Why I hate Monopoly

I think the most ubiquitous board game, the one everyone has played, would have to be Monopoly. I think everyone I know has at least one edition of the game on their shelf somewhere. Today I’m going to talk about why this is the worst game on my shelf.

To be fair I’m going to start by saying I don’t recall ever winning a game of Monopoly and this is one of the go to games my family played during my childhood. A little of my disdain stems from the hundreds of terrible losses I was subjected to. But only a little.

Originally Monopoly gets its basic concepts from an earlier game called “The Landlords Game” which was put together to prove that monopolies were a bad thing. Basically it showed that the winner was a jerk and the common person was screwed by the system. Now that’s a family fun theme if I ever heard one.

One of my biggest issues is the nearly unachievable end game for Monopoly. Even the company has had to come out and suggest a time limit. The longest game on record lasted 1,680 hours. Who has 70 days to set aside for family game night? There have been games I have participated in where everyone just agrees to just end the game for the sake of our sanity. No-one is a clear winner after an eternity of playing and nobody is having fun anymore and the game just… ends. Everyone just goes home to bed, turning game night into futility night.

As the game time lengthens the exclusion factor becomes more and more of an issue. Being the first one to lose your fortune and being forced to watch everyone else have fun is excruciating and boring beyond belief. But to achieve that Monopoly you have to have people knocked out of the game. And isn’t family night about working to exclude each-other and rub in that loser feeling?

I would love to follow one of the several strategy guides out there but the game has little to no real strategy, you just roll the dice and hope you land on a good spot. It’s all luck. Personally dice seem to want to kill me so I usually don’t land on good spaces. One game sticks out in my memory where I was the last to roll out of 5 people. I went around the board three times and had to pay every spot I landed on. Most of the board was bought up before I managed to buy a single property at auction. The only strategy that has ever worked for me was to stay in jail late in the game. It saved me from being the first player eliminated.

Nothing says broken rules system like the need to add house rules to make a game playable, and Monopoly has the highest number of house rules I have encountered so far. I find that I don’t like playing Monopoly with new players because each group has its own variation of house rules. I never know what rules to play by because there are so many that are ignored, added or tweaked by player groups. And nobody does their house rules the same.

Speaking of terrible house rules, free space is just that: a “free space.” It's in the rule book. Nothing happens when you land on it. However a popular house rule makes it so the space becomes a lottery space. This is an issue because I find it lengthens the game time when not playing within a time limit. People who should be eliminated end up sticking around for numerous turns because they just keep winning the free parking lottery. This house rule just breaks the game further. It doesn't fit with the theme or the mechanic.

Another issue is that many people don't play with the auction rule. The rule book states that if a person doesn't purchase a property he/she lands on the property goes up for auction from the bank and is sold to the highest bidder. This rule helps move property and shortens the game time considerably. But this rule is often ignored and people just wander the board until property can be purchased for full price.

Then there is the fact that no new edition works to fix this broken system. No matter which edition of the game you buy it’s the same game. It’s just different property names or currencies. The putting makeup on a pig analogy comes to mind here. No matter what style, how much, or how well done the makeup is it’s still a pig.

Nostalgia keeps this game alive. For some reason people think they had fun with this game as children. Their rose coloured glasses don't allow them to recall the hours of boredom, the inevitability of defeat, and the humiliation as you slowly mortgage off your property so you can pay off the lucky winner.

I find that all of the fun in the game comes from selecting your piece. I love when I get to claim the race car, Oh YEAH! Then everything just sucks after that.

To sum up: stop allowing this game to Monopolize any more of your precious time. I suggest you look into another game, may I suggest Settlers of Catan as an alternative?