[impendia]

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.

[kqr]

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.)

[impendia]

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!

[dragonwriter]

> 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.)

[kqr]

Some house rules prohibit these contracts -- that's what I alluded to not recommending. Sorry, I was unclear.

[ryanbrunner]

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).

[impendia]

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.

[banannaise]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> It is essential to a competitive game that everyone try their best in that specific instance of the game.

No, its not.

It is, of course, more desirable from the perspective of people who prefer that style of play that others conform to it, but it is in no way “essential”.

It may be beneficial to mutual enjoyment to have table agreement on metagame issues like this in advance (OTOH, one might do well to recognise the inherent incentive structure toward the metagame approach you decry in games which tend to produce a long, lingering defeat with no reasonable route to victory.)

[impendia]

An interesting point, but I would argue that I was following your dictum and playing within the boundaries.

I wasn't angry at my friend, and I wasn't personally seeking revenge. I was role-playing my cat army, which suddenly had its home city burned down. My cats certainly were seeking revenge.

In real life, facing an enemy who has nothing to lose can be highly dangerous, and creating such a situation is foolhardy. Why should a board game be different? Why play for second, when a more appealing alternate goal suggested itself?

[smichel17]

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.