Perhaps the most intrigueing meta observation of the monopoly game is how the players seem to never recognise how it is rigged, at least years of playing it with my cousins never revealed the didactic purpose to any of us. When we played people always took it seriously, ie that there are smart things you can do and you should do them, but we never stepped back and pointed out how the rules made the losers more and more desperate.
We also modified the rules as kids. Who'd have thought the lack of houses was by design, and of it was, who could think it was a fair thing to do, cornering the market?
I certainly didn't think about the dynamics until I studied economics and read articles about how the game was designed. Only my later self, with a background in trading would recognise the rules for what they are, and the strategic possibilities.
The jargon for this is a "comeback mechanic" - game designers have to be cautious with them though, as if the final round can flip the results too easily what was the point of all the other rounds?
In "Power Grid" (a power plant building game) the turn order is recalculated every round based on how well the player is doing, with the players doing worst getting more chances to bid in power plant auctions and being first to buy on the fuel market.
In "Flamme Rouge" (a cycling-themed game) a 'drafting' mechanic means the leading player has to add 'exhaustion' cards to their hand, much like riders in real races try to slipstream behind the race leaders.
In "Suburbia" (a city building game) victory points are 'population' but as you move up the population tracker, you cross red lines that reduce your income and reputation.
In 'Trans-America' (a railroad-building game) points are scored by connecting cities, and it's easy for a naive player to connect 4 cities before a lucky expert player connects 5 and ends the round. This creates the impression of a close game as the best and worst players will be within 20% of each other.
And of course, the other option is: A scoring system so baffling and opaque, nobody can work out who's in the lead until the calculators come out at the end.
Yes, you can lose the meaning of all other rounds but the last. And if player strategies can maximize comebacks, then all the smart people will only focus on the comebacks and only the less experienced or relaxed players will play the actual game (and be constantly frustrated by seeming to win early on and then losing to comebacks without feeling any power to change that).
In chess, which doesn't have a clear comeback mechanic, this sometimes works out, since the impact of late game mistakes can vastly outperform early wins. So, comebacks are clearly and directly linked to the skill of the winning player making a mistake and the skill of the losing player being able to capitalize this mistake.
But even that direction doesn't come for free. As in such games skill is so important, inexperienced players fighting each other will have a lot of huge randomness in their outcomes and altogether the game only becomes fun once you reach a certain minimum skill level.
Last but not least, there are also alternatives to comebacks. For instance, in poker or pen&paper roleplaying games a factor of pure randomness is added. So, while on average the skilled players will have almost all the positive experiences that chess players have (they win more often, they have more clarity and control about the progress and current status mid-game), the unskilled players can sometimes make a lucky win which seems satisfying enough that some people get addicted to poker without ever gaining much skill.
As Monopoly also has a random element, I wonder if simply tuning the impact of randomness would make it more fun, allow for more lucky comebacks, etc. As a stupid example, maybe event cards could introduce property tax rates that stay until another event card alters them, or a renter being unhappy about the rental property won't pay the rent or even create costs through law-suits, required building repairs, or clean-ups.
> the unskilled players can sometimes make a lucky win which seems satisfying enough
I like games that have this feature, perhaps even more then a come-back mechanism.
In the game of go playing against a higher skilled player you usually have some portion of the board where you are doing better then expected. The higher skilled player might have actually "given" this result as a trade favorable to them, but that is usually not the perception of the lower skilled player.
In fact on a 19×19 board there are so many micro battles going on that the lower skilled player will usually get enough perceived good mini-results that it is enough to enjoy the game, despite knowing they will definitely loose in the end.
In addition—to take this out side of board games—as someone that is not good at sports, I like sports usually only when there is a lot of added randomness so I can get at least a lucky shot or two, even if I will loose most likely loose the game as a whole. For example when I play basketball I like it a lot better when we play on a coarse concrete, with crooked baskets and a peeling ball. Another examples include: laser-tag (er even better a nerf-gun fight) vs paint ball and disk-golf vs. traditional golf.
> inexperienced players fighting each other will have a lot of huge randomness in their outcomes and altogether the game only becomes fun once you reach a certain minimum skill level
This is a very good point.
I play chess with my children a few times a year and I was subconsciously feeling that it is not that fun.
