Monopoly started out to show that capitalism is based on luck and opportunity, and that the end result is one person owning everything.
The whole process is miserable and even when you win you have to sit thru a prolonged ending where you slowly drain every last resource from you friends and family.
It’s not a bad game, they just overestimated how well Americans can pick up irony.
Originally called “The Landlord’s Game” Parker Brothers changed it to something less obviously terrible in the run up to the great depression.
I don’t know if Far Side is really that deep but:
The only way to win is to not play
Is literally the point the game tries to beat over family’s heads for hours at a time.
In an ironic twist of complete capitalist predictability, the game we know today was also stolen from the original developer.
Far Side? Here I thought that was from War Games.
It definitely is. As an avid fan of The Far Side, I can’t come up with any connection between it and that quote.
Originally called “The Landlord’s Game” Parker Brothers changed it to something less obviously terrible in the run up to the great depression.
Goes to show you how indoctrinated and manipulated we all are when we think that the idea of a monopoly is more acceptable than a landlord.
They clearly meant it’s a worse name for a board game, not that it references a worse thing
That’s what I’ve been saying all the time when my brother says monopoly sucks when you don’t win. It’s literally designed to make you suffer
Not quite. Parker Brothers had always intended it to have a pro-capitalist message. The woman (and of course it was a woman who got fucked over) who invented The Landlord’s Game essentially got duped.
Whenever anyone suggests playing Monopoly I always insist on following the rules as written. (Auctions, no money on Free Parking, building evenly across properties, when there’s no more houses left in the bank no one can build houses, etc.) The game goes a little faster that way… because everyone eventually agrees to quit and play something else.
If you play by the rules the game isn’t that long, either whoever owns orange or who gets lucky at the beginning just wins the game.
When I was a kid the family rule was that the game is only over once there’s a “real” winner, meaning all the others gone bankrupt. Always great for the first loser and easy 3-4 hour games. I just liked playing the bank and sorting bills.
Monopoly’s precursor “The Landlord’s Game” was invented by Lizzie Magie in the early 1900s to demonstrate why Capitalism needs Georgism to actually have any semblance of fairness, competition, and longevity.
Georgism is roughly the idea that ALL tax should come from land ownership, and that taxes on labour/wages should be abolished.
The game was created to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”. She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.
Personally I think the landlords would just increase the rent while saying their interests are literally the only ones that need protection from the state because they generate all the revenue but can’t blame them for trying.
Generally speaking landlords charge as much in rent as the market will bear. If they could get away with charging more they would already be doing so.
Right, and when tenants aren’t paying taxes?
Rents will presumably rise accordingly, and then be captured in the form of a tax that is both very difficult to evade and no longer harms economic efficiency
I think that’s a rather hopeful view of the situation, but, on the other hand, I guess it would also help real estate bubbles from forming so there’s that at least.
Right, and when tenants aren’t paying taxes?
Then tenants will keep more money, in any case where there’s any competition in housing.
And in any case where there’s no competition in the housing supply, tenants will still be unharmed because they’re already paying the maximum amount that landlords can get away with.
It’s risk free for tenants.
Counterintuitively, a LVT wouldn’t distort prices because the supply of land is fixed.
My first thought was that ending the taxes at land ownership was shortsighted - all capital should be taxed - but then I looked up Georgism on Wikipedia and saw that that was basically already in scope (mostly by “including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property)”).
I’m already paying taxes for owning a small parcel of land to live on on top of income and sales taxes. It hurts from so many sides. 🥲
Georgeism would not increase your overall tax burden, it would shift taxation away from things like income and sales tax and toward land value (excluding improvements like your home). Your overall tax burden would only increase if you occupy a larger then average share of the total land in existence (by value, not physical area), and for the large majority of people it would decrease appreciably.
It does seem like it would be a reasonable tax scheme but it would have to be carefully balanced for the type of use for the land. It’d make sense to charge more for a factory making a lot of value for the economy compared to a high density residential building occupying the same area. I personally prefer mixed use zoning to make land use more efficient though so it’d be interesting to see how that’d go.
I think one of the benefits of Land Value Tax is that an empty lot costs as much as a highrise or factory. It heavily disincentivizes leaving a property undeveloped or poorly developed, like with parking lots or abandoned buildings.
That being said, it would also put pressure on underdeveloped properties, like your home on a street with rising property values. Some limitations would almost certainly be necessary.
This could also be solved with better zoning, but most of our social problems could be fixed with better governance of some kind. Land Value Tax is one of the proposed methods that would need less fixes to make work and (hopefully) be harder to co-opt for wealth extraction.
I’d accept trying anything though, instead of more tax cuts and funding cuts.
That being said, it would also put pressure on underdeveloped properties, like your home on a street with rising property values.
Yeah. I feel like people would get out and vote if they understood this.
and for the large majority of people it would decrease appreciably.
I’m still concerned, since I’m planning to own a huge international chain of retail stores when I strike it rich and become a billionaire. (This is Sarcasm.)
Great explanation. Thank you.
Yes! Here’s a video about it: https://youtu.be/B7nFA19Gzrw
I will forever shout it from the rooftops. Monopoly is a 30 minute game, regardless of how many players you have. If you play by the actual rules, and none of the house rules you’ve made up for yourself, it’s really quick and really fun. No families need to be shattered over the game. No friendships lost. Just play by the actual rules!
Have you tried to play literally any other board game?
Monopoly has one great rule (or lack of specificity), that it doesn’t put any restricting on when you are able to trade (doesn’t even say it has to be your turn!). This creates a great ten minutes or so when most of the properties are bought and people are making interesting deals with each other.
Everything else in the game is bad because there are very few interesting decisions to make. The dice tell you where you go and the space you land on tells you what to do. Strictly you “decide” whether or not to buy an available property if you land on it, but it’s virtually always a good idea. In the rare auction case you can decide your bid. You can decide which order you mortgage off your properties if you are out of money. I think one of the chance/CC cards has a choice on it? Even buying houses is kind of dull since you have to build them evenly across the block.
It’s a critique of capitalism, there not being many choices and alway accruing capital that’s limited in supply is the exact point of the game.
Real life is still worse though. Imagine being added to an already-in-progress game of Monopoly where you start with no money and everyone else already has hotels on every property.
Games have to put playability over realism even if they are trying to make a point. You can randomize the initial money for each player if you want the full experience.
100% true. Note that I was responding to someone who called it quick and fun, so the lack of choices seemed like a relevant point there.
True that, it can be boring, personally I own an expanded version called Cheaters Monopoly, that one has some fun stuff like there is a card that says to not say anything, just take 150 from the bank and if anyone questions what you are doing they owe you 100. When in jail you literally get a handcuff put on you thats connected to the board and if you manage to take it off without anyone noticing and a player makes completes his turn you can get out of jail for free, you can steal houses and hotels and with the same rule if no one notices you can place it on your property.
Exactly, play by the original rules, and play aggressive as all hell. You don’t need almost any property, it’s just fine to mortgage everything but your main set, the goal is to get one very developed set ASAP.
Not only is this a pretty effective way to win (a conservative player who lands once on a very developed property is basically out of the game), it also makes the game progress much faster, especially if other players are willing to concede before the bitter end. 2 or 3 players like this, and you’ve actually got a recipe for a decent time.
This is it! Everyone I’ve ever met that hates monopoly doesn’t play by the rules. They don’t auction, they put all the money under free parking, and I’ve even had some people that increase the $100 when you pass go once all of the properties are bought. Of course you hate the game, you’ve been playing it wrong.
I’d love to know where the free parking thing cane from. I distinctly remember not doing that as a kid but then suddenly I don’t know why in my teens(I think) it appeared in a way like it was not doing it was incorrect.
Never heard of the pass go thing though.
The Pass Go thing came from a friend of the family that came over for Christmas dinner one year. It went from $100 to $300 once all the properties were bought, and the reason was “so everyone can afford to land on hotel spaces.” So, yeah, completely defeating the point of late stage of the game.
Monopoly: Communism Edition
Sounds more like Monopoly: Social Democracy edition to me. Though either way, you’d need to add a tax for the rich to explain the $300.
Everyone I’ve ever met that hates monopoly doesn’t play by the rules
Or they’ve tried any other modern boardgame released in the last couple decades
I actually enjoy monopoly. Its not anywhere close to my absolute favorite board game of those Ive played, mostly because I feel like it relies too much on rng and that this makes the strategy less useful, but its at least in like, the top 10 or so
Why? There’s literally thousands of better games. Just pick any from the top thousand on BGG.
I do too, even though I’m 1000% aware of the original message behind it. It’s like a toxic relationship.
They should “update” the game rules to mimic the real life experience. 1 or 2 players begins the game either with 25% of the amount of money that the game brings (or with 1 set of average cost properties with either houses or hotels) and the rest of the players begin the game following the original rules.
They should call it Bezopoly or something like that.
So what’s in your top 5?
Evolution, settlers of Catan, Machi Koro (okay, that ones more a card game, but it plays like it has a board almost) are top ones. Next two probably vary a bit on the situation, if I’m having to play with children, due to visiting family that has them, King of Tokyo is good. If they’re aren’t any children and there’s a lot of time, I enjoy risk sometimes too.
I’m not a huge board game player though, so I’ve played, maybe 2 or 3 dozen different ones over time?
I feel like a lot of the major problems from the game, like the house rules or people not wanting to make trades, stems from the fact people not wanting to lose in Monopoly. A loss in Monopoly is a hard loss.
It works to the same principles like our economy.
It’s actually a bit better since you don’t pay income tax every time and there’s guaranteed income.
Yeah, GO is kinda UBI already, isn’t it?
Hahaha ok now let’s teach it Risk
This is why you let card set turn-ins continue to scale. Eventually, someone gets 50 armies and they snowball across their enemies.
Hey, we can tolerate a table flip here an there, but you are talking about
WAR
Might be good to get a warning sign that the AI wants to take over the world because it will start amassing troops near Siam and if it does manage to conquer Australia, you can be relatively sure that it will spend a few turns building up its bottleneck defense, maybe trading some border country to get a card each turn.
Lol that just reminded me of the first time I played risk with my cousins, when we thought that players got a card each time they took a country and then the 5 card max rule meant that they could (or had to) trade in for troops in the middle of their turn. The game had a few quiet turns and then absolutely exploded once things got rolling and only lasted some turns after that because we weren’t the most strategic thinkers and didn’t realize there was no reason to stop when you could reinforce your front with more armies than anyone else had combined every 3 countries you took.
Wasn’t there a chess robot who broke the finger of a kid to win or something?
Iirc the kid had their hand on a piece even though it was the robot’s turn, so it was really just an anti-cheat feature if you think about it.
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A boring game IS a bad game tho and Monopoly is the worst
Depending on how strict you are with the rules, it can be pretty a fairly quick game. It’s not super quick, but it’s no Axis and Allies or Risk.
The fact it’s a long game isn’t an issue, the problem is that it’s long and bad. A winner is usually determined pretty early on but then there’s still half an hour of random rolls as everyone slowly loses their money. That’s why house rules are mostly adding safety nets, the game’s already over and it’s just not fun running around a board watching your numbers go down. Since house rules don’t change the core gameplay they don’t fix the game and just make it drag even longer.
There’s some very good long games and some very good short games, how long a game is doesn’t determine how good it is.
I’ll have to respectfully disagree, while it’s not the best game, I can’t say it’s that bad. The whole game shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes unless you’re going easy on someone (like kids but monopoly isn’t really a friendly smiley game).
I guess it’s really up to what type of games you like to play.
Yeah, monopolies are the worst… everywhere.
And now the robot is a revolutionary communist, great job guys.
Dude is gonna love Cho Chabudai Gaeshi.
