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I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. We want to learn for real life from games, and real life is full of chance. And there are strategies f

I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. We want to learn for real life from games, and real life is full of chance. And there are strategies for dealing with chance, like hedging your bets. For Monopoly, mathematicians have worked out winning strategies. I think it has to do with a high chance of people landing in jail and the odds of landing on fields when starting from jail.

DanBC 11y ago
Monopoly's lack of fun isn't because it uses dice. Monopoly's lack of fun comes from the player elimination, which is a crucial part of the game. People dislike player elimination (because it feels mean), and include stuff to avoid it, (fines go in the middle and are collected if you land on free parking, for example). These house rules turn a 1 hour game into an interminable 5 hour slog. If you have a group of people who are happy with the concept of player elimination, and who play to win, and you avoid the house rules, Monopoly becomes somewhat fun. But there are very many much better games.
- drostie 11y ago
  So much this. The last game of Monopoly I played with my girlfriend, she was in the lead. She eventually started on the "well, it costs this much, but you don't have to pay if you don't want to..." No. The game is, just kill me and win. Stop trying to prolong it.
Mithaldu 11y ago
"A factor of chance" does not make a game "unworthy". Particularly, you're looking at this as a binary decision of worthy or unworthy. What makes a game interesting to most people is how much randomness there is. Human brains are built to dole out reward hormones when they make predictions and, followed by a period of uncertainty/expectation, their predictions come true; OR fail in such a way that they gain enough information to improve future predictions. Having too little randomness can (if there is little complexity) mean that predictions always come trivially true, which does not trigger the reward mechanism. Having too much randomness disables the triggering by way of a "teaching failure". (Though it still leaves the way open for the success trigger, thus addictions to gambling.) So in order for a game to be good, it needs to strike a certain balance between simplicity/complexity and determinism/randomness.
- Zikes 11y ago
  Some of my favorite games have a large amount of chance. There's a variety of dice games called "press your luck" where you can roll a set of dice and accept the results as they are, or roll again and again hoping for better results, but also increasing the odds that you'll "bust" and lose your turn entirely. I've played a few games where someone managed to win after only a couple of turns, or I just roll busts over and over, but there are still plenty of opportunities for strategy in between those wild swings of good and bad luck.
sago 11y ago
> I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say, Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board? For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star Wars Monopoly!).
- kqr 11y ago
  > For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. ...and when the first player loses, they have to sit by and idly watch while one player gains a larger and larger advantage, only waiting for the rest to lose.
- facepalm 11y ago
  I guess it is true that the time it takes to lose is the real issue. Still, I played a lot of Monopoly as a kid. Nowadays it wouldn't be my first choice for a game evening, but I have brought it out occasionally for my preschool kid. I make him calculate change money, which he doesn't always like. Even Chutes and Ladders can be great fun for kids, and they can practice counting. I think the boardgame geek top list is a bit biased, because it was made by gaming geeks who might tend to prefer complicated game mechanics.
  - sago 11y ago
    I don't think so, a game like Werewolf, say is very simple, and has a lot of love on the Geek. A game like Ticket to Ride, or the Resistance, or Forbidden Island is much less complex than Monopoly, but are routinely in top lists of game fans. Okay, you have to be into heavier games to be into Brass, but heavy Euros are hardly the be-all of board gaming. [edit: Yeah, I take back the 'I don't think so' - on reflection - there is a bias towards heavy games at the top, but I don't think that's why Monopoly, Parcheesi et al are low]
babarock 11y ago
There are many things I dislike about Monopoly but the randomness isn't one of them. A good deal of games I love have a big chunk of luck/randomness and I'm fine with it. The things I dislike about Monopoly: * Not too much strategy involved. The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. * It's long. Even the shortest games last over 90 minutes. However the winner is decided much earlier in the game. There's very little you can do to prevent an early leader from taking the game, and you have to sit there watching them bully you slowly for several hours. * The theme sucks. "Buy land, make more money". I don't find that particularly fun. * The good elements of monopoly are often found in other games that don't share the same bad elements (I'm thinking of Settlers, but there are others too).
- onion2k 11y ago
  The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. That's testable. Simulate a few tens of thousands of games based on some criteria (players always buy properties they land on if they can afford them, players will mortgage their portfolio to buy properties if it blocks another player, etc) and see if the person winning on round n where n is an early round is the same as the person who's winning at the end of the game. It certainly sounds like it's true. It'd be interesting to see how early you can abandon a game and still know who'd have won.
lmm 11y ago
An element of chance is fine, if it allows interesting decision making. Good games of chance indeed involve strategies like hedging your bets. But with Monopoly, 90% of turns involve literally no decision-making - you roll, move along, and pay out or not. Occasionally you have a tough call to make about whether to buy a property, or how many houses to buy - but those are the exception rather than the rule. 90% of the game is essentially you doing bookkeeping for the game.

