And this is literally true, OP your interpretation is exactly how it was designed:

> Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, …… as a way to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth

( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game) )

The less outright-capitalistic part didn’t survive in the rules.

I thought it would be too tedious to write out everything about the Landlord’s Game since it was shared here a few months ago. Which is why I only winked at it by mentioning Georgeism (it’s there, literally in my comment).

The history aside, the game Monopoly describes the concept of monopoly quite well and how it is a bad thing.

I think we were confused by what you thought you were being "too literal" about.

It's called Monopoly because the winner is the one that gets the monopoly, and because The Landlord's Game originally had a second phase called "Prosperity." "Monopoly" and "Prosperity" go well together.

I'm still confused, actually. The game is not a depiction of Georgism, it's a depiction of the world as it is. The solution is Georgism, which Magie thought would lead to Prosperity.

> I think we were confused by what you thought you were being "too literal" about.

Are you sure that you’re not being very literal yourself? (See my last paragraph here.)

> It's called Monopoly because the winner is the one that gets the monopoly, and because The Landlord's Game originally had a second phase called "Prosperity." "Monopoly" and "Prosperity" go well together.

Ok?

> I'm still confused, actually. The game is not a depiction of Georgism, it's a depiction of the world as it is. The solution is Georgism, which Magie thought would lead to Prosperity.

“Georgeism of the precursor to Monopoly or Monopoly itself” means that the designers were motivated by that particular ideology. And if the game is a critique of something then it makes sense that the game itself won’t represent that reality but will represent the critique of the status quo which will motivate said ideology as a solution to the problem of the status quo.

Leave it to America to turn that game into a massive commercial succuss, while somehow using it to teach people the exact opposite message.

It's worse than that - the game was, and remains to this day, an world-wide commercial success, despite that anyone who played it a couple times hates the experience; what's more, most people hate it for generic reasons like "playing it with my family sucks", not realizing it's the game that's structurally anti-fun, nor that this was intentional, nor that it's because it's mirroring the real aspects of the American economy.

Talk about tricking everyone into participating in a direct, visceral lesson, and somehow failing to actually teach anyone anything.

Are everyone necessarily being tricked? I wouldn’t go full Occupy Wallstreet mode if someone at work asked me whether I liked Monopoly or not. I would just say the usual thing about the snowball effect.

What I mean is: approximately everyone played Monopoly an had a bad experience. That bad experience was by design, and meant as a lesson, demonstrating how certain economic ideas lead to bad outcomes. Approximately nobody connected the dots here.

Many love the game. One of the most requested games. What forms your everyone has a bad experience idea? Just something you noticed?

> What forms your everyone has a bad experience idea? Just something you noticed?

Locally: everyone I remember talking to played a variant of the game as a kid, and didn't like it. Matches my experience too. Hell, the most fun I had with this game as a kid was grabbing the box and spending half a day alone role-playing with the little plastic houses.

Globally: the game has meme status for what I described. Things that get to the point of being memes tend to be broadly representative.

The worst part is that while Monopoly has its flaws, a good part of what makes it so "unfun" is house rules.

Played by the rules (or using the official "short game" rules), it is not that bad. There has been a lot of progress made in board game design in the last few decades and there are way better options today, but if you are stuck with Monopoly, just read the damn rulebook, it will improve your experience a lot.

A game should take less than an hour, involve a lot of negotiation, and be pretty aggressive (gameplay-wise!).

Disagree.

Monopoly without rule modifications is nearly unplayable.

Specifically, the monopoly dynamic.

The free parking win all money on the board gives everyone a comeback chance

The big problem with that rule, and it is a common theme in most house rules, and in many games other than Monopoly is that it puts back into play money that should have been destroyed.

Games have a fine tuned balance between resource sinks and sources, if you break the balance, for example by removing a sink, as it is the case here, you break the game. Here it tends to result in much longer and boring games.

Plus, it is a poor comeback mechanism. If you don't have property, cash alone is not enough to get you back into the game. Monopoly already has a limited but better designed comeback mechanism with "repair" cards.

Curious to know what are your rules modifications.

By terrible house rules I mean things like collecting money on "free parking", limiting trade or not auctioning unbought property.

I have yet to see commonly practiced house rules that improve the game. I am sure there are, but most people who know enough about game design to actually improve on the game typically don't play Monopoly.

Removing the monopoly requirement for building.

People will say landlords do work too. They’re busy, right? However none of the work they do is necessary as owner and can