Only after watching The Queen's Gambit I realized that the fun is there, but out of reach for me.
A countervailing pattern I've seen (in games with 3+ players) is that, if one player pulls into a lead, then the other players will start piling on them. Board games like Avalon Hill Civilization, Family Business, Root, etc. -- basically any game where you can choose one of your rivals to attack.
Munchkin takes this to the extreme, where someone will perpetually be on the edge of winning and there are a variety of colorful ways to set them back. It's random and chaotic by design.
Monopoly doesn't really involve such a mechanic. You can refuse to trade with someone who is pulling ahead, but by that time it is more likely to be too late.
Assuming your Monopoly house rules allow arbitrary contracts (if they don't, they should) the non-winning players can extend credit to each other, and allocate their combined resources very efficiently to try to beat the winner.
It's very hard as a single player to beat a credit union. So the winning player will want to build some sort of alliance with at least some of the losers to make their coalition weaker, which will pull those players up the ladder and give them a chance, and so on. It creates a mostly good dynamic of cooperation for self-preservation.
In the end, one person wins, but it's often a close race.
(This works best if you play with the same crowd every time, because then people have reason to build trust with each other and won't suddenly default on a huge loan without feeling the consequences of it.)
Interesting. Sounds like I should find some people to play a game of Monopoly with!
The game seems to have earned a bad reputation, the prototype for the sort of game you shouldn't play anymore because everything from the last 25 years is better. I'm not sure this is deserved, but realistically my copy will probably end up collecting dust. After reading your comment, I hope not!
> Assuming your Monopoly house rules allow arbitrary contracts
IIRC, you don’t need house rules for that, so long as “arbitrary contracts” covers future commitments for things otherwise legal to exchange (you do need house rules for such contracts to be self-enforcing, though.)
Taken to an extreme, this has a 'kingmakeer' problem though, where who wins the game can often be decided by someone who has no realistic chance of winning (either by directly aiding or allying with one player, or failing to block another player).
I agree, but I wouldn't always characterize this as a problem.
I remember playing a 3-player game of Root (which I highly recommend!) Player A ambushed me and managed to burn down my headquarters. At that point I realized I couldn't win, and I spent the rest of the game attacking A.
A complained that I was just throwing the game to B, which is exactly what happened. The kingmaker problem made A's decision into a huge blunder. If you don't pay attention to psychology in these games, you will lose.
It is essential to a competitive game that everyone try their best in that specific instance of the game. Depending on the player, this could mean "go all-out to win" or "place as highly as possible" or "come as close to winning as possible" or even "score as many points as possible". All of those are reasonable. Playing for things external to the game is a problem.
There tend to be three kinds of kingmaking: revenge, social dynamics, and wanting to leave. All of them have something in common: they are done for reasons outside the gamespace. They're violating the boundaries of the game.
Revenge (what you did) is out-of-bounds because it's using the game to win future games rather than playing the current one.
Social dynamics and wanting to leave are out-of-bounds because they're using the game for rewards that have nothing to do with the game.
The equivalent in monopoly is making an unfavorable trade with whoever is in second place, putting yourself behind in order to give the 2nd place person a shot at winning.
What is the mechanic in Settlers that enables this? Can't think of anything apart from how resources seems to be unevenly used throughout the game (wood and brick being more sought after early on to build roads and settlements, while iron and grain become more important when cities are built later on).
If you trade with the winning player, they win faster. If you trade with players who are behind, it doesn't really change the outcome of the game (they will probably still be behind at the end of the game)
The only thing preventing that winning player from reaching 10 points is 2 stone and 3 wheat. So as long as no one gives the winning player those resources, the game continues.
Alternatively, the winning player can try to win on their own by massing up 20 other resources and trading 4 for 1. But everyone else can more efficiently get the resources they need by trading with each other, allowing for an innate comeback mechanic.
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At a minimum, that puts even the weakest players always in the position as kingmaker. So everyone has something to do at all stages of the game.
In Catan there are multiple ways to try to get to 10 points, so if someone else is in the lead via one strategy (e.g. city building) it's still possible to be in the lead for a different one (e.g. development cards).
Catan is a poor example, because there is no built-in mechanic. Player interaction allows for targeting leaders and making mutually beneficial moves with people who are trailing. For everything great about Catan, it's a pretty old Eurogame, and it lacks a lot of refinements to the genre that have been made since.
The main thing is the free-for-all nature combined with the existence of trading. It is obviously tactically incorrect to trade with anyone who is about to win, but it usually takes a while to get that last point or two without a trade.
Dominion is a great example of this. For most games (depending on which cards are played there may be differing victory conditions) the way you win the game is by obtaining Province cards and adding them to your deck. These are worth a lot of points, but have no actual utility in the game (where most of the cards you are adding to your deck let you do things like draw more cards or gain resources). So as you get closer to winning, the composition of your deck becomes worse and worse, and you become less and less likely to be able to purchase more Provinces.
There are certainly games that have negative feedback loops for leading players. Some Ludo variants make it progressively harder for players to make valid moves the more pieces they brought home, for example by forcing the player to move to an empty home field with an exact dice roll.
Generally, I'd say that if you have a game that regularly ends in close finishes it's likely either very random or it contains negative feedback loops.
"Imperial" - the best boardgame of all, in my opinion[1]- largely circumvents having a comeback mechanism by making the game scores being a dynamic result of all player interactions until the very end. You typically only know for sure whos about to win in the last round but (very importantly) it does not feel random at all (there is virtually no luck, no dice, no card decks)
In short, its a light wargame in which the players control the nations - but they are not the nations. They are investors who buy bonds in the nations and the player with most investments controls (governs) that nation. Controls shift during the game and war is _not_ the objective. Profiting from your nation(s) is.
Do check it out. The game is well reviewe and still critically underrated
> Is there a board game where one's advantage doesn't compound, though?
The thing is, it's not usually such a zero-sum game as it is in Monopoly.
In better designed games, there's more opportunity cost associated when you start optimizing for something. Individual players can pursue their own, different strategies. A player who optimizes for "strategy A" might be weak to "strategy B." Getting the resources for "strategy B" might become easier, since there's less competition for them.
The trick to Monopoly is that there is no alternate strategy. Opting to (or being unable to) buy land doesn't open up some other path through which you can win - it just means you're going to lose.
I used to play the MAD (magazine) board game as a kid. It's pretty good. Pretty crazy, not surprisingly. A lil like Monopoly except the pick-up cards involve doing weird things, or telling every player to pass their money to the player on their right or left, which happens so often that you never are winning for too long.
Yes. As others have pointed out, it’s more and more common these days - or at least more common to have a situation where the players aren’t entirely sure who is ahead.
Examples include:
* Innovation
* Wingspan
* 7 Wonders
* Brass: Birmingham (and the original Brass, too)
> Perhaps the most intrigueing meta observation of the monopoly game is how the players seem to never recognise how it is rigged
I don't want to start a big argument, because I realize some people actually do like Monopoly as an artistic statement, but I've always felt that if a game is actually that universally misunderstood, it's not because it's brilliant -- it's because it's bad at demonstrating its core point.
One of the purposes of game design is to communicate something, whether that's an idea or an emotion or whatever. And Monopoly is a bad game at communicating. It doesn't add anything additional to anyone's understanding of Capitalism, it's only decipherable by people who already know what it's trying to say.
I have never, ever seen a child or an adult that was out-of-the-loop on Monopoly's origins walk away from the game saying "huh, that has some interesting parallels to the real world, I should read more about this."
That's because when it was corporatized, they intentionally took out the message. The Landlord's Game became Monopoly. The Poor House became Jail. References to wages and necessity taxes were removed. The anti-monopolist rules were removed entirely.
To be fair, the history of capitalist owners of Monopoly have had reason to "dull" the original design. The Landlord's Game included two rule sets and encouraged players to play both then compare/contrast. The second Georgist rule set hasn't been included in the official rulebook in decades, but was a key part of the original design. (It's intentionally dull to play the other rules, but it was the stark contrast that was a key part of its attempt to be a teaching tool.)
There's also been another force "dulling" Monopoly's game design over time: most people don't learn Monopoly from the rules, they learn Monopoly from playing with others. There are a lot of viral (mimetic) multi-generation "house rules" that people learn from their families/peers/educators. There's also a couple of key clear rules that remain in the rulebook that people don't follow for a number of reasons, including essentially culturally "we forgot them".
(There's some interesting meta-commentary on Capitalism and its attempts at "fairness" band aids in the house rule dialects that have accumulated over time. There's some interesting meta-commentary on Capitalism regulations, banking, and/or dumb luck in the rules that have been "forgotten".)
In some ways, some of the almost willful cultural ignorance of the message of Monopoly is its own ironic statement on the systemic problems of Capitalism and how much people complicit in that system want to wish things fair or ignore their complicity and try to just cope with the problems and their fallout. I wouldn't necessarily call that "universally misunderstood", that's a pretty deep understanding, even if accidental. It's generally surprisingly easy to have conversations about it and "wake" people to Monopoly's origins and what it says about the game (and why they love/hate it) because even if they never thought "huh there are interesting parallels to real world Capitalism here" they can definitely see the parallels in hindsight if you want to talk about it.
Perhaps this was different in the past, back when your entertainment for the evening was just to sit around with a few people, read the rules thoroughly, and concentrate. Perhaps even play it several times.
For the current age I think it takes way too much patience. I think movies have changed like that too, the attention economy demands that you get to the point immediately. Heck, I can't even read articles that don't address their headline within the first three paragraphs.
They've actually done that in a psychology study. As in real life, the people with the advantage start inventing reasons why they deserved that advantage, and that it's really fair.
I think I remember reading about this and IIRC one of the players was given more starting money than the rest, but wasn't told about it. Then when they were asked why they think they won, they would say it was because of their strategy or their skill, and I think most even doubled down when they were told about the extra money. Something along those lines. My memory is likely inaccurate as well.
> I played board games to have fun. Monopoly failed to deliver.
A common sentiment, and yet "Over 250 million sets of Monopoly have been sold since its invention and the game has been played by over half a billion people making it possibly the most popular board game in the world." [1]
Did you read the WP article? It seems the original game had 2 sets of rules:
> The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and a monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game.[3] A win in the anti-monopolist or Single Tax version (later called "Prosperity"), was when the player having the lowest monetary amount has doubled his original stake.
So one rules similar to modern day Monopoly. And one that teach us the virtues of "social policies". (can I say socialism here without being down voted to hell?)
And there was a clear intend to teach its players about "unfairness":
> 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. Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood.
I've learned something today!
Also, I'm quite a fan of Georgism (tax bad behavior so heavy it disappears). For instance, I think we should georgize pollution and wealth hoarding.
I don't have a good understanding, but is it actually socialist when it is about increasing personal wealth at the core? It does rather sound like a constrained version of capitalism to me.
Well to be honest there is different versions of socialism with different meanings. Some do put personal wealth as more important, or at least indirectly. If it is part of the market socialism side then wealth is used the same way to promote self-interest.
In market socialism the the difference from capitalism is stricter controls on business ownership (i.e. businesses must be coops or something along those lines).
Socialism tries in increase wealth of individuals, just like capitalism does. The difference is that different flavours of socialism want to increase it across the board, where capitalism wants an individuals wealth to be very well protected, especially when the numbers get high, so that wealth may accumulate in few.
I find it fascinating that the original Monopoly game was desgined to teach us the difference and how Georgism (taxing bad behavior) may be used by "the people/democracy" to ensure capitalism is not the outcome.
Also very telling that the game was thn ripped off, and got popular as Monopoly, where the only set of rules are the capitalistic ones.
Georgism is extremely capitalist, and it is not “tax bad behavior.”
Georgism can be summarized as such: A person is entitled to exactly what he or she produces.
That’s the purest capitalism I’ve ever heard of. The scent of socialism you get is due to the examination that George provides of “exactly what he or she produces.”
Laborers are therefore entitled to all of their wages. Capitalists, who earn money by deploying capital (which is actually stored up labor) are entitled to all of their returns. Landlords, however, earn money by charging for access to something they did not produce - either to the “productive powers of nature” such as rivers, mines, farmable land, or to value created by the community surrounding a plot of land (such as education, cultural amenities, public transit, or private employment opportunities).
It’s really not socialist at all. It’s idealized capitalism.
> Landlords, however, earn money by charging for access to something they did not produce
Not only did they not produce it, in many places they (or the ancestors they inherited it from) actively stole it from the original inhabitants. e.g. The Inclosure Acts, Colonialism, etc.
