For everyone stuck in the game. The problem with "capitalism" isn't voluntary market exchanges. It is corrupted markets from hierarchical power discrepancies. UBI, as the power to say no, solves the structural desperation imposed on people threatened by starvation. The monopoly analogy is slightly distorted because there is still some undeveloped land that can compete with existing housing affordability.
It took me way too long to realize how fucked up it is that you build houses on your properties and as soon as you collected enough rent money evict all those families, tear down the houses and build a hotel instead.
The best way to win the game is actually to aggressively build houses and never upgrade to hotels. I'm pretty sure that the rules as written don't allow anyone to buy houses if there's not any house pieces left so if you can get a bunch of the cheaper properties and max out houses you can stop any of the rest of the players from being able to jack up the rent on their properties.
Correct. I have recited this in a million contexts over the last 20 years.. the first sentence in Business 101 textbook: "there is scarcity" and therefore all the shit that has followed
Monopoly is a very boring game when you're just throwing dice and hoping to get lucky early on.
Then, two or three players have a lot of fun haggling over properties for a bit in the middle.
But once the trading is done and monopolies are locked in, there's never a reason to trade again and you're back to just rolling dice until someone goes broke.
The original version of the game had a "cooperative" mode, where you tried to develope the whole board in the fewest number of turns. But even that was largely "roll dice, hope you get lucky".
It's just not a good game, overall. Catan plays much faster and still gives you the bargaining dynamic. Puerto Rico lets you play a soulless land developer without the randomness. Tzolk'in has a way cooler board. And if you've got 2-3 hours to blow on a board game, pick up one of the insane 4Xers like Eclipse or do something more exciting like Galaxy Trucker for a madcap puzzle/racing adventure.
Monopoly is designed to be unbalanced on purpose. It's mostly derived from the Landlord's Game that was made to be a political education tool about the accumulation of land and real estate in a few private hands.
That was the point of the original game though right? To show how quickly it becomes imbalanced and players who got lucky early on easily ended up winning.
Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, created in 1903 in the United States by left-wing feminist Lizzie Magie, as a way to demonstrate that an economy rewarding individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth.