SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
Recent blogs have bemoaned how commentators faced with the gaming hobby invariably fall back on lazy quips about Monopoly. I thought it was time to put to the test the hypothesis that Monopoly is a uniquely fractious and tedious game. So: I sourced an old (1960s) edition of the game on eBay, rounded up some veteran gamers, checked up the CORRECT rules (auctions and all!) and gathered together the Dirty Half Dozen for a journey into the dark heart of Capitalism... We have been warned that Monopoly is deeply boring and lasts for hours. Popular lore tells us that we will all fall out and go home with sore feelings. But at the start, spirits are high and the tokens are on the starting space, anxious for the off! The first 20 minutes pass merrily. This is Phase 1, where circling the board carries only trivial penalties and you get to buy the properties you land on. The randomness of dice mean some people get lucky, assembling near-monopolies very quickly. Others are less lucky. I get 3 Stations on consecutive turns, but Oliver gets the 4th. I pass on buying the Electric Company, wary of the bad reputation of the 'utilities', and Ray pays over the odds for it. Karl takes this tactic to an extreme, passing on several properties, triggering auctions and driving up the price so that other people pay more. Later, he will come to see this approach is misguided. Once most of the properties have been bought, the game enters Phase 2, which is negotiation. Everyone wants someone else to trade them a property, but no one wants to allow someone else to get a monopoly too easily. Sweeteners are added. Eventually, deals are made, monopolies are acquired and the first green houses start to rise on Richard's pink monopoly. I must say, this part of the game was fun. Realising that 3 Stations were a modest earner but offered no way of competing later in the game, I paid through the noise for Brown properties from Karl and Richard to acquire my first monopoly - the most rubbish monopoly on the board. Nevertheless, I figured I could grow from here. Then people start going bankrupt: first Alex, then Oliver. Their departures bring fresh auctions to the table as their portfolios are sold off. This bidding is very different. People know what they are after and the bidding is fierce, even reckless. Whole monopolies are up for grabs and there are vicious hate plays and, yes, over-extension. I fall victim to this, spend too much money, trade away my Stations to Karl to expand my properties even further then get brought down by those very Stations when I cannot pay the rent for landing on them. Irony! Karl is floundering, with Stations and money, but no monopolies. Ray is in a strong place. He has built hotels on the Oranges to rival Richard's Pink empire - and the Oranges are more likely to catch out players leaving Jail. But fate has a different tale to tell! They call it Death Alley..... Alas for Ray, his empire goes down like the Bastille: first he has to mortgage properties, then sell his hotels, then go bankrupt. It was mostly unlucky dice rolls landing him on expensive rents. His property portfolio is extensive and Karl and Richard carve it up between them. We're just over 90 minutes in to the game and down to the Final Two. Everyone else has been knocked out in rapid succession (in the last half hour) and still spectates with interest. Richard has the stronger portfolio and the deadly hotels in Pink, but Karl now has a monopoly (finally!) on Yellow which could be lucrative if he can build there. Unfortunately, everything that has made the game compelling so far disappears now that there are only two players left. There will be no more auctions. The two have no incentive to trade. They just circle the board, round and round, Karl slipping past Richard's hotel-strewn power base on blue/pink/orange time after time with lucky rolls, while Richard lurks in Jail, collecting rent but paying Karl only small amounts. And this goes on for another hour! Eventually, it ends as it must, with Karl finally landing on Pall Mall's hotel and being crippled by the bill. Richard is victorious, but by this point the interest is gone. The knocked-out players are tapping on their phones, the still-contending ones are numbed to the endless dice rolls. The endgame span on for far too long. Closing Thoughts First off, I was surprised by how much fun we had for the first 90 minutes of this game. You can see why families and old school friends bring Monopoly to the table. Phase 1 is good-natured and full of promise. Who doesn't like circling the board buying things? At this point, the rents are modest and the rewards significant. It also feels rather like modern resource management games: you are building your 'victory engine'. Phase 2 is much more competitive and, for hobbyist gamers, very fulfilling. Working out what to trade and how to persuade, these are fulfilling skills to use. Staying in Jail becomes a winning practice: you can still charge rent and bid, but you don't have to advance round the board for a couple of turns. When players are knocked out, more auctions are triggered and these are psychologically charged affairs. The knock-outs happen close together: when one player goes bankrupt another won't be far behind. It's hard to imagine families and casual gamers enjoying this though. How can children aggressively bid against their parents or strike coercive trade deals with their older siblings? Why would friends and lovers enjoy a game where their partners bid against them ruthlessly to drive up the costs or refuse to trade with them while agreeing to trade with someone else? Monopoly is simply a bit too hard core, in a psychological sense, for family fun. This of course is where house rules creep in: kitties of money being paid out to people landing on Free Parking and players in Jail being unable to charge rent. These 'fixes' make the game feel less unfair, but they only prolong the inevitable. Most of my work colleagues who claim to enjoy Monopoly are surprised to hear about auctions and property trading: they just don't use these rules, robbing the game of its only strategic choices and stretching out the play time even further. The real problem for us was the spinning endgame. Once it's down to two players with all the properties divided between them, there are no further choices to make but a lot of dice to roll before the final bankruptcy occurs. There's no value in playing this far; instead a timer is needed to stop the game at (say) the 2-hour mark, with victory going to the player with the most wealth at that time. A worthwhile experience then and perhaps worth repeating, with time limits in place. The official rules contain a Shorter Game variant and I think it would be fun to see if that retains the fun while bringing then to a conclusion before fatigue sets in. I'll report on that in due course.
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