DanBC 11y ago

Monopoly's lack of fun isn't because it uses dice. Monopoly's lack of fun comes from the player elimination, which is a crucial part of the game. People dislike player elimination (because it feels mean), and include stuff to avoid it, (fines go in the middle and are collected if you land on free parking, for example). These house rules turn a 1 hour game into an interminable 5 hour slog. If you have a group of people who are happy with the concept of player elimination, and who play to win, and you avoid the house rules, Monopoly becomes somewhat fun. But there are very many much better games.

drostie 11y ago
So much this. The last game of Monopoly I played with my girlfriend, she was in the lead. She eventually started on the "well, it costs this much, but you don't have to pay if you don't want to..." No. The game is, just kill me and win. Stop trying to prolong it.

Mithaldu 11y ago

"A factor of chance" does not make a game "unworthy". Particularly, you're looking at this as a binary decision of worthy or unworthy. What makes a game interesting to most people is how much randomness there is. Human brains are built to dole out reward hormones when they make predictions and, followed by a period of uncertainty/expectation, their predictions come true; OR fail in such a way that they gain enough information to improve future predictions. Having too little randomness can (if there is little complexity) mean that predictions always come trivially true, which does not trigger the reward mechanism. Having too much randomness disables the triggering by way of a "teaching failure". (Though it still leaves the way open for the success trigger, thus addictions to gambling.) So in order for a game to be good, it needs to strike a certain balance between simplicity/complexity and determinism/randomness.

Zikes 11y ago
Some of my favorite games have a large amount of chance. There's a variety of dice games called "press your luck" where you can roll a set of dice and accept the results as they are, or roll again and again hoping for better results, but also increasing the odds that you'll "bust" and lose your turn entirely. I've played a few games where someone managed to win after only a couple of turns, or I just roll busts over and over, but there are still plenty of opportunities for strategy in between those wild swings of good and bad luck.

sago 11y ago

> I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say, Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board? For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star Wars Monopoly!).

kqr 11y ago
> For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. ...and when the first player loses, they have to sit by and idly watch while one player gains a larger and larger advantage, only waiting for the rest to lose.
facepalm 11y ago
I guess it is true that the time it takes to lose is the real issue. Still, I played a lot of Monopoly as a kid. Nowadays it wouldn't be my first choice for a game evening, but I have brought it out occasionally for my preschool kid. I make him calculate change money, which he doesn't always like. Even Chutes and Ladders can be great fun for kids, and they can practice counting. I think the boardgame geek top list is a bit biased, because it was made by gaming geeks who might tend to prefer complicated game mechanics.
- sago 11y ago
  I don't think so, a game like Werewolf, say is very simple, and has a lot of love on the Geek. A game like Ticket to Ride, or the Resistance, or Forbidden Island is much less complex than Monopoly, but are routinely in top lists of game fans. Okay, you have to be into heavier games to be into Brass, but heavy Euros are hardly the be-all of board gaming. [edit: Yeah, I take back the 'I don't think so' - on reflection - there is a bias towards heavy games at the top, but I don't think that's why Monopoly, Parcheesi et al are low]

babarock 11y ago

There are many things I dislike about Monopoly but the randomness isn't one of them. A good deal of games I love have a big chunk of luck/randomness and I'm fine with it. The things I dislike about Monopoly: * Not too much strategy involved. The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. * It's long. Even the shortest games last over 90 minutes. However the winner is decided much earlier in the game. There's very little you can do to prevent an early leader from taking the game, and you have to sit there watching them bully you slowly for several hours. * The theme sucks. "Buy land, make more money". I don't find that particularly fun. * The good elements of monopoly are often found in other games that don't share the same bad elements (I'm thinking of Settlers, but there are others too).

onion2k 11y ago
The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. That's testable. Simulate a few tens of thousands of games based on some criteria (players always buy properties they land on if they can afford them, players will mortgage their portfolio to buy properties if it blocks another player, etc) and see if the person winning on round n where n is an early round is the same as the person who's winning at the end of the game. It certainly sounds like it's true. It'd be interesting to see how early you can abandon a game and still know who'd have won.

lmm 11y ago

An element of chance is fine, if it allows interesting decision making. Good games of chance indeed involve strategies like hedging your bets. But with Monopoly, 90% of turns involve literally no decision-making - you roll, move along, and pay out or not. Occasionally you have a tough call to make about whether to buy a property, or how many houses to buy - but those are the exception rather than the rule. 90% of the game is essentially you doing bookkeeping for the game.