22 ms·

Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

252 points by throwaway3157 7y ago

mcv 7y ago
I guess that explains why it's such a terrible game. People put up with it because it was all they had. Now we have other options, fortunately. (I guess this comment could apply to either the boardgame, or to capitalism.)
- eitland 7y ago
  The boardgame can be great fun especially if people follow the rules.
  - larrik 7y ago
    Any boardgame that involves eliminating players from it is a non-starter for me.
    - chungy 7y ago
      How do you win, then?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - saghm 7y ago
        In many board games, either a win condition is reached for one player that ends the game for everyone at once, or some sort of scoring system is used to determine the winner after the gameplay ends.
      - cowbellemoo 7y ago
        Many games go until a win condition is reached without eliminating other players in the meantime.
      - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
        Look up Pandemic or Forbidden Island for examples of cooperative games that put players against the game instead of each other.
        Joeri 7y ago
        Also, bank attack: https://www.johnadams.co.uk/product/bank-attack/ https://www.johnadams.co.uk/product/bank-attack/
        jbay808 7y ago
        An issue with games like Pandemic is that a more experienced or dominant player can tend to take charge of the whole team, with everyone else following their orders instead of autonomously making their own decisions. Especially if following the experienced player's advice really does maximize the chance of winning, it basically becomes a single-player game with spectators who help move the pieces around. I think adding in secret information or hidden objectives can help prevent this.
        captn3m0 7y ago
        The fancier term for this is "The Quarterback" problem. It happens at every Pandemic game, but there are ways around it. Even something as simple as a total-game-timer helps. Another rule that helps is enforcing the "consent" part of the rules (for 2-player interactions, including the one where you're allowed to move other players), and ensuring autonomy is respected in the game, even if its a sub-optimal move. +1 to secret information/hidden objectives. I guess Pandemic:Legacy uses that?
        Spellman 7y ago
        Alternatively, hidden traitor (Shadows over Camelot, Dead of Winter, Battlestar Galactica)! Then you can't trust the "Quarterback" because they could be LYING!!! Other games solve this via real-time constraints. Thinking Escape from the Cursed Temple and Space Alert. There's not enough time for on person to coordinate everyone, so everyone needs to communicate and take initiative.
      - karatestomp 7y ago
        1) One or more game-ending game states which may or may not also be win conditions for the person causing them, without any possibility for a player to be "out" before that. 2) Set duration (usually in rounds played). Usually wins determined, in either case, either by "you were the first to do X so you win" or a scored resolution. It's usually possible to be de facto eliminated in these games (anyone who's played much Catan has been there, to pick a familiar example) but the best of them keep that from happening until late in the game. Quite a few, frankly, do not do a good job of that but do make it hard to tell who's winning so at least you don't know you've effectively already lost by the halfway point of the game. [EDIT] for an easy example many might be familiar with: look at most trick-taking card games, like Spades, Hearts, or Bridge. No elimination (unlike, say, poker), but you still get a winner or winning partnership at the end.
      - dragontamer 7y ago
        "First to 10 points wins". "Dominion", "Settlers of Catan", "Splendor" are great games of this nature. ------ Acquire has "When all companies are monopolies (11 tiles or larger) or when one company is of size 42, the game is over". So the game is on an implicit clock. All players keep playing until the end condition.
        TimPC 7y ago
        Settlers of Catan is a deeply flawed game. It's far better than monopoly but is definitely too dice-heavy and kingmaker oriented. Dominion is in a lot of ways among the worst games in the genre it created as most of the variants that followed added more interesting mechanics and tradeoffs. It should get a lot of credit for being original so I guess I'm fine with calling it a great game. Splendor is a classic.
        dragontamer 7y ago
        I feel like there are better games than Catan these days, but it was great when people were only thinking about relatively bad games like Monopoly or Risk as their Friday night hangout game.
        TimPC 7y ago
        Agree with that. I just think it's sad that the state of the art for gaming in non-specialist stores is Catan and Ticket to Ride. If places like Indigo were a bit more ambitious in their title selection many people would be playing much better games.
        mcv 7y ago
        I honestly haven't seen any pure deckbuilding game that's as good as Dominion. It works very well in Quest for El Dorado, but that's not pure deckbuilding (great game, though). I also disagree that Catan is deeply flawed. Of course no game is perfect, but Catan does what it does very well. Kingmaking can be an issue in any multiplayer game with any sort of interaction, but in Catan, it's pretty clear how to get points. If people are throwing the game just to spite someone, then you just need to play with better people. Dice are absolutely central to the game, but that's not necessarily bad. Luck being a factor does not make a game deeply flawed. If you prefer chess, you just need to play chess instead.
      - hnal943 7y ago
        first past the post and score are both good options.
    - shaneprrlt 7y ago
      There's some intense relationship-ending games of Sorry in your past, I can sense it.
      - larrik 7y ago
        lol, more like my kids getting eliminated and then causing trouble.
        DonHopkins 7y ago
        Kids love causing trouble with that Pop-O-Matic! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfznucMwNuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfznucMwNuU
      - DonHopkins 7y ago
        Eunice explains how to use the little bell to Ma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNG1DkS_f4g&t=6m38s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNG1DkS_f4g&t=6m38s
    - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
      From a social fun aspect, that's a good way to look at it. From the Landlord's Game/Monopoly original intent, eliminating a player basically means they are homeless and destitute, making the educational point rather clear. That said, cooperative games are a nicer way to spend an evening with friends.
      - praptak 7y ago
        Actually, the axed "Prosperity" set of rules for the original game was cooperative.
    - dragontamer 7y ago
      Try Acquire instead. 1. All players play to the end. 2. Implicit alliances are setup similar to the stock market. If the "Saxon" company does better, ALL players who own Saxon benefit. 3. Implicit rivalries are setup similar to the stock market. If "Saxon" company is the strongest in the game, the players you have to worry about are the fellow "Saxon" shareholders. Especially the intense fight over who is majority shareholder (and therefore gets the majority bonus at endgame) 4. It is easier to screw opponents over by buying the last share (or holding tiles they need), rather than win the game outright. Implicitly, Acquire relies upon playing well in a social aspect. Generally speaking, scratch the back of weaker players (ex: If a weaker player a minority shareholder in "Worldwide" company, grant them the majority), they might return the favor (ex: the weaker play may make an acquisition play, benefiting all shareholders of "Worldwide". Its better to be minority in "Worldwide" through an acquisition than to be majority in Worldwide but the company doesn't go anywhere). Note: All companies only have 25 shares. Once the 25 shares are sold, there are no more. You can only purchase 3 shares per turn (maximum, across all companies), meaning the fight for "majority shareholder" is quite intense. You can win vs players with more money by being the first one to buy 13 shares, as an example. 5. You can't sell until a company is acquired. Reaching monopoly status (11-tiles large) means that a company CANNOT be acquired, which means your wealth is now trapped in the monopoly, unable to influence other companies aside from acquiring them. The wealth counts for endgame of course, but small companies grow faster, so its usually better to leave your wealth in the small 1 to 3-tile companies instead. I have lost games because my wealth was trapped in monopolies before, despite being majority shareholder in the largest endgame companies. ------------ Whenever my friends want to play Monopoly, I show them Acquire instead. Its strictly superior. Better tactics, better social interactions, better interactivity for "losing" players (they stay in the game, and often make the final acquisition plays that determine the winner). "Comeback victories" aren't really a thing, due to the exponential growth of money in acquire. If you fall behind, you fall behind exponentially. But its still nice that everyone still has something to do at the board throughout the game, especially compared to Monopoly. At a minimum, your tiles determine who you can help or hurt, while your shares you own form your rivalries and alliances. You're never "alone" per se, someone else always tries to become at least "minority" shareholder in those other companies with you. So you can rely upon your alliances to advance in the late stages of the game, even if you're behind. There's still a degree in fun trying to maximize your earnings, even in a losing position IMO.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      They're fine if they're short. I'd prefer elimination to longer games where a couple clear leaders after lucky first couple rounds are the only ones who can plausibly win, which I've also seen in a few enlightened modern games. Best case for those games is you spend the remaining 80-90% of the game playing spoiler or kingmaker, which is kinda shitty, or in the worst case the game's designed such that you can't do much about it, so you're going through the motions to see if you can manage 3rd place out of 5 (or whatever) for the rest of the game. Monopoly's pretty short if you play by the rules and everyone knows how to play and isn't screwing around. I don't really like it, but I don't think elimination is the main problem. It's not like world-conquest risk where it typically drags on forever, well after the first player elimination. [EDIT] economy-building games with low interaction between players and a significant randomness component seem especially prone to "well that player happened to go first and got the only good thing available to buy this round so has its benefit the rest of the game, and will proceed to stomp everyone else, obviously". There's a particular cards-based game with an age-of-sail trading vessel theme I've played several times that's my (least) favorite example of this: I've won, I've lost, both are fucking boring because you spend most of the game knowing where you're going to place and you can't even rage-harm other players out of boredom. Drawing a blank on the name. Anyway, I'd much rather be eliminated in a game like that.
      - dragontamer 7y ago
        "Dead man walking" is one of the worst feelings ever. Settlers of Catan has a few "dead man walking" situations, but they're somewhat rare.... Especially because the optimal strategy in Catan is to trade with players weaker than you. So all "dead men walking" get boosted by the stronger players. The 1st place player never wants to trade with the 2nd place player, or vice versa. "Ticket to Ride" has more dead-man walking situations, where you know you've messed up but nothing can be done until the game is over. And because the game is elimination free, you feel like a jerk to leave before the game is over. --------------- The goal is to find a game that strikes the balance. Keep everyone playing, but make everyone feel like their contributions (even if they're behind) are noteworthy. Carcassonne is probably the best.
        7y ago
    - captn3m0 7y ago
      +1. I once did a fun presentation on why Monopoly sucks. This was the top issue and the main reason why I don't play it anymore. People play games to have fun. Eliminating them from a game is the worst thing you can do as a game designer, because its the only guaranteed way of them not having fun. This is the same issue that Mafia/Werewolf suffers from. There's a nice blog post from the designer of Guillotine[1], where he mentions how one of the cards in the game (which stops players from playing any action cards) was "the biggest mistake I ever made as a game designer in my life". Can't find the presentation anymore, but the other issues in Monopoly: - Runaway leader (leading players get luckier) - Starting few rolls can end up deciding too much of the game. - Chances of landing in various properties is skewed enough to be a game-breaker (Primarily Transports and Orange) if not everyone is aware of it. - Too much dependence on luck, overall. [1]: https://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-thing-to-avoid-in-game-design.html https://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-thing-to-av...
    - eitland 7y ago
      So no Risk and no Chess for you?
      - Spellman 7y ago
        No OP, but I assume Risk is out. But Chess is OK because game ends when one player is eliminated. Therefore, no lingering players eliminated and standing on the sidelines while the rest play.
  - thinkingemote 7y ago
    I've enjoyed adding more rules, such as the bank adding loans with interest, bank robberies, insurance and organised crime and other things to make it more like a role play game.
    - soylentcola 7y ago
      How did you work out things like (for example) bank robberies? When the banker gets up to pee, you snatch some bills from the drawer? Or every X turns, roll for chance to hit vault-armor class 0?
      - DonHopkins 7y ago
        My favorite approach is to go in under the table and cut a hole underneath the bank's pile of money.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Monopoly sucks because of using the house rule that Free Parking is a jackpot of money. Not doing property auctions and paying out $400 for landing on Go are lesser reasons for it sucking. Stick to the published rules and the problems mostly to away.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    It's still mostly luck (and who-has-the-most-social-capital-to-persuade-the-other-to-let-them-win) based though. There are lot's of much better board games out there.
    - doggydogs94 7y ago
      That’s like saying that poker is mostly luck.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - TimPC 7y ago
        Any individual session of poker is mostly luck. I say this as a winning poker player. The edges are very small and the variance is quite high. There is a reason it's so rare for the best players to make deep runs in the WSOP Main Event.
      - rurp 7y ago
        Poker is mostly luck. Elite players sometimes lose for months at a time. It takes a LOT of hands before you can expect your real world results to converge to your EV results. It is certainly possible to win in the long term, but results from a single session are very loosely correlated with skill.
  - andrepd 7y ago
    That house rule (which is far from universally applied) is a small detail. The game is boring (luck-based, little if any strategy) and unenjoyable in other ways: it takes too long to finish, players who go bust early are left watching the game continue for maybe hours, front-runners are almost certainly going to win yet it takes an excruciatingly drawn-out process to finish the process, etc.
- deweller 7y ago
  This is not due to its origin. It's just not a great game due to its widely varied play time, elimination of players and other flaws. If you're new to Euro-style games and enjoy games with some luck and rolling of the dice, check out The Settlers of Catan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan).
  - proc0 7y ago
    Ah, was that created to show the evils of colonialism? /s
    - mcv 7y ago
      Not every game has a message. Settlers of Catan was created to show what a fun, tight boardgame with some depth and a limited playing time would look like, and kicked off the German boardgame boom as a result. But if you want a game showing the evils of international politics, give War On Terror a try. You can fight the other players by funding terrorists to fight them, but if everybody does that, the terrorists win and everybody loses.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > People put up with it because it was all they had. Nominative determinism strikes again?
andy_ppp 7y ago
I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I certainly always feel like I deserve to have won.
- rdtsc 7y ago
  > it turns out it was just rolls of the dice Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)
- mikestew 7y ago
  As the title implies, the game was designed to be a lot like real life, and it sounds like that from your POV it has succeeded.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too. https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?s=21 https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...
    - dagav 7y ago
      And the 1,048,576 other coins who never tried to flip, because they knew that getting 10 in a row was just luck, will live lives of quiet desperation.
    - misterbwong 7y ago
      I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that success/failure are inherently probabilistic. Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.
howmayiannoyyou 7y ago
My children learned how to negotiate via family monopoly games. This has made parenting MUCH more difficult.
- QuesnayJr 7y ago
  I think they would have figured it out eventually. We never play Monopoly, but I sometimes suspect that my children are actually reincarnated lawyers.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    My 4.5 year old (at the time) was playing school with his 6 year old sibling. Older: What is 1 plus 1? Younger: Two. Or eleven. I see Javascript or law in the future...
    - gdubs 7y ago
      Clearly you’re failing to teach your children binary :P
chungy 7y ago
Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  as the article points out the game was in particular desgigned to show the economic effects of private land rent, hence the original title 'the landlord's game', and that is in fact a zero sum game as they aren't making any more of it. And in particular on tech websites like these people vastly overstate how non 'zero-sum' economic activity actually is mostly because tech has been in a bubble of highly anomalous growth. (A lot of it ironically arguably not real productivity growth but rent collection through platforms and market power). In many ways the tech startups of today look more like digital landlords than innovators whose disruption is primarily taking over the market from a host of competitors rather than improving process efficiency. If we were living in Fordist times and the assembly line and other innovations delivered 6-7% growth annually, then we could rave on about non-zero sum economies. Total factor productivity growth these days is relatively non-existent.
  - xixixao 7y ago
    I think that’s a super narrow view of tech development. Many menial jobs are being replaced by tech, and if that’s not increasing productivity than I don’t know what Ford’s assembly lines did...
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      I don't think it's true that many jobs are being replaced by tech. Restaurant workers, store clerks, nurses, assistances, even warehouse workers and so on are stable. Go through a list of the jobs in the US that employ most workers and none in the top 30 have been created in the last 20 years. Many economists have pointed this out. If the 'rapid innovation' that a lot of tech entrepreneurs talk about was happening (and they have an incentive to oversell it), we would see high unemployment (as people are being replaced) together with high productivity and high GDP growth. We see no such thing. The Andrew Yang robot horror scenario is nowhere in the data. By historical measures, the technological progress of the 1940s to late 1970s vastly outpaces today.
kiliantics 7y ago
The game's creator, Lizzie Magie, was a proponent of Georgism[0], not exactly anti-capitalist, but supported common ownership of land. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
- notacoward 7y ago
  Calling Georgism "common ownership of land" is seriously misleading. A tax is not ownership, no matter how many times the neo-feudal "vulgar libertarians" (as Georgists and geolibertarians call them) try to establish the trope via mere repetition.
  - nwah1 7y ago
    Common ownership is the term Henry George used. Of course, keeping the title system was specifically preferred in order to limit the scope of government. Just need to pay for the land you use, since it belongs to all. We should, perhaps, distinguish common ownership from public ownership. The concept of the Commons is one that people ought to understand. Something can be owned in common without it being managed by the government.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      George wrote a lot about the commons, and you're right that it's important to understand the relationship between state/common/private ownership, but I stand by the statement that its use here - without that context, where more common capitalist vs. communist notions of property are already being discussed - is misleading. It's like throwing "bad faith" into a discussion without being clear that it refers to a domain-specific concept from law or existentialist philosophy.
willart4food 7y ago
