Monopoly > Reviews (201)

Monopoly or monotony

Monopoly must be one of the world’s best known board games. Based on buying property and letting it out for profit, the idea is to make the other players in the game bankrupt, thus ensuring you get the monopoly.

* - History

Back in 1934, at a time when the Great Depression was in full swing and many Americans were unemployed, Charles B. Darrow from Germantown, Pennsylvania, USA, showed executives at Parker Brothers a game that he had produced the previous year called Monopoly. The Parker Brothers Company wasn’t impressed and initially rejected the game due to over fifty design errors. Undaunted, and no doubt driven by unemployment and his own game’s promise of riches, Darrow produced the game on his own, gaining help from a friend who was a printer, and sold 5,000 handmade Monopoly sets to a Philadelphia department store. The game went down a storm as soon demand outstripped supply. Unable to keep up with the growing requests for his new game, Darrow went back to Parker Brothers who took up his idea, and the world’s greatest board game was properly launched.

As a kid, my mum had an obsession with property, which has been passed down to me today. My mum’s view was that if you could invest in property, you were doing the right thing. Although circumstances prevented us from achieving anything like a portfolio of property, Monopoly was introduced into our house from when I was just a small kid, and the dreams that I have today of being a property tycoon are due to the seeds sown from playing this game.

* - Playing

Each player (from 2 to 8 players can play at once) starts with the same amount of money, a different character token to go around the board with, and one common aim – To make every other player bankrupt and be declared the winner.

Money is made and lost by the buying, selling and renting of properties. Starting with £1,500, each player starts from the “Go” square, throwing two dice and then moving the appropriate number of squares, the idea at the start of the game is to buy properties. Once you’ve bought a property, the people who land on that property afterwards have to pay you a set rent. Buying all properties in a colour group immediately doubles the rent for those properties and allows you to start building, for a price, houses and hotels on the properties, which in turn raise the rent that you can charge.

The game continues with each player trying to amass as many properties as they can, whilst avoiding landing on opponents properties and paying out rent, avoiding being sent to jail, and other catastrophes along the way.

As you get into the game, you can diversify by trading with other players, mortgaging properties to raise cash or selling your existing houses and hotels for half the price that you paid for them.

The players that own the more salubrious properties, which are the properties at the far end of the clockwise playing rotation, are not always those who win, for despite the opportunity to make a lot of money from these properties, there is also a high cost of buying and building on them.

Play continues until one player remains, having bankrupted all other players.

* - Customized Rules

Although there is a standard set of rules for playing the game, which include auctioning off a property when the person who lands on it decides that they do not want to buy it, the game of Monopoly is also subject to different rules made by the users. In fact, Monopoly is one of the most customizable board games on the market. My personal favourite “Unofficial” rules are that if you throw a double, no matter where you land you do not need to pay any fines or rent, and that any fines or taxes collected are put into the middle of the board and collected by anyone who lands on Free Parking. These two rules keep the game more competitive, as you can go from having nothing and landing on Mayfair with a hotel on it with a double and therefore not paying, to suddenly collecting anything from nothing to a few thousand by landing on Free Parking!

* - Tips

There are 32 houses and 12 hotels in the official game. If all houses and hotels are being used, a player is not allowed to build further on his properties until more buildings are available. Sometimes, by stopping building at 4 houses, you can prevent other players from building on their properties.

Picking a Chance card will more likely take you somewhere else than anything, as ten of the sixteen cards result in this action. With Community Chest cards, nine of the sixteen cards will give you a reward.

You should always buy an unowned property if: a) no other player owns a property in its colour group, b) it gives you a second or third property of its group, or c) it blocks an opponent from controlling a colour group.

It’s estimated that an average trip around the board will make a player around £170. This includes passing Go, collecting rents and other monies, as well as the fines and rent you pay out yourself. Knowing this will allow you to work out an average amount of money that your competitors have.

* - Trivia

• The most frequently landed on coloured properties are the Orange set: Bow Street, Vine Street and Marlborough Street, though the three most individually landed on squares are Trafalgar Square, "GO" and Liverpool Street Station.
• The character locked behind the bars is called Jake the Jailbird
• 500,000 sets are sold each year in the UK alone.
• The most expensive group to build to a Hotel on each, is green, which costs almost £4,000 by the time you have bought the properties and the houses and hotels to go on them.
• 60% of your trips around the board will result in you landing on a station. Just over 20% will result in a trip to one of the Brown properties.

* - Price

Hasbro.co.uk (The official UK makers) are selling this online at £17.99 for the standard Monopoly version, though a quick scout around will tell you that there a huge number of Monopoly games available – Disney Monopoly, Star Wars Monopoly, Batman & Robin Monopoly, Junior Monopoly, Essex Monopoly (I kid you not!) and Arsenal Monopoly to name but a few.

All play exactly the same way as the original game, but have different place names, and vary in price. There are also a few PC versions of the game floating around, though I’ve yet to find an online version – If anyone knows of one that is worth playing, please let me know!

One of the newest additions to the Monopoly family is MyMonopoly.com, which is a website that allows you to design and make your own Monopoly board, and then get it delivered to your door. Imagine that, you could have a Ciao Monopoly set, with all of your favourite characters taking the place of Old Kent Road, The Strand and Mayfair. I’ll leave you to decide who should go where !! This costs £100 by the way.

* - Overall

Everyone in the world must have heard of Monopoly, and I dare say that everyone has played it at some point too. People may blast this game for promoting greed – what other game relies on you driving other players into bankruptcy? Although I agree that is true to a certain extent, I’d be more inclined to suggest that Monopoly is a lesson in life – You start with very little, and no matter what you do there will always be someone willing to run you down to achieve their goals.

Playing Monopoly gives everyone a chance to dream, a chance to be rich, and a chance to do things in life that they normally wouldn’t be able to do. I love this game, and though I find it’s better played with several people, I still enjoying playing it one on one with someone, and I can’t wait until my girls are old enough to play this too.

The game itself is generally recommended for children from the age of 8 upwards, though I know I was playing this from the age of about six and upwards.

The game gives a grounding in life insomuch that you can choose to gamble everything you have on building a hotel knowing that a stroke of bad luck on your part, or good luck on the part of your opponents could cause you to fail. It also shows that, just when you think you have everything worked out, there’s a tax bill to pay. You don’t get much more realistic than that!