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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.
Monopoly is designed to be unbalanced on purpose.
It's not the imbalance that's the problem. It's the glacial pace and the lack of meaningful decision points.
the lack of meaningful decision points.
Again, that's part of the point.
It can be played quicker. Players don't get money for passing go. That's socialism don'tcha know? And if you end up in jail it's for twice the turns as there are players. A few tweaks here and there make the game quicker and way more unfair, hammering home the point that the player who gets a lucky roll first will dominate the other players.
That doesn't make it a good game. They don't give it away for free at Economics classes, it's sold worldwide by Hasbro!
In a really cynical turn of events, Hasbro (or whatever company came before) ripped of the woman who made The Landlord's Game to make monopoly and made billions in the process.
The irony is too damn high.
That sucks. But the original point was it's a bad game. The fact that it's an unethical, bad game doesn't change that.
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.
Spot on.
There is a reason that it only has a rating of 4.4 of 10. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1406/monopoly/
Still 3.4 to high...
Just like the capitalism it emulates, no?