In one of those Repo Man lattice of coincidence moments, I was suddenly hit with a couple of unrelated posts about Monopoly the other day, which is the sort of thing that makes you think… at least think about Monopoly. So I did. Or tried. The first was from Bhagpuss, who brought up the apparent reveal of a RuneScape edition of Monopoly. RuneScape Monopoly – Image stolen directly from Bhagpuss This is the sort of thing that generates… negative interest from me… or antagonism. This is just the same game dressed up in yet another theme that you can go pre-order right now for $60 if you love RuneScape or Monopoly that much. (Delivery promised by February 2027.) I can barely fathom the idea of needing to actually BUY a copy of Monopoly. When I was growing up there wasn’t a household that didn’t have at least one copy of the game available, issued along with a fondue set and at least two Bill Cosby albums. (In some jurisdictions that last could be substituted out for one Rusty Warren and one Jose Jimenez album.) As I noted in a comment on Bhagpuss’s post, I don’t think I ever played a game of Monopoly on a game set that was produced after 1970. That might be a mild exaggeration, but for purposes of this post I went and looked in our hallway closed and found we had on the board games shelf copies of Monopoly, Candyland, Battleship, Ticket to Ride, a chess set, two Scrabble sets (including a Simpsons edition that I feel like I’ve only just found out about), two copies of Twister, and three full editions of Trivial Pursuit, the newest of which is from 1992 so is hopelessly out of date, a set of dominoes, and close to two dozen packs of cards. This is a pretty typical old person’s hallway closet in my experience growing up. Also, I am now an old person. The Monopoly set has a 1978 copyright but, in my defense, I am sure I have never played with our copy and frankly have no idea where it came from. Then there is the special edition factor, which I summed up in my aforementioned comment with: Like a Pokemon themed litter box, there is no veneer that can be laid over Monopoly that makes it anything more than it is. That is perhaps unfair, but mostly because we have three cats so a Pokemon themed litter box would have some utility in our home. Special editions irk me in the way something like a Civil War chess set gets under my skin. The basic game is not enhanced by your king being U.S. Grant, and is arguably diminished by being required to defend the treasonous and highly overrated Robert E. Lee. I also have a mild dislike of special editions of Monopoly because there have been so many of them that there is no longer anything special about getting a special edition. There are multiple pages on Wikipedia covering the various editions, broken out by region, there being far too many to contain on the main page about the game or on a single combined page dedicated to editions of the game. My dislike is mild only because I don’t care enough for it to be anything beyond that. But it still tests the elasticity of my credulity when somebody gets excited about a special edition of the game. It is more a surprise if you haven’t had one by this point. WoW got one more than a decade ago. (And got a version of Trivial Pursuit as well. Now that is a test of popularity.) Define the Grind Hell, even freaking Cthulu got a Monopoly edition. Cthulu F’tagn – Go and Free Parking are unscarred by non-Euclidian geometry I feel like it is capitalism telling us something when the most popular board game simulation of it as a economic model can come wrapped up in Lovecraftian horror because it will make a few extra bucks. It is like putting a Spirit Halloween store on Park Place along with the five hotels you’ve installed. It will motivate the marks to let you fleece them by just enough to have a positive ROI. All of which is a side ramble about things not particularly related to the mechanics of the game itself. On that front I think of Monopoly as a tedious, death march of a game and frankly I can conjure zero happy memories of playing the game. It was always a slog, off to a happy hopeful start and then turning into a never ending trip around that goddam square board. It is the sterotypical Ameritrash board game, built on gonads and strife and the luck of the dice, the sort of thing that, as a child, encouraged a fondness for re-runs of Gilligan’s Island or anything else the TV might have on as an alternative. I’ve feigned interest in the ongoing adventures of Davey and Goliath instead of delving into the brutal capitalism simulator nightmare. I mean, it is just Christian Gumby, right? It requires not only that somebody win, but that the winner must personally grind down and bankrupt everybody else. Mere victory is not enough, you must crush the spirits of those around you, driving them to despair in the most tedious way possible. So not a fan. And then, after having that barrage of things going through my brain on a Friday morning, I hit lunch and sprawled on the couch with one of the cats to enjoy some leftover tortellini and read my email and found a post from Jeff Vogel singing the praises of Monopoly. In this economy? You may remember Jeff Vogel from Spiderweb Software, which has made a whole bunch of single player RPGs over the last 30 years and somehow has managed to survive and possibly thrive. Or you may remember him from that one post where he complained about there being too many video games. I think that one came up when Twitter was still a thing and made a bunch of people mad. Anyway, he likes board games, as somebody who designs games likely should, and he likes Monopoly. He also thinks board games should make children cry, which is a take for sure, but since our child is in her mid 20s now I am at least beyond testing that theory. His defense of Monopoly comes in two forms. First, the amount of influence it has had. I had forgotten that the original creator had patented the concept of going endlessly around a board, passing the same locations over and over again. But it did have a lot of influence. That one cannot deny. And the other part is that the game sucks to play because we’re all doing it wrong. The working theory here is that the game should be played more like Diplomacy. In Diplomacy, there is a board that depicts the current state of affairs, but the actual actions take place between the players as they negotiate, form alliances, rally to defeat a common foe, and turn on each other when the time is ripe. The argument is that you should not let the board and the dice be the whole game. When your turn comes up you look to haggle, trade, or otherwise interact with your opponents to make deals to advance your position beyond buying up whatever property the dice happened to send you to. That can both speed up the game and make the whole scenario much more dynamic. And almost nobody does that. Instead we circle the board endlessly, collecting our $200, visiting jail, and making up rules that mostly prolong the tedium. The Free Parking rule is the classic “this is not in the rules but people do this” example of that, a random injection of cash for just landing on the square that is generally big enough to forestall bankruptcy but not enough to give one a positional advantage. Advantage requires a monopoly, a trap on the board loaded up with enough hotels to drive to ruin any foe who lands there. You can get to that just rolling the dice and moving your mice… your tokens… but it is a something you can speed up if you can get your fellow players into side deal. Therein lies the rub of course. You can’t be the sole person keen to haggle or the whole thing turns into that scene from Life of Brian. Also, if you’re obviously and obnoxiously seeking advantage through deals that favor you with little or no upside for your opponent they will refuse to deal. This is a very real scenario, because it isn’t that I have suddenly become aware of the whole side deal making aspect of the game, it is that the people I have played with are so fundamentally bad at it that it has no impact on the game. If you hold Boardwalk and I hold Park Pace and you’re plan is to get me to trade you that for something like Marvin Gardens when I don’t hold Ventnor and Atlantic, that deal is never going to happen. Usually the offers in this situation are so poorly crafted and lacking in incentive that I will vow to go to the grave before I will give up Park Place. The only way you’ll get it is if the dice betray me so badly that I have to auction off properties to pay my debts… and even then Park Place will be last on the list to go. This is probably more an indictment of me and the people with whom I have played than the game, but as Vogel notes, the game doesn’t actually do anything to help with the situation. The last couple of times I played Monopoly, and that was a long time back, we had adopted a system of dealing out some percentage of the properties randomly, up front, so everybody started with some ownership. That at least eliminated the first couple dozen circuits of the board. And even then the whole thing was a bit of a misery. While I found the idea that we’re mostly playing the game wrong credible, I am still not convinced it is worth the effort.