Someone needs to make a Socialism game. The state owns all the properties, top politicians embezzle a lot of money; and the game must last at minimum 7 days during which people are given little and crappy food, and forced to work for little money and also work for free in public work. I'll run the game, any volunteers? Oh yeah, I forgot. If someone complains they will be beaten, and if they continue to complain they will "disappear".
- nso 7y ago
  You clearly have no idea what socialism is.
- dsiegel2275 7y ago
  I think you meant to say "Communism". Regardless, substitute a couple of nouns and one could argue that game description isn't all that different than the capitalism version.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  No no no The trend in board games right now is legacy board games, where the game maintains state after each session. What you really want is legacy monopoly. Where the winners of early games maintain their monopoly, and face a proletariat uprising in future games, making it an asymmetrical struggle for the elites to maintain power.
- lm28469 7y ago
  Weird, France has been under socialist governments plenty of times since the 30s and we never experienced any of that. You might be thinking about communism.
  - randomdata 7y ago
    Communism has no state or government (and thus no politicians), which are the key features of his game.
  - e2le 7y ago
    To some, they see no difference between the two and neither do they see difference in implementation.
legitster 7y ago
Monopoly was meant to show the benefits of Georgism - essentially a flat-value land tax. Georgism is not opposed to capitalism. In fact, Adam Smith himself advocated a similar tax. So did Keynes, Friedman- nearly every economist. However, it is likely that Elizabeth Magie herself didn't quite understand this - the Georgist set of rules in the Landlord's game doesn't quite match what Henry George was proposing. George's proposed tax intended to drive down rents by encouraging development of land. But the game flat out handed people money and kept rents the same.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  Henry George was more or less opposed to our current conception of capitalism. He believed all land and narual resources should be held in common. He stated that a person should be entitled to the product of their personal labor and that was about it. But being a practical man he realized the horse was well out of the barn on private ownership of land and felt that a land value tax was essentially the next best thing. He maintained collective ownership of natural resource beside land though.
  - legitster 7y ago
    I feel that is an overzealous interpretation. The whole crux of his work was that rent was unlike capital and labor and very subject to exploitation. He very much believed in markets and accumulation of capital. You can collectively own natural resources and still have a vibrant free trade economy.
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      Yup, never said he was opposed to markets nor accumulation of capital. But capitalism as we know it is hugely influenced by our current system of private property. Georgeism would have many similarities to our present form of capitalism but it would also look very different.
      - legitster 7y ago
dsiegel2275 7y ago
I've always used Monopoly as a good way to explain inflation. If you play by the stated rules in the game, any property landed on goes up for auction to all players if the current player doesn't want to purchase it. Imagine what happens to the purchase price of properties in this scenario if every player started the game with 10 times more money...
- koheripbal 7y ago
  I've always used it as a business negotiations lesson. The winner of the game is often the person who makes the most deals to secure the most property monopolies. The KEY lesson is that you can trade "down" as the loser of every single deal, and yet still win by virtue of the fact that you've made the MOST deals. Making deals captures untapped value. There's actually a LOT more strategy to Monopoly than the people in this thread realize.
  - dkonofalski 7y ago
    Have you actually played Monopoly until the end? The winner is not usually the person that makes the most deals. It's the person who makes the best deals for the dice rolls. If you buy blue, green, and yellow blocks through deals, you're almost always guaranteed to win regardless of how many deals you've made outside of those. The remaining players can continue to make deals and, as long as you don't accept them, they can never win.
  - throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
    That is... false. Trading down consistently only works if you’re playing with idiots. Trading a high value property for a low value property makes sense if you get a color set, but if you do this multiple times with bare minimum competence players, the likely outcome is that everyone has at least one set, but you have booth the lowest amount of cash to develop things and the least valuable properties. With the exception of edge case (although often optimal) strategies where you lock down the available houses, trading down is likely a sign that you’re trying to increase your likelihood of winning from 0% to 10%, while improving the odds to a greater degree for whoever is getting the better deal. Most properties are superficial until they have specifically 3 houses on them. If you have three color sets, but fewer than 3 houses on any of them, you’re going to lose.
robomartin 7y ago
I love people who call capitalism evil while doing so on computers and phones that exist because of it, while surrounded by products, from their clothes to their desk, furniture, construction materials, cars and more that are the product of the system. Or politicians who do the same while speaking into a microphone and a camera on a stage with lights and a broadcast system that is the result of capitalism and entrepreneurship. It’s easy to be critical of something while not having to suffer the consequences of not having that thing. Even worse, proposing imaginary solutions without ever having lived under that reality at all. The latter is the socialist utopia Bernie Sanders is selling. We have friends from nearly every real Socialist nation in the world. They can’t believe people like Sanders and Warren are not being laughed out of politics in the US. Even worse, they are horrified they are given the time of day as presidential candidates. All of them actually escaped to the US from the very things these people want to implement in the US. Bloomberg, Biden and Mayor Pete are the only reasonable people in that race, with Bloomberg being a massively better candidate than all of the rest.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  In the large, it's extremely unclear that everything you've named is a side-effect of capitalism or other effects (such as network effects; hard to predict whether a critical mass of invention in any one location would kick off the kind of technology revolution that has occurred regardless of the form of government atop it).
  - WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
    It is very obvious that enforced property rights and freedom of association (aka, capitalism) is the direct reason for the enormous increase of wealth. If you cannot see that, it's time for you to read an Econ 101 textbook.
- speedgoose 7y ago
  I stopped reading at "socialist utopia Bernie Sanders is selling". It's too much for my poor European point of view, using my capitalist Chinese phone to read your comment and write my answer.
raintrees 7y ago
The board game Cashflow is closer to reality than Monopoly, especially the 202 version, which provides for paper assets options, as well as loss of investment properties to acts of nature. A good way to learn basic investment evaluation using play money.
amelius 7y ago
You should try entering a game after a few rounds have already been played. Impossible. That's how monopoly works in real life. (Thinking about it, I guess demonstrating this is the function of the jail in the game).
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Here is the crux of the article, beginning with the father of the inventor, Elizabeth Magie: "Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all. Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it. Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)"
- vondur 7y ago
  I believe that there has always been land taxes here in the US. I'd love for the US to break up some of these huge overpowering companies today though.
  - naravara 7y ago
    US mostly has a Property Tax for state or local governments, which is different from a Land Value Tax. The property tax is levied based on the value of your property, which includes all improvements made to the property. A land value tax is specifically levied against the value of the land itself, and ignores the value of any buildings and improvements or the use value of the land you're on.
Jonahgay 7y ago
In monopoly you're forced to pay, in reality you have choice to who you want to pay.
solotronics 7y ago
How else should land be distributed if not via free market capitalism? Land is a scarce resource that people want. Either some person/corporation owns it or the government does. Its easy to see models where the government owns all the property as this exists in many places around the world such as Nigeria, China, and North Korea.
- lukifer 7y ago
  The ideas of Henry George [0] address this, without resorting to "Tragedy of the Commons" solutions of collective ownership. The short answer is a Land Value Tax [1], based only on "ground rent" (the usage value combined with the value of proximity to community), as opposed to taxing improvements, as most property taxes do currently. The rough theory is that the tax should be proportional to the unearned "rent-seeking" profits that derive indirectly from the surrounding community; moreover, a higher tax on ground rent disincentivizes pure speculation [2], while removing the disincentive of value-creation/development baked into our property taxes now. And unlike communist policies, this system would preserve the distributed intelligence of markets; there are some libertarian economists who favor the idea, the most notable of whom was Milton Friedman, who called LVT "the least worst tax". In some sense, it could be seen as closer to a voluntarist system that most forms of government: one essentially pays the surrounding community to compensate them for their violent exclusion from a portion of nature. This video articulates the idea fairly well in plain language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism [1] http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_the_vacant_lot_(cropped).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_...
- francisofascii 7y ago
  The best policy is a balance between total government control and total private control. An individual can own land, but the government can tax it, or allow easements, etc. Governments can own land and allow individuals on it. So it doesn't have to be one or the other.
cryptica 7y ago