Indeed. At bottom all land ownership originated at someone brutalizing or threatening to brutalize another person. This is mentioned in the moral/ethical argument by Henry George, but there are separately robust utilitarian arguments for all the same positions.
If the moral position resonates, take it. If the economic position resonates, take it. If the political one resonates, take it. Each is very convincing by its own merits!
"Capitalism" is a fraught word because it is used both with very specific definitions, many conflicting to a degree, and it's also in very general terms. So in general conversation with people of different backgrounds, it's important to connect its usage to specific schools of thought or to more precisely define what is meant
I'll think you'll find that Marx is pretty upset about labor not being entitled to what labor produces, as well. And while Marx is not all of socialism, I don't know anybody who says that Marxian thought is outside of socialism, and I've sought out lots of socialist thought that critiques Marx.
Most critiques of capitalism are that workers are not entitled to the fruits of their labor, that capital steals from them. So if saying that somebody is entitled to work and to keep their labor is capitalist, I'm having trouble understanding where you come from, and would like to hear more. In particular, I don't think George declares that capital is entitled to the fruits of others' labor, which is what you seem to be saying.
Georgism is about socializing land, about preventing people from hoarding it and the wealth it produces. Land is the one input to production that we can't make more of, so therefore hoarding it is by far the most harmful. It's about restoring commons, after the commons had been taken away and privatized. It's about restoring all land to some form of social control, no matter who owns it and how much that person owns. And it's about redistributing that wealth that people are unfairly taking from society when they pocket unearned land rents.
My problem with Georgism is that it tends to be politically unstable and lead to tax revolts. And my problem with the typical Marxist visions (Marx himself was not super prescriptive, but in that void, Marxist thought must expand upon Marx) is the tendency to dictators and totalitarianism, something which George also predicted.
I think George is extremely compatible with, and perhaps required for, the type of socialism that was sought in the Spanish revolution of 1936.
The Georgist position is that capital is entitled to the returns on capital, labor is entitled to the returns on labor. Both of these are "legitimate" because labor would not give any gains to capital if they could produce more without it. Labor employs capital (or chooses to be employed by capitalists) because it increases the productivity of labor - it grows the pie even if they don't get the entirety of it while employing capital. Labor's legitimate claim to its own fruit is self-evident to most people.
The fruits of labor that are not accounted for in a quid pro quo transaction with capital are those that go to land, for which there can be no quid pro quo transaction because you must occupy (and labor upon) land. If there were infinite land available, labor could simply move to that land and produce what they themselves can produce from nature with no gains going to capital because they need not employ capital to survive. If there were infinite land available, the only people who would choose to employ capital (or be employed by a capitalist, same thing) are those who believe the bigger pie is worth the smaller slice.
However we do not live in a world of infinite land, and so that calculus happens^ but it is coerced by the necessity to live and work on land owned by neither labor nor capital. Given that capitalists don't work directly on land and are generally "more efficient" (this is why capital is valuable, aka this efficiency is what capital is), the world becomes separated into those above the "rent line" and those below the "rent line," and there are far more capitalists above than below and far more laborers below than above. This creates tension between labor and capital, but neither of them are getting what they produce, but that's not because capital is stealing from labor - rather land is stealing from both, just capital has greater capacity to be stolen from before descending into poverty.
In any case:
* Not every point of an ideology is mutually exclusive of every point of every competitive ideology.
* Georgism is not about socializing land nor centralizing control. It is explicitly not about that. It is about socializing the gains on land produced by external factors (nearby public and private investment, technological improvements, etc)
* You mention Georgism tends to be politically unstable. Could you point to some historical examples you have in mind?
maybe start from the names: socialism tries to put society first, capitalism tries to put capital first. western europe democracies try to be 'social capitalism', with mixed results, but maybe not as disastrous and scary as some folks here would like them to be.
fair points, but one could argue that USSR wasn't necessarily a socialist state. it was totalitarian, which somehow gets more confused with socialist the further west you go and ask.
We also modified the rules as kids. Who'd have thought the lack of houses was by design, and of it was, who could think it was a fair thing to do, cornering the market?
I certainly didn't think about the dynamics until I studied economics and read articles about how the game was designed. Only my later self, with a background in trading would recognise the rules for what they are, and the strategic possibilities.