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.

I have a better house rule. Properties don't have prices and when anyone lands on an unowned property it goes up for auction. Reflects more of a realistic property market and makes the game far more strategic. We also find the property prices in monopoly are too low by at least 2x.

There's a lot of strategy in Monopoly. People who don't think there's strategy in Monopoly in my experience are people who don't understand the value of trading, and have largely played games of it where little to no trading was done.

If you can't imagine trading with another player in a way that would give that player a Monopoly, you haven't exhausted the strategy space of Monopoly, a seminal game in the history of board games that all 3M/German/Euro-style strategy games of today owe a debt to.

I'm going to stop because I feel like I'm falling into a bizarre habit of only commenting on HN when Monopoly is brought up negatively:)

edit: if there's an obvious, unstoppable winner at any point in any game, you are allowed to stop playing.

>If you can't imagine trading with another player in a way that would give that player a Monopoly

No, I wouldn't, except if it gives a (more valuable) monopoly to me.

You talk a lot about strategy, but what strategy is that? Afaict any strategy in Monopoly is "static", i.e. prefer orange properties, then the second set in each street, etc. That is, the boring sort x)

The game rarely goes on for hours without free parking.

The game should run between. 30-60 minutes at the most with normal rules and if everyone knows what's up. Once the first player falls an auction begins or one player gets all the assets and the game is quickly over after that. Most games go on forever because there's money on free parking or you don't do auctions, or you have unlimited houses.

Play by the rules and the game is very fun with a lot of strategies.

If you follow the actual rules, the game rarely lasts more than an hour. The main rule that no one follows that speeds up the game is auctioning a property when there person doesn't want to buy it.

It forces every property on the board to be owned with just a few times around the board.

Everytime I played, people always bought properties if able, since it's so obviously worth it, so auctions (which where in the rules) happened very seldom anyways.

They are so not all worth it. A couple efficient properties (yellow and orange) are worth any number of the others. Own a monopoly on yellow or orange, and you will likely win the game. I auction everything else, which depletes my competitors and raises my chances.

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.

That’s like saying that poker is mostly luck.

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.

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.

Adding a prize for Free Parking makes the game last longer. Adding more money into the game (in any manner) just serves to lengthen the game.

Yep. When we first started playing by the published rules, we were surprised by how quickly games ended. Property auctions help too as it quickly gets most properties into play instead of players just going round and round the board while hitting NOP spaces.