[codingkoi]

My siblings and I would tape a monopoly board to the TV to split it vertically and then play team games to get around “screen cheating”. I think it had the best of both worlds. We were still in the same room but we could ambush and sneak up on each other. Definitely less expensive than this solution.

Goldeneye 64 was the best bang for our buck of any game we ever bought. We did the same thing with Perfect Dark.

[willismichael]

That's incredible. Somebody actually found a genuinely enjoyable use of a monopoly board.

[voidfunc]

I like Monopoly, but this made me laugh.

[willismichael]

Thanks. My problem with Monopoly is that I always feel like about 10 or 15 minutes into the game it is clear who the winner will be, and then the next two hours are a slow grind in which everybody else slowly becomes dust.

[mlok]

That is the point of this game : "It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies."

Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history

[tragictrash]

My god I always hated this game, now I know why.

[darepublic]

My friends and I played a version of monopoly where every unowned property that is landed on goes up for general auction among all players. To speed up the process of auctioning all players write their bid down and then it is shown all at once. This reduces the luck of the game somewhat in regards to luck in being the first to land on a property tile, and adds a skill of being able to figure out what a property is worth in the context of the board situation. Every x-mas I try and usually fail to get my family to play it with me.

[philliphaydon]

The rules of monopoly are that if you land on an unowned tile you must buy it. If you decide not to, or can’t afford to, it can be bid on. Highest bid gets it. Even if it’s less than the cost.

[benjaminwootton]

I’ve played monopoly for 30 years and never realised that. I and everyone I’ve ever played assumed you had a choice whether to purchase or not.

[gridspy]

FYI, this written auction process is called a Blind Tender.

[pacerwpg]

This is the version in the game rules.

[afiori]

in this version the moving player does not have priority.

[mikepurvis]

The sibling mentions about the intentional aspect of this, but the other factor is the popular house rules around free parking and not auctioning properties, both of which contribute to there being far too much cash in the game. This is part of why it takes so long to go bankrupt.

[bgdam]

My friends and I invented the 'Joint Venture' ruleset precisely because of this reason. Under these rules, you don't need to own a monopoly to start building on it. Instead you can form an agreement with the other owners, a JV so to say, and then you can pool money and start building. Income from the properties can be split up between the JV partners in any manner of their choosing.

But since the rules of the game only allow you to build if you have a monopoly, when a JV is formed, all owners should nominate one person and transfer their properties (within that monopoly) to that person, who then becomes the owner of the monopoly and can do with it as he wishes.

This leads to a lot of fun situations when there is conflict between the JV parties about the usage, or if the owner requires money for financing something else, and decides to 'backstab' the JV partners. Keeps the game entertaining for hours!

[blowski]

Do whatever it takes to get the cheapest sets early and fill them with houses (NOT hotels) to use up all the housing stock.

And then play for hours towards your inevitable victory.

[93po]

I've been playing a LOT of monopoly online recently and I agree with you - whoever gets the first monopoly on the second or third side of the board is going to win 90% of the time. And if you're playing with an inexperienced person who doesn't realize the value of never, ever giving another player a monopoly, then whoever bamboozles them first is likely to win.

I would usually forfeit and leave whenever I wasn't first, and generally speaking so did anyone else.

[danachow]

It goes much faster if you’re the banker and embezzle judiciously.

[prawn]

My 9yo loves numbers. When most people play Monopoly and act as the banker, they have the board in front of them and the bank's funds to the side. When he plays, he has the bank's notes laid out in front of him and the game's board is an afterthought off to the side. Thankfully I don't think he is the cheating sort, yet.

[myko]

That's how you know you're playing it correctly!

As another comment posted, that is the point of the game. It doesn't always work out that way with house rules people use (knowingly or not).

[dylan604]

You just summed up life ;P

No, not the other board game

[0des]

If anything at least it is a simulation of real life, is it not?

[dmitriid]

you can arrange two monopoly boards (better still if two different monopolies) in an 8 shape. This prolongs the game and makes it more interesting.

[mattl]

Do you use all the rules, especially auctions?

[rowanG077]

hmmm I feel the opposite. The absurd amounts of money a person can lose by just landing on two build houses of their opponent means that even someone who is winning can suddenly start to lose within a few turns.

[shoo]

in a better world, every family would not have the traditional copy of monopoly on the shelf, but would instead have a copy of chinatown

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47/chinatown

https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/review-chinatown/

[RileyJames]

Yep, remember doing that once or twice in halo 1.

Ultimately, screen cheating is a feature.

Halo worked well as the pistol (starting weapon) is all you really need. So there’s no massive disadvantage on spawn.

I remember playing online 2v2 (halo on xbox, there was no online so it was actually system link, lan, run over the network. Bloody hard work from Australia) in which screen cheating is most definitely a feature.

Nothing more bonding for two brothers to duke it out 1v1, and then discover you’re leagues ahead of everyone online in 2v2.

[mulmen]

As I recall the Xbox had an Ethernet port and Halo supported up to four consoles. I think there were some limitations. Not sure if two teams of 8 were possible but I think 4x4 was. At a minimum I believe dedicated screens were possible in a four player game.

The PS2 had something similar (only two consoles) but it used Firewire because Sony is the Apple of Japan.

[Infernal]

I recall being in an 8 v 8 LAN game, team living room had 2 TVs and team dining room had 2 TVs.

[antifa]

I didn't know 4v4v4v4 was possible, we mostly did 8v8 CTFs.

I gave up on PS2 games because the first few I tried would say 2 or 4 or more players and too many times they meant "1 per PS2" without disclosing that ahead of time where xbox and GC reliably had splitscreen on pretty much any multiplayer game.

[mulmen]

I’m honestly not sure 4v4v4v4 was a thing but I have a memory of doing four way team death match. I could be making things up. That was a long time ago.

[dmead]

During undergrad in the US we used to use Xbox connect. It would function had a lan bridge to other people so you'd just use the regular halo UI to find a game.

So it has no real online features but they were grafed on by a bunch of tricks.

[tehbeard]

Ah Xbox connect. Had mine and my brother's xbox on the same switch so we could play together with others.

We used to connect across the Atlantic to a host in the US, dude had a fat fibre pipe so 16 player Halo 2 with 0 lag and modded features (like spawning a warthog for each player in blood gulch for Cat vs. Mouse games.)

Fun times. Halo 3 iirc made some changes to the netstack to break it though :(

[dmead]

rip. what was that mod called? i think people were calling it like halo 1.5 for a while. i'm reaching way back for this.

[megablast]

Screen cheating is a valid form of play though. You have to be good to know where someone is by quickly looking at their screen.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Yeah that's how my group of friends came to see it. It was just another skill we could compete with. Some of us could watch the other three screens most of the time and hardly look at our own, which led to strategies of running around while staring at floors and walls to mask our position better.

The game has a lot of tricks too as I recall. Grenade launcher grenades only explode when hitting the ground, not other surfaces, so if you know what you're doing you can kill someone half way across The Complex with one. Oh, and some guns can shoot through doors, but the door must be open(ing) for it to actually register the hit, otherwise it is just rendering a tracer. Stuff like that.

Perhaps someday I will have an opportunity to save the world with my license-to-kill, postols-only, Complex skills. Only then will my misspent youth make sense.

[noobermin]

18 year old me would say "only noobs think this"

[ddingus]

Yup. Knew those layouts cold. People knew

[tenken]

Yup, it's simple, just get better at the game.

[udp]

We used to position the TV such that it was split between two bunks of a bunk bed. One player below and one player above.

[aunty_helen]

Perfect dark was such a great game. Heaps of innovative concepts.

Not sure screen cheating would work very well against the sniper that can shoot through walls though.

[donatj]

I remember having a good hiding spot near the ammo for the FarSight and just taking out my friends on repeat for like 20 solid minutes before they managed to get to me and kill me. Totally OP in wrong hands and amazingly fun.

One of my honest bigger complaints about newer first person shooters is that they round all that corners off the map. There's no good sniper nests.

In Halo Infinite anywhere you could reasonably snipe from is out of bounds. They give you a grappling hook, but don't let you go anywhere interesting with it in the multiplayer.

[fernandotakai]

the second mode on all weapons made perfect dark absurdly unique. the laptop gun was super fun and innovative.

[14]

I was going to mention Perfect Dark. Probably my favourite game to this day. So many good wasted childhood hours playing this game.

[stevesearer]

I loved Perfect Dark but never completed the game as my system would always freeze due to the number of explosions during the last level’s boss battle. Even with the expansion memory pack thing.

[Arrath]

I was an unashamed screen-looker in the Goldeneye days, and got no end to the raft of shit I got from my friends over it.

As luck would have it, those skills were a great advantage when playing games like Halo LAN parties where I was sharing the screen with my allies rather than enemies. A quick glance and I could gauge their location, situation, and how best to help them out.

[effingwewt]

We used cardboard boxes in a panels formed to a cross and extended. I don't know how we spent days playing it but we did!

We had some people who relied on screen cheating so much they refused to play with it.

It was weird how split the community was on screem cheating or not back then.