"Georgism" is actually a really great idea but the name is terrible. I remember I tried to discuss it with someone once and they chuckled when I said the word "Georgism". They couldn't actually listen to my argument. I think names are very important. For example, I find it ingenious that the country "French Guyana" has the word "French" in it and that there is another country in South America already called "Guyana"; it's probably a key reason why "French Guyana" is still part of France; they literally have no identity without France; they'd have to invent and popularize a new word first and that's very difficult to do.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Just call it LVT, as the land value tax is the policy focus of the ideology. It would fit in next to other acronyms in vogue like UBI, MMT, FJG, etc.
- duxut_staglatz 7y ago
  It is called Guyane in French. Given that the locals are not English native speakers, I fail to see how the English name influences their national identity.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem will solve itself.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Because "enlightened self interest" is an oxymoron? By the way, "people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer" is a misstatement of the theory.
  - jamie_ca 7y ago
    Parent's "wealth for all" does not mean "wealth for each." Of course taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise, which is why they tend not do do so voluntarily. However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation?
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      A lot of these arguments also tend to elide the fact that even under the most "extreme" tax structures in place or being proposed in first-world democracies across the globe, wealthy people are still wealthy even with those taxes. In practice, no one serious is actually talking about forcing Bill Gates to give up all his money so it can be apportioned equally to every American citizen. If Gates had to pay an annual wealth tax of 2%, started with $90B (the most recent estimate of his net worth I can find), and made $2B a year (which is less than the most recent estimate of his annual wealth increase I can find), then after 20 years he would have... $93B. I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry."
DonHopkins 7y ago
Twenty years ago I made "Micropoly", a board game about Microsoft's monopoly. The company names on the properties are a bit dated by now! https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.micropoly.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.microp... Here's the board: https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.micropoly.com/micropoly-board-med.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.microp... And this is the XML file that defined the board, properties, utilities, cards, etc, which were generated by a Perl script and some PostScript: https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly <CHANCECARD TITLE="Download"> <IMAGE X="130" Y="70" SCALE="0.55" EPSFILE="graphics/gatespie.eps"/> <TEXT X="10" Y="40" SIZE="10">Go directly to Reinstall Windows.</TEXT> <TEXT X="10" Y="25" SIZE="10">Do not pass Start,</TEXT> <TEXT X="10" Y="10" SIZE="10">do not collect $200.</TEXT> </CHANCECARD> <CORNERS> <CORNER NAME="Start Menu" INDEX="0" NAME1="START" NAME2="MENU" NAME3="" CAPTION1="COLLECT" CAPTION2="$200 SALARY" CAPTION3="AS YOU PASS" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyStartMenuCorner"/> <CORNER NAME="Reinstall Windows" INDEX="1" NAME1=" REINSTALL" NAME2=" WINDOWS" NAME3="" CAPTION1="JUST" CAPTION2="REBOOTING" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyReinstallWindowsCorner"/> <CORNER NAME="Free Software" INDEX="2" NAME1=" FREE" NAME2=" SOFTWARE" NAME3="" CAPTION1="" CAPTION2="" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyFreeSoftwareCorner"/> <CORNER NAME="Goto Reinstall" INDEX="3" NAME1=" CORRUPTED" NAME2=" REGISTRY" NAME3="" CAPTION1=" GOTO" CAPTION2=" REINSTALL" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyCrashAndReinstallCorner"/> </CORNERS> Micropoly The Microsoft Monopoly Game Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a political statement protected under the First Amendment. This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman. You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly! The Goals of the Micropoly Project: To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the economy. To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers. To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in 1973, that teach why monopolies are bad. To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source" game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly. To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet. To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth. Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the Twentieth Century: Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist. That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life! The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers. The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game all over the world. Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other peoples original ideas. Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with frivolous lawsuits. They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the "Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won! As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's safe to call a game "anything-opoly". We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly. The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and Microsoft should be obvious. Openopoly The software used to produce Micropoly will be freely distributed, as well as the Micropoly content, to serve as an example of how to make your own personalized monopoly game. We are developing a free "Openopoly" architecture based on XML, whose purpose is to automate the production of custom monopoly games, both printed board games and multi-player online computer games. Micropoly will be the first example of such a custom game, so anyone will be able to drop in their own text and graphics, turn the crank, and produce a version of monopoly localized for their own city, university, company, church, sports team, or favorite political cause. [...]
DonHopkins 7y ago
Also check out Ralph Anspach's "Anti-Monopoly". There's a book about the huge lawsuit it caused, and it's an amazing story! http://www.antimonopoly.com/ http://www.antimonopoly.com/ >Anti-Monopoly – a board game with a twist >This game may look familiar, but don't be fooled – it's a real estate trading game with an exciting twist! Players choose free enterprise or monopoly, then play under different rules. Competitors charge fair market value while monopolists take over whole neighborhoods and jack up rents. In real life, monopolists have an unfair advantage. But in Anti-Monopoly, competitors have a fair shot at coming out on top! Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-Swindle/dp/0966649702 https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-Swindle/dp/09... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly >Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly. >Background and history >Anspach created Anti-Monopoly in part as a response to the lessons taught by the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail them in the real world. >The game was originally to be produced in 1973 as Bust the Trust, but the title was changed to Anti-Monopoly. It has seen multiple printings and revisions since 1973. In 1984, a new version appeared as Anti-Monopoly II; this version was updated and re-released in 2005 without the numerical designation. The game is currently still in print, and is produced and distributed worldwide by University Games. >Trademark lawsuit >See also: History of the board game Monopoly (Anti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General Mills Fun Group) >In 1974, Parker Brothers sued Anspach over the use of the "Monopoly" name, claiming trademark infringement. While preparing his legal defense, Anspach became aware of Monopoly's history prior to Charles Darrow's sale of the game to Parker in 1935, and how it had evolved from Elizabeth Magie's original Landlord's Game into the version Darrow appropriated. Anspach based his defense on the grounds that the game itself existed in effectively the public domain before Parker purchased it, and therefore Parker's trademark claim on it should be nullified. The case dragged on for ten years,[1] with numerous appeals and overturned judicial verdicts, until Anspach and Parker ultimately reached a settlement, permitting him to continue using the name Anti-Monopoly and distributing the game.[2] >For a time during the dispute, the game was marketed as simply "Anti." How a Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US_News https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US... The Story of Class Struggle, America's Most Popular Marxist Board Game https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-struggle-americas-most-popular-marxist-board-game https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-strugg...
3xblah 7y ago
Think of the WWW as a Monopoly board. Except unlike the board game the first move involves no roll of the dice. The class of players known as users always start the game on the same certain properties, owned by a small set of players known as Google, Amazon, etc. Microsoft used to have a marketing slogan to address the growing presence of the internet: "Where do you want to go today?" The question we should have is, "Why does Microsoft need to know?" Why do these companies need to know what we are going to do next? In the WWW monopoly a small set of players collect rent from nearly every user and strive to know every users' next move. It may be through the control of websites or devices, or both. As they say, the game is rigged.
- iso1210 7y ago
  Microsoft were certainly the first movers, but they only owned the stations. Muppets. Amazon, Google, Facebook moved in and bought almost all the properties. Apple are doing very well from owning the purples.
joshspankit 7y ago
Huh. And I always thought we were missing something because players would always end up bickering and hating the experience (except the winner, and it brought out the worst in them). Now I see that was actually the core lesson.
fag_tits 7y ago
f* off bernie
planetzero 7y ago
I wish more people would learn from it: Monopolies are bad if it's a private company or the government. The outcome is still the same: a stalled industry, little to no innovation, and many times, high prices.
neilparikh 7y ago
The title is incorrect. It was invented to demonstrate with exclusionary land ownership. Even Adam Smith recognised that this would be a problem.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  Further, The introduction of hotels to the game was not intended initially. Adding hotels causes more housing to appear, which is antithetical to the point of housing shortages
dang 7y ago
Two big threads from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889109
dzhiurgis 7y ago
What if we limited max amount of property owned by a person (by sq ft or value)?

