfast, oatmeal today. The number of available houses in Monopoly has a hard limit at 32. And one successful strategy is to create a housing shortage by buying them all up. That way, if you own two monopolies with four houses on each property-- that's 24 houses total-- there are only eight houses left in play. This puts a serious crimp on your opponent. But the option of trading four houses in for a hotel undermines this strategy.
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