The Way You Play Monopoly is Wrong

Sorry for the clickbait title. Let me clarify, that I do not mean wrong in the sense of "not within the rules"; Monopoly has always had family variations. No other game has so many well established and almost universally accepted rules without making them the official rules.

What I mean by the title of this article is that you are playing Monopoly wrong for your own aims. Monopoly has a reputation of causing family arguments and for taking forever. However these are as a direct result of using the family rules.

Let me elaborate. The original game was designed so that more money leaves the game than enters the game so that eventually all bar one will go bankrupt. This was a quite finely balanced machine, you want money to leave the game otherwise it will go on forever. I suspect that the various rules that people add which give people more money were intended to create good feelings, but they only lengthen the period.

Under this category of family rules which add more money I put: fines in the middle which you collect on Free Parking and double payday if you land on Go. Not only do they contribute to almost doubling the length of the game (amazingly), they also reward luck.

Then there are the family rules which lengthen the game in other ways without introducing more money: not buying on the first circuit, not allowing trade until all properties are gone etc. Why would you do that to yourself? I despair.

If you've never played the base game without the family rules, you might be surprised to hear that at university we often played it as a 30 minute game (computer simulations show that it takes about 40 turns each on average to reach an endgame scenario). Now of course, you can play it however you choose in your own family, but I'm not convinced you are actually happy with your decision. Not only do people often have hang ups about Monopoly, but since it is typically people's first introduction to board games people often bring the bad association with them.

Do yourself a favour and give it a go without the gimmicks. You'll have to point out that "but we have always played it with these rules" is not actually an argument to your family, but I promise it is worth it. Or, you could go and play a good game like Settler's of Catan. I leave that up to you.