252 points by throwaway3157 7y ago

mcv 7y ago

I guess that explains why it's such a terrible game. People put up with it because it was all they had. Now we have other options, fortunately. (I guess this comment could apply to either the boardgame, or to capitalism.)

eitland 7y ago
The boardgame can be great fun especially if people follow the rules.
- larrik 7y ago
  Any boardgame that involves eliminating players from it is a non-starter for me.
  - chungy 7y ago
    How do you win, then?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - saghm 7y ago
      In many board games, either a win condition is reached for one player that ends the game for everyone at once, or some sort of scoring system is used to determine the winner after the gameplay ends.
    - cowbellemoo 7y ago
      Many games go until a win condition is reached without eliminating other players in the meantime.
    - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
      Look up Pandemic or Forbidden Island for examples of cooperative games that put players against the game instead of each other.
      - Joeri 7y ago
        Also, bank attack: https://www.johnadams.co.uk/product/bank-attack/ https://www.johnadams.co.uk/product/bank-attack/
      - jbay808 7y ago
        An issue with games like Pandemic is that a more experienced or dominant player can tend to take charge of the whole team, with everyone else following their orders instead of autonomously making their own decisions. Especially if following the experienced player's advice really does maximize the chance of winning, it basically becomes a single-player game with spectators who help move the pieces around. I think adding in secret information or hidden objectives can help prevent this.
        captn3m0 7y ago
        The fancier term for this is "The Quarterback" problem. It happens at every Pandemic game, but there are ways around it. Even something as simple as a total-game-timer helps. Another rule that helps is enforcing the "consent" part of the rules (for 2-player interactions, including the one where you're allowed to move other players), and ensuring autonomy is respected in the game, even if its a sub-optimal move. +1 to secret information/hidden objectives. I guess Pandemic:Legacy uses that?
        Spellman 7y ago
        Alternatively, hidden traitor (Shadows over Camelot, Dead of Winter, Battlestar Galactica)! Then you can't trust the "Quarterback" because they could be LYING!!! Other games solve this via real-time constraints. Thinking Escape from the Cursed Temple and Space Alert. There's not enough time for on person to coordinate everyone, so everyone needs to communicate and take initiative.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      1) One or more game-ending game states which may or may not also be win conditions for the person causing them, without any possibility for a player to be "out" before that. 2) Set duration (usually in rounds played). Usually wins determined, in either case, either by "you were the first to do X so you win" or a scored resolution. It's usually possible to be de facto eliminated in these games (anyone who's played much Catan has been there, to pick a familiar example) but the best of them keep that from happening until late in the game. Quite a few, frankly, do not do a good job of that but do make it hard to tell who's winning so at least you don't know you've effectively already lost by the halfway point of the game. [EDIT] for an easy example many might be familiar with: look at most trick-taking card games, like Spades, Hearts, or Bridge. No elimination (unlike, say, poker), but you still get a winner or winning partnership at the end.
    - dragontamer 7y ago
      "First to 10 points wins". "Dominion", "Settlers of Catan", "Splendor" are great games of this nature. ------ Acquire has "When all companies are monopolies (11 tiles or larger) or when one company is of size 42, the game is over". So the game is on an implicit clock. All players keep playing until the end condition.
      - TimPC 7y ago
        Settlers of Catan is a deeply flawed game. It's far better than monopoly but is definitely too dice-heavy and kingmaker oriented. Dominion is in a lot of ways among the worst games in the genre it created as most of the variants that followed added more interesting mechanics and tradeoffs. It should get a lot of credit for being original so I guess I'm fine with calling it a great game. Splendor is a classic.
        dragontamer 7y ago
        I feel like there are better games than Catan these days, but it was great when people were only thinking about relatively bad games like Monopoly or Risk as their Friday night hangout game.
        TimPC 7y ago
        Agree with that. I just think it's sad that the state of the art for gaming in non-specialist stores is Catan and Ticket to Ride. If places like Indigo were a bit more ambitious in their title selection many people would be playing much better games.
        mcv 7y ago
        I honestly haven't seen any pure deckbuilding game that's as good as Dominion. It works very well in Quest for El Dorado, but that's not pure deckbuilding (great game, though). I also disagree that Catan is deeply flawed. Of course no game is perfect, but Catan does what it does very well. Kingmaking can be an issue in any multiplayer game with any sort of interaction, but in Catan, it's pretty clear how to get points. If people are throwing the game just to spite someone, then you just need to play with better people. Dice are absolutely central to the game, but that's not necessarily bad. Luck being a factor does not make a game deeply flawed. If you prefer chess, you just need to play chess instead.
    - hnal943 7y ago
      first past the post and score are both good options.
  - shaneprrlt 7y ago
    There's some intense relationship-ending games of Sorry in your past, I can sense it.
    - larrik 7y ago
      lol, more like my kids getting eliminated and then causing trouble.
      - DonHopkins 7y ago
        Kids love causing trouble with that Pop-O-Matic! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfznucMwNuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfznucMwNuU
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      Eunice explains how to use the little bell to Ma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNG1DkS_f4g&t=6m38s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNG1DkS_f4g&t=6m38s
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    From a social fun aspect, that's a good way to look at it. From the Landlord's Game/Monopoly original intent, eliminating a player basically means they are homeless and destitute, making the educational point rather clear. That said, cooperative games are a nicer way to spend an evening with friends.
    - praptak 7y ago
      Actually, the axed "Prosperity" set of rules for the original game was cooperative.
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    Try Acquire instead. 1. All players play to the end. 2. Implicit alliances are setup similar to the stock market. If the "Saxon" company does better, ALL players who own Saxon benefit. 3. Implicit rivalries are setup similar to the stock market. If "Saxon" company is the strongest in the game, the players you have to worry about are the fellow "Saxon" shareholders. Especially the intense fight over who is majority shareholder (and therefore gets the majority bonus at endgame) 4. It is easier to screw opponents over by buying the last share (or holding tiles they need), rather than win the game outright. Implicitly, Acquire relies upon playing well in a social aspect. Generally speaking, scratch the back of weaker players (ex: If a weaker player a minority shareholder in "Worldwide" company, grant them the majority), they might return the favor (ex: the weaker play may make an acquisition play, benefiting all shareholders of "Worldwide". Its better to be minority in "Worldwide" through an acquisition than to be majority in Worldwide but the company doesn't go anywhere). Note: All companies only have 25 shares. Once the 25 shares are sold, there are no more. You can only purchase 3 shares per turn (maximum, across all companies), meaning the fight for "majority shareholder" is quite intense. You can win vs players with more money by being the first one to buy 13 shares, as an example. 5. You can't sell until a company is acquired. Reaching monopoly status (11-tiles large) means that a company CANNOT be acquired, which means your wealth is now trapped in the monopoly, unable to influence other companies aside from acquiring them. The wealth counts for endgame of course, but small companies grow faster, so its usually better to leave your wealth in the small 1 to 3-tile companies instead. I have lost games because my wealth was trapped in monopolies before, despite being majority shareholder in the largest endgame companies. ------------ Whenever my friends want to play Monopoly, I show them Acquire instead. Its strictly superior. Better tactics, better social interactions, better interactivity for "losing" players (they stay in the game, and often make the final acquisition plays that determine the winner). "Comeback victories" aren't really a thing, due to the exponential growth of money in acquire. If you fall behind, you fall behind exponentially. But its still nice that everyone still has something to do at the board throughout the game, especially compared to Monopoly. At a minimum, your tiles determine who you can help or hurt, while your shares you own form your rivalries and alliances. You're never "alone" per se, someone else always tries to become at least "minority" shareholder in those other companies with you. So you can rely upon your alliances to advance in the late stages of the game, even if you're behind. There's still a degree in fun trying to maximize your earnings, even in a losing position IMO.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    They're fine if they're short. I'd prefer elimination to longer games where a couple clear leaders after lucky first couple rounds are the only ones who can plausibly win, which I've also seen in a few enlightened modern games. Best case for those games is you spend the remaining 80-90% of the game playing spoiler or kingmaker, which is kinda shitty, or in the worst case the game's designed such that you can't do much about it, so you're going through the motions to see if you can manage 3rd place out of 5 (or whatever) for the rest of the game. Monopoly's pretty short if you play by the rules and everyone knows how to play and isn't screwing around. I don't really like it, but I don't think elimination is the main problem. It's not like world-conquest risk where it typically drags on forever, well after the first player elimination. [EDIT] economy-building games with low interaction between players and a significant randomness component seem especially prone to "well that player happened to go first and got the only good thing available to buy this round so has its benefit the rest of the game, and will proceed to stomp everyone else, obviously". There's a particular cards-based game with an age-of-sail trading vessel theme I've played several times that's my (least) favorite example of this: I've won, I've lost, both are fucking boring because you spend most of the game knowing where you're going to place and you can't even rage-harm other players out of boredom. Drawing a blank on the name. Anyway, I'd much rather be eliminated in a game like that.
    - dragontamer 7y ago
      "Dead man walking" is one of the worst feelings ever. Settlers of Catan has a few "dead man walking" situations, but they're somewhat rare.... Especially because the optimal strategy in Catan is to trade with players weaker than you. So all "dead men walking" get boosted by the stronger players. The 1st place player never wants to trade with the 2nd place player, or vice versa. "Ticket to Ride" has more dead-man walking situations, where you know you've messed up but nothing can be done until the game is over. And because the game is elimination free, you feel like a jerk to leave before the game is over. --------------- The goal is to find a game that strikes the balance. Keep everyone playing, but make everyone feel like their contributions (even if they're behind) are noteworthy. Carcassonne is probably the best.
      - 7y ago
  - captn3m0 7y ago
    +1. I once did a fun presentation on why Monopoly sucks. This was the top issue and the main reason why I don't play it anymore. People play games to have fun. Eliminating them from a game is the worst thing you can do as a game designer, because its the only guaranteed way of them not having fun. This is the same issue that Mafia/Werewolf suffers from. There's a nice blog post from the designer of Guillotine[1], where he mentions how one of the cards in the game (which stops players from playing any action cards) was "the biggest mistake I ever made as a game designer in my life". Can't find the presentation anymore, but the other issues in Monopoly: - Runaway leader (leading players get luckier) - Starting few rolls can end up deciding too much of the game. - Chances of landing in various properties is skewed enough to be a game-breaker (Primarily Transports and Orange) if not everyone is aware of it. - Too much dependence on luck, overall. [1]: https://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-thing-to-avoid-in-game-design.html https://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-thing-to-av...
  - eitland 7y ago
    So no Risk and no Chess for you?
    - Spellman 7y ago
      No OP, but I assume Risk is out. But Chess is OK because game ends when one player is eliminated. Therefore, no lingering players eliminated and standing on the sidelines while the rest play.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  I've enjoyed adding more rules, such as the bank adding loans with interest, bank robberies, insurance and organised crime and other things to make it more like a role play game.
  - soylentcola 7y ago
    How did you work out things like (for example) bank robberies? When the banker gets up to pee, you snatch some bills from the drawer? Or every X turns, roll for chance to hit vault-armor class 0?
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      My favorite approach is to go in under the table and cut a hole underneath the bank's pile of money.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Monopoly sucks because of using the house rule that Free Parking is a jackpot of money. Not doing property auctions and paying out $400 for landing on Go are lesser reasons for it sucking. Stick to the published rules and the problems mostly to away.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  It's still mostly luck (and who-has-the-most-social-capital-to-persuade-the-other-to-let-them-win) based though. There are lot's of much better board games out there.
  - doggydogs94 7y ago
    That’s like saying that poker is mostly luck.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - TimPC 7y ago
      Any individual session of poker is mostly luck. I say this as a winning poker player. The edges are very small and the variance is quite high. There is a reason it's so rare for the best players to make deep runs in the WSOP Main Event.
    - rurp 7y ago
      Poker is mostly luck. Elite players sometimes lose for months at a time. It takes a LOT of hands before you can expect your real world results to converge to your EV results. It is certainly possible to win in the long term, but results from a single session are very loosely correlated with skill.
- andrepd 7y ago
  That house rule (which is far from universally applied) is a small detail. The game is boring (luck-based, little if any strategy) and unenjoyable in other ways: it takes too long to finish, players who go bust early are left watching the game continue for maybe hours, front-runners are almost certainly going to win yet it takes an excruciatingly drawn-out process to finish the process, etc.
deweller 7y ago
This is not due to its origin. It's just not a great game due to its widely varied play time, elimination of players and other flaws. If you're new to Euro-style games and enjoy games with some luck and rolling of the dice, check out The Settlers of Catan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan).
- proc0 7y ago
  Ah, was that created to show the evils of colonialism? /s
  - mcv 7y ago
    Not every game has a message. Settlers of Catan was created to show what a fun, tight boardgame with some depth and a limited playing time would look like, and kicked off the German boardgame boom as a result. But if you want a game showing the evils of international politics, give War On Terror a try. You can fight the other players by funding terrorists to fight them, but if everybody does that, the terrorists win and everybody loses.
zozbot234 7y ago
> People put up with it because it was all they had. Nominative determinism strikes again?

andy_ppp 7y ago

I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I certainly always feel like I deserve to have won.

rdtsc 7y ago
> it turns out it was just rolls of the dice Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)
mikestew 7y ago
As the title implies, the game was designed to be a lot like real life, and it sounds like that from your POV it has succeeded.
- epistasis 7y ago
  Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too. https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?s=21 https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...
  - dagav 7y ago
    And the 1,048,576 other coins who never tried to flip, because they knew that getting 10 in a row was just luck, will live lives of quiet desperation.
  - misterbwong 7y ago
    I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that success/failure are inherently probabilistic. Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.

howmayiannoyyou 7y ago

My children learned how to negotiate via family monopoly games. This has made parenting MUCH more difficult.

QuesnayJr 7y ago
I think they would have figured it out eventually. We never play Monopoly, but I sometimes suspect that my children are actually reincarnated lawyers.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  My 4.5 year old (at the time) was playing school with his 6 year old sibling. Older: What is 1 plus 1? Younger: Two. Or eleven. I see Javascript or law in the future...
  - gdubs 7y ago
    Clearly you’re failing to teach your children binary :P

chungy 7y ago

Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.

Barrin92 7y ago
as the article points out the game was in particular desgigned to show the economic effects of private land rent, hence the original title 'the landlord's game', and that is in fact a zero sum game as they aren't making any more of it. And in particular on tech websites like these people vastly overstate how non 'zero-sum' economic activity actually is mostly because tech has been in a bubble of highly anomalous growth. (A lot of it ironically arguably not real productivity growth but rent collection through platforms and market power). In many ways the tech startups of today look more like digital landlords than innovators whose disruption is primarily taking over the market from a host of competitors rather than improving process efficiency. If we were living in Fordist times and the assembly line and other innovations delivered 6-7% growth annually, then we could rave on about non-zero sum economies. Total factor productivity growth these days is relatively non-existent.
- xixixao 7y ago
  I think that’s a super narrow view of tech development. Many menial jobs are being replaced by tech, and if that’s not increasing productivity than I don’t know what Ford’s assembly lines did...
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    I don't think it's true that many jobs are being replaced by tech. Restaurant workers, store clerks, nurses, assistances, even warehouse workers and so on are stable. Go through a list of the jobs in the US that employ most workers and none in the top 30 have been created in the last 20 years. Many economists have pointed this out. If the 'rapid innovation' that a lot of tech entrepreneurs talk about was happening (and they have an incentive to oversell it), we would see high unemployment (as people are being replaced) together with high productivity and high GDP growth. We see no such thing. The Andrew Yang robot horror scenario is nowhere in the data. By historical measures, the technological progress of the 1940s to late 1970s vastly outpaces today.

kiliantics 7y ago

The game's creator, Lizzie Magie, was a proponent of Georgism[0], not exactly anti-capitalist, but supported common ownership of land. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

notacoward 7y ago
Calling Georgism "common ownership of land" is seriously misleading. A tax is not ownership, no matter how many times the neo-feudal "vulgar libertarians" (as Georgists and geolibertarians call them) try to establish the trope via mere repetition.
- nwah1 7y ago
  Common ownership is the term Henry George used. Of course, keeping the title system was specifically preferred in order to limit the scope of government. Just need to pay for the land you use, since it belongs to all. We should, perhaps, distinguish common ownership from public ownership. The concept of the Commons is one that people ought to understand. Something can be owned in common without it being managed by the government.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    George wrote a lot about the commons, and you're right that it's important to understand the relationship between state/common/private ownership, but I stand by the statement that its use here - without that context, where more common capitalist vs. communist notions of property are already being discussed - is misleading. It's like throwing "bad faith" into a discussion without being clear that it refers to a domain-specific concept from law or existentialist philosophy.

willart4food 7y ago

Someone needs to make a Socialism game. The state owns all the properties, top politicians embezzle a lot of money; and the game must last at minimum 7 days during which people are given little and crappy food, and forced to work for little money and also work for free in public work. I'll run the game, any volunteers? Oh yeah, I forgot. If someone complains they will be beaten, and if they continue to complain they will "disappear".

nso 7y ago
You clearly have no idea what socialism is.
dsiegel2275 7y ago
I think you meant to say "Communism". Regardless, substitute a couple of nouns and one could argue that game description isn't all that different than the capitalism version.
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
No no no The trend in board games right now is legacy board games, where the game maintains state after each session. What you really want is legacy monopoly. Where the winners of early games maintain their monopoly, and face a proletariat uprising in future games, making it an asymmetrical struggle for the elites to maintain power.
lm28469 7y ago
Weird, France has been under socialist governments plenty of times since the 30s and we never experienced any of that. You might be thinking about communism.
- randomdata 7y ago
  Communism has no state or government (and thus no politicians), which are the key features of his game.
- e2le 7y ago
  To some, they see no difference between the two and neither do they see difference in implementation.

legitster 7y ago

Monopoly was meant to show the benefits of Georgism - essentially a flat-value land tax. Georgism is not opposed to capitalism. In fact, Adam Smith himself advocated a similar tax. So did Keynes, Friedman- nearly every economist. However, it is likely that Elizabeth Magie herself didn't quite understand this - the Georgist set of rules in the Landlord's game doesn't quite match what Henry George was proposing. George's proposed tax intended to drive down rents by encouraging development of land. But the game flat out handed people money and kept rents the same.

DubiousPusher 7y ago
Henry George was more or less opposed to our current conception of capitalism. He believed all land and narual resources should be held in common. He stated that a person should be entitled to the product of their personal labor and that was about it. But being a practical man he realized the horse was well out of the barn on private ownership of land and felt that a land value tax was essentially the next best thing. He maintained collective ownership of natural resource beside land though.
- legitster 7y ago
  I feel that is an overzealous interpretation. The whole crux of his work was that rent was unlike capital and labor and very subject to exploitation. He very much believed in markets and accumulation of capital. You can collectively own natural resources and still have a vibrant free trade economy.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    Yup, never said he was opposed to markets nor accumulation of capital. But capitalism as we know it is hugely influenced by our current system of private property. Georgeism would have many similarities to our present form of capitalism but it would also look very different.
    - legitster 7y ago

dsiegel2275 7y ago

I've always used Monopoly as a good way to explain inflation. If you play by the stated rules in the game, any property landed on goes up for auction to all players if the current player doesn't want to purchase it. Imagine what happens to the purchase price of properties in this scenario if every player started the game with 10 times more money...

koheripbal 7y ago
I've always used it as a business negotiations lesson. The winner of the game is often the person who makes the most deals to secure the most property monopolies. The KEY lesson is that you can trade "down" as the loser of every single deal, and yet still win by virtue of the fact that you've made the MOST deals. Making deals captures untapped value. There's actually a LOT more strategy to Monopoly than the people in this thread realize.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  Have you actually played Monopoly until the end? The winner is not usually the person that makes the most deals. It's the person who makes the best deals for the dice rolls. If you buy blue, green, and yellow blocks through deals, you're almost always guaranteed to win regardless of how many deals you've made outside of those. The remaining players can continue to make deals and, as long as you don't accept them, they can never win.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  That is... false. Trading down consistently only works if you’re playing with idiots. Trading a high value property for a low value property makes sense if you get a color set, but if you do this multiple times with bare minimum competence players, the likely outcome is that everyone has at least one set, but you have booth the lowest amount of cash to develop things and the least valuable properties. With the exception of edge case (although often optimal) strategies where you lock down the available houses, trading down is likely a sign that you’re trying to increase your likelihood of winning from 0% to 10%, while improving the odds to a greater degree for whoever is getting the better deal. Most properties are superficial until they have specifically 3 houses on them. If you have three color sets, but fewer than 3 houses on any of them, you’re going to lose.

robomartin 7y ago

I love people who call capitalism evil while doing so on computers and phones that exist because of it, while surrounded by products, from their clothes to their desk, furniture, construction materials, cars and more that are the product of the system. Or politicians who do the same while speaking into a microphone and a camera on a stage with lights and a broadcast system that is the result of capitalism and entrepreneurship. It’s easy to be critical of something while not having to suffer the consequences of not having that thing. Even worse, proposing imaginary solutions without ever having lived under that reality at all. The latter is the socialist utopia Bernie Sanders is selling. We have friends from nearly every real Socialist nation in the world. They can’t believe people like Sanders and Warren are not being laughed out of politics in the US. Even worse, they are horrified they are given the time of day as presidential candidates. All of them actually escaped to the US from the very things these people want to implement in the US. Bloomberg, Biden and Mayor Pete are the only reasonable people in that race, with Bloomberg being a massively better candidate than all of the rest.

shadowgovt 7y ago
In the large, it's extremely unclear that everything you've named is a side-effect of capitalism or other effects (such as network effects; hard to predict whether a critical mass of invention in any one location would kick off the kind of technology revolution that has occurred regardless of the form of government atop it).
- WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
  It is very obvious that enforced property rights and freedom of association (aka, capitalism) is the direct reason for the enormous increase of wealth. If you cannot see that, it's time for you to read an Econ 101 textbook.
speedgoose 7y ago
I stopped reading at "socialist utopia Bernie Sanders is selling". It's too much for my poor European point of view, using my capitalist Chinese phone to read your comment and write my answer.

raintrees 7y ago

The board game Cashflow is closer to reality than Monopoly, especially the 202 version, which provides for paper assets options, as well as loss of investment properties to acts of nature. A good way to learn basic investment evaluation using play money.

amelius 7y ago

You should try entering a game after a few rounds have already been played. Impossible. That's how monopoly works in real life. (Thinking about it, I guess demonstrating this is the function of the jail in the game).

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Here is the crux of the article, beginning with the father of the inventor, Elizabeth Magie: "Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all. Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it. Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)"

vondur 7y ago
I believe that there has always been land taxes here in the US. I'd love for the US to break up some of these huge overpowering companies today though.
- naravara 7y ago
  US mostly has a Property Tax for state or local governments, which is different from a Land Value Tax. The property tax is levied based on the value of your property, which includes all improvements made to the property. A land value tax is specifically levied against the value of the land itself, and ignores the value of any buildings and improvements or the use value of the land you're on.

Jonahgay 7y ago

In monopoly you're forced to pay, in reality you have choice to who you want to pay.

solotronics 7y ago

How else should land be distributed if not via free market capitalism? Land is a scarce resource that people want. Either some person/corporation owns it or the government does. Its easy to see models where the government owns all the property as this exists in many places around the world such as Nigeria, China, and North Korea.

lukifer 7y ago
The ideas of Henry George [0] address this, without resorting to "Tragedy of the Commons" solutions of collective ownership. The short answer is a Land Value Tax [1], based only on "ground rent" (the usage value combined with the value of proximity to community), as opposed to taxing improvements, as most property taxes do currently. The rough theory is that the tax should be proportional to the unearned "rent-seeking" profits that derive indirectly from the surrounding community; moreover, a higher tax on ground rent disincentivizes pure speculation [2], while removing the disincentive of value-creation/development baked into our property taxes now. And unlike communist policies, this system would preserve the distributed intelligence of markets; there are some libertarian economists who favor the idea, the most notable of whom was Milton Friedman, who called LVT "the least worst tax". In some sense, it could be seen as closer to a voluntarist system that most forms of government: one essentially pays the surrounding community to compensate them for their violent exclusion from a portion of nature. This video articulates the idea fairly well in plain language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism [1] http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_the_vacant_lot_(cropped).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_...
francisofascii 7y ago
The best policy is a balance between total government control and total private control. An individual can own land, but the government can tax it, or allow easements, etc. Governments can own land and allow individuals on it. So it doesn't have to be one or the other.

cryptica 7y ago

"Georgism" is actually a really great idea but the name is terrible. I remember I tried to discuss it with someone once and they chuckled when I said the word "Georgism". They couldn't actually listen to my argument. I think names are very important. For example, I find it ingenious that the country "French Guyana" has the word "French" in it and that there is another country in South America already called "Guyana"; it's probably a key reason why "French Guyana" is still part of France; they literally have no identity without France; they'd have to invent and popularize a new word first and that's very difficult to do.

