>Most popular game in its category
>A gateway for countless people into the hobby
>Played in every country on earth
>Bitter failed game designers will try to convince you it's a bad game because "muh design principles", ignoring the boatload of real success its had
But enough about 5e, anyone wants to play monopoly?
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Monopoly is objectively shit in every conceivable way though. It's so shit that if anybody likes it, you can tell that person is shit as a human.
And what games do you like anon?
Chinatown
Catan (a guilty pleasure of mine)
Acquire
Innovation
Pax Pamir and Pax Renaissance
>Innovation
>Pax Pamir and Pax Renaissance
Based anon
>Designed to highlight the flaws of a system
>Ended up beloved and a classic for how fun it played.
It was never fun outside moments where you can humiliate your family members, tho. And even then it was more about random chance than skill.
Every time they try anything
The Settlers of Catan mogs Monopoly so hard it hurts.
>anyone wants to play monopoly?
God no, it's a very unpleasant experience.
it's cool to hate on Monopoly, but it's a decent game.
it's not cool to hate on D&D 5e, and go frick yourself.
I know this thread is bait, but in this essay I want to lay out the exact reasons as to why Monopoly has bad game design. I don't care to convince OP, but rather the average lurker who just reads without posting. This one's for you lads.
Monopoly is a bad game because it's a boring waste of time. It's maybe two steps above Candyland or Snakes and Ladders in complexity. Candyland and similar games are completely chance-based and have no player agency. There is nothing for the player to do except for act as an impartial executor of a rules-based system. I don't think that anyone on this planet has a problem with Candyland's design: it's obviously a game intended to be played by preschool children and it's meant to teach babies fine motor skills, color recognition, and simple counting. Candyland is a better gateway game than Monopoly. Monopoly does have elements of money-counting, dice counting, and fine motor skills, so it might be fun for toddlers or with particularly dim-witted adults who find counting physical money fun.
Anyone arguing that "it can be fun if you make up your own rules" is a drooling moronic moron because that's true of anything and has no bearing on the actual game itself. Those people can frick right off back to preschool, or go hang out with Jean-Paul Sartre.
Monopoly is a boring waste of time because the game is designed to disincentivize players from actually playing it by encouraging denial entanglement. It has very little player choice, has a small handful of extremely obvious strategies to optimize any player choices that there are, and is likely to never end if the players are competent.
cont.
This is an exhaustive list of the things you can do in a game of Monopoly:
1) Roll dice to move your token and take the action on the tile you land on. These are all game actions, you are forced to do them, so there's no choice to make here (French philosophers begone).
2) If you land on an unowned property, you have the choice to buy it at face value or to participate in an immediate auction with other players for that property.
3) At any time: you may sell the Get Out of Jail Free card to another player for any price, buy buildings on monopolized color groups, buy or sell any owned unimproved property, mortgage an unimproved property you own, or lift a mortgage from a property you own.
4) If you've been sent to Jail and it's not your third consecutive turn in Jail, you can pay a fine to leave or use the Get Out of Jail Free card. It's usually the best strategy to stay in Jail for as long as possible if there are no unowned properties, since moving around the board is generally costly, but whether this is the case may depend. It's very simple to determine.
5) When you are forced to pay property tax, you must make the choice of 10% or the flat fee immediately, before calculations. Since the math in Monopoly is trivial and the objective is to pay a lower fee, there is obviously an optimal choice here.
The most interesting thing to do in a game of Monopoly is to participate in an auction, because that's a whole separate mostly social sub-game that relies on bluffing. However, the obviously best strategy is to buy as many properties as possible as quickly as possible and to not even risk an auction, so the game rules discourage players from participating in this fun activity. If you're in an auction, just win it lol.
cont.
It's never a good strategy to sell property to another player. It is ALWAYS optimal to play a game where you deny as many monopolies to other players as possible. You can consider this a bit of a social game where you lie to the other player that giving you a monopoly is a good idea, but it's such an obvious and transparent lie that only a child or fool would believe it. Once again, the game rules discourage players from participating in any kind of positive entanglement. Instead, the game rules encourage denial entanglement, which means that it's optimal to deny other players the ability to play the game.
In the same vein, the optimal way to buy houses is to buy them all and cause a housing shortage which denies other players from building any more houses, and removes their ability to play the game.
The game only ends when the second-to-final player has been eliminated through bankruptcy. Bankruptcy only happens if a player owes someone else more money than they have. It is generally possible to move around the board while paying fewer than $200 per go-around, so unless players are paying more due to someone owning a monopoly, the game will tend to infinity. This bit here can be a little bit fun because it becomes a risk management game, but it's Monopoly, there's only a handful of risks to manage: can you afford to pay rent or taxes versus how likely is it that you'll have to pay either thing.
If the players have all followed these obvious strategies and nobody was lucky enough to obtain a monopoly, then there is literally nothing to do in the game except throw dice and move your token forever. In this way, the game boils down to get lucky or socially finesse idiots into letting you win while denying other people the ability to play the game. Does that sound like fun? It sounds like a miserable boring time.
cont.
If you play with children or dumbasses, maybe Monopoly can be fun for the not-child-not-dumbass, but the child/dumbass will resent you because the game mechanics mean they don't get to play. If you play with adults, Monopoly is a game of pure chance.
Just play poker instead, which is a game based around chance, risk management, and socially finessing possibly-not-idiots into letting you win.
The thing is that if you were playing Monopoly with three dumbasses and you were in a position to dominate the game via the few strategic options you have, those dumbasses are probably also going to try adding the popular Monopoly houserules which almost always just make the game take even longer by making it harder to deny people's ability to play.
Candylands only real point is it's a board game you can get a 3 year old to play, and it can be a good introduction to things like taking turns and how game mechanics work, even if there are literally no choices and it's all in the order of the cards.
Truth. You have inspired me to say my opinion on the most fun actually good version of monopoly and that game is monopoly empire since it relies on hitting a fixed objective relating to your own holdings not just making everyone else go broke through sheer chance so there is some strategy involved and you can control your own victory instead of relying on the bad luck of others.
For example in monopoly empire there is no property color monopolies or houses and the goal is to build a tower with the higher the tower making rent for players to you more expensive and whoever reachs the top of their tower wins. This is done by buying properties which are then stacked ontop of eachother so not only does this end the game quicker by just handing victory to the person obviously winning but it also removes the dumbass filter and time wasting of trying to get people to stupidly sell color monopolies they own and buying the housing market in order to ever have a chance of finishing the game in a timely manner. One of the dice also has a side that lets you swap the top most owned property from another player with your own so now there is an extra layer of strategy of putting smaller properties ontop of your large ones to protect them and to swap using the smaller ones. The chance cards also have a much bigger impact besides free money and the tax spaces straight up remove the top most property instead of a fee making them much more impactful.
TDLR monopoly empire is the best monopoly and you should play it if you want to play monopoly but not a shit game.
Yeah, empire was an eye opener for my folks.
Then they lost the board and went back to playing the regular version.
>Then they lost the board and went back to playing the regular version.
lmao
Monopoly is good for one thing only: illustrating Pareto principle in practical terms
So good to see someone with media literacy here.
Pareto principle has been deboonked, tho
>Pareto principle has been deboonked
Hardly
The only thing is that sometimes the 80% is more like 99.99%
>millions of people play it yet none of them enjoy it
The League of Legends of board games.
(crazy) Labyrinth wants a little word with you!
In what world is Crazy Labyrinth anywhere popular enough to warrant hate?
It pummeled families inro hate each other!
i like playing monopoly but i have never finished a single game
i don't know what makes people get angry over the game though, it's peak ameritrash fun as long as you remember you have little control over anything that happens
Actual ameritrash games have at least high production value going for them. Monopoly has the depth of a low end ameritrash game while looking like barebones eurotactics save the possible licenced elements from whatever IP this particular version was sold as. Worst of the both worlds.
No but if its a game of hansa teutonica instead I'm in.
>ported to over 9000 different franchises
>still plays exactly the same (like shit)
But enough about 5e, who wants to play STAR WARS Monopoly?!
Personally I think Monopoly is fine as long as you play to the actual rules, but stop playing as soon as one person goes bankrupt.
It's fine as long as you don't play with tryhards. 70% of monopoly games stall out indefinitely if you refuse to trade according to that video I vaguely remember but am going to reference as a scientific survey. You gotta at least have players willing to attempt cons and deals
Pretty much this. As with any social activity, excluding autists makes it better.
Look, if excluding autists was a valid answer to this problem I'd never get invited to games nights in the first place.