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This is my life-long frustration on monopoly and Catan. There isn't a better case for free trade than playing those games in my opinion, but people really are r

This is my life-long frustration on monopoly and Catan. There isn't a better case for free trade than playing those games in my opinion, but people really are reluctant to understand that trades make their possition better at the expense of everyone else. Allow me to boast about my single most fantastic monopoly play where nobody wanted to trade at all, so I initiated a series of trades where I gave each opponent a monopoly without getting myself one, except for the very last trade of all with a player that had all the cash in the game and no properties and I gave him a small monopoly and got a huge one + all the cash to build on it. They key is that each trade I made increased the opponents chances to win enormously, but the last one basically gave me the game in exchange for a small chance to someone that had none at all.

pessimizer 7y ago
Sounds masterful. I've always explained Monopoly as a trading game unlike any other out there in that you spend the entire first 3/4 of the game building up to one big trade. It may be a complex multi-part trade, involving other trades in preparation, but it's all you were working towards. After that trade, you're just a passenger seeing how your valuations played out. Sometimes, like what you did here, you can just structure everything so well that every trade is a better deal for the other player than it is for you, but the sum total of the trades makes you unstoppable. As I mentioned before, this is almost inevitable when you spread your trades between all of the players, and they don't trade with each other. So if you specifically target their needs (like you did), they might not even be able to come up with productive trades with each other...
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Absolutely correct!