Apocryphon 7y ago
Just call it LVT, as the land value tax is the policy focus of the ideology. It would fit in next to other acronyms in vogue like UBI, MMT, FJG, etc.
duxut_staglatz 7y ago
It is called Guyane in French. Given that the locals are not English native speakers, I fail to see how the English name influences their national identity.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.

GreenJelloShot 7y ago
If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem will solve itself.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Because "enlightened self interest" is an oxymoron? By the way, "people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer" is a misstatement of the theory.
- jamie_ca 7y ago
  Parent's "wealth for all" does not mean "wealth for each." Of course taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise, which is why they tend not do do so voluntarily. However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation?
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    A lot of these arguments also tend to elide the fact that even under the most "extreme" tax structures in place or being proposed in first-world democracies across the globe, wealthy people are still wealthy even with those taxes. In practice, no one serious is actually talking about forcing Bill Gates to give up all his money so it can be apportioned equally to every American citizen. If Gates had to pay an annual wealth tax of 2%, started with $90B (the most recent estimate of his net worth I can find), and made $2B a year (which is less than the most recent estimate of his annual wealth increase I can find), then after 20 years he would have... $93B. I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry."

DonHopkins 7y ago

Twenty years ago I made "Micropoly", a board game about Microsoft's monopoly. The company names on the properties are a bit dated by now! https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.micropoly.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.microp... Here's the board: https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.micropoly.com/micropoly-board-med.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.microp... And this is the XML file that defined the board, properties, utilities, cards, etc, which were generated by a Perl script and some PostScript: https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly <CHANCECARD TITLE="Download"> <IMAGE X="130" Y="70" SCALE="0.55" EPSFILE="graphics/gatespie.eps"/> <TEXT X="10" Y="40" SIZE="10">Go directly to Reinstall Windows.</TEXT> <TEXT X="10" Y="25" SIZE="10">Do not pass Start,</TEXT> <TEXT X="10" Y="10" SIZE="10">do not collect $200.</TEXT> </CHANCECARD> <CORNERS> <CORNER NAME="Start Menu" INDEX="0" NAME1="START" NAME2="MENU" NAME3="" CAPTION1="COLLECT" CAPTION2="$200 SALARY" CAPTION3="AS YOU PASS" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyStartMenuCorner"/> <CORNER NAME="Reinstall Windows" INDEX="1" NAME1=" REINSTALL" NAME2=" WINDOWS" NAME3="" CAPTION1="JUST" CAPTION2="REBOOTING" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyReinstallWindowsCorner"/> <CORNER NAME="Free Software" INDEX="2" NAME1=" FREE" NAME2=" SOFTWARE" NAME3="" CAPTION1="" CAPTION2="" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyFreeSoftwareCorner"/> <CORNER NAME="Goto Reinstall" INDEX="3" NAME1=" CORRUPTED" NAME2=" REGISTRY" NAME3="" CAPTION1=" GOTO" CAPTION2=" REINSTALL" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyCrashAndReinstallCorner"/> </CORNERS> Micropoly The Microsoft Monopoly Game Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a political statement protected under the First Amendment. This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman. You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly! The Goals of the Micropoly Project: To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the economy. To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers. To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in 1973, that teach why monopolies are bad. To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source" game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly. To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet. To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth. Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the Twentieth Century: Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist. That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life! The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers. The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game all over the world. Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other peoples original ideas. Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with frivolous lawsuits. They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the "Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won! As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's safe to call a game "anything-opoly". We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly. The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and Microsoft should be obvious. Openopoly The software used to produce Micropoly will be freely distributed, as well as the Micropoly content, to serve as an example of how to make your own personalized monopoly game. We are developing a free "Openopoly" architecture based on XML, whose purpose is to automate the production of custom monopoly games, both printed board games and multi-player online computer games. Micropoly will be the first example of such a custom game, so anyone will be able to drop in their own text and graphics, turn the crank, and produce a version of monopoly localized for their own city, university, company, church, sports team, or favorite political cause. [...]

DonHopkins 7y ago

Also check out Ralph Anspach's "Anti-Monopoly". There's a book about the huge lawsuit it caused, and it's an amazing story! http://www.antimonopoly.com/ http://www.antimonopoly.com/ >Anti-Monopoly – a board game with a twist >This game may look familiar, but don't be fooled – it's a real estate trading game with an exciting twist! Players choose free enterprise or monopoly, then play under different rules. Competitors charge fair market value while monopolists take over whole neighborhoods and jack up rents. In real life, monopolists have an unfair advantage. But in Anti-Monopoly, competitors have a fair shot at coming out on top! Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-Swindle/dp/0966649702 https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-Swindle/dp/09... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly >Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly. >Background and history >Anspach created Anti-Monopoly in part as a response to the lessons taught by the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail them in the real world. >The game was originally to be produced in 1973 as Bust the Trust, but the title was changed to Anti-Monopoly. It has seen multiple printings and revisions since 1973. In 1984, a new version appeared as Anti-Monopoly II; this version was updated and re-released in 2005 without the numerical designation. The game is currently still in print, and is produced and distributed worldwide by University Games. >Trademark lawsuit >See also: History of the board game Monopoly (Anti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General Mills Fun Group) >In 1974, Parker Brothers sued Anspach over the use of the "Monopoly" name, claiming trademark infringement. While preparing his legal defense, Anspach became aware of Monopoly's history prior to Charles Darrow's sale of the game to Parker in 1935, and how it had evolved from Elizabeth Magie's original Landlord's Game into the version Darrow appropriated. Anspach based his defense on the grounds that the game itself existed in effectively the public domain before Parker purchased it, and therefore Parker's trademark claim on it should be nullified. The case dragged on for ten years,[1] with numerous appeals and overturned judicial verdicts, until Anspach and Parker ultimately reached a settlement, permitting him to continue using the name Anti-Monopoly and distributing the game.[2] >For a time during the dispute, the game was marketed as simply "Anti." How a Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US_News https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US... The Story of Class Struggle, America's Most Popular Marxist Board Game https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-struggle-americas-most-popular-marxist-board-game https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-strugg...

3xblah 7y ago

Think of the WWW as a Monopoly board. Except unlike the board game the first move involves no roll of the dice. The class of players known as users always start the game on the same certain properties, owned by a small set of players known as Google, Amazon, etc. Microsoft used to have a marketing slogan to address the growing presence of the internet: "Where do you want to go today?" The question we should have is, "Why does Microsoft need to know?" Why do these companies need to know what we are going to do next? In the WWW monopoly a small set of players collect rent from nearly every user and strive to know every users' next move. It may be through the control of websites or devices, or both. As they say, the game is rigged.

iso1210 7y ago
Microsoft were certainly the first movers, but they only owned the stations. Muppets. Amazon, Google, Facebook moved in and bought almost all the properties. Apple are doing very well from owning the purples.

joshspankit 7y ago

Huh. And I always thought we were missing something because players would always end up bickering and hating the experience (except the winner, and it brought out the worst in them). Now I see that was actually the core lesson.

fag_tits 7y ago

f* off bernie

planetzero 7y ago

I wish more people would learn from it: Monopolies are bad if it's a private company or the government. The outcome is still the same: a stalled industry, little to no innovation, and many times, high prices.

neilparikh 7y ago

The title is incorrect. It was invented to demonstrate with exclusionary land ownership. Even Adam Smith recognised that this would be a problem.

throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
Further, The introduction of hotels to the game was not intended initially. Adding hotels causes more housing to appear, which is antithetical to the point of housing shortages

dang 7y ago

Two big threads from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889109

dzhiurgis 7y ago

What if we limited max amount of property owned by a person (by sq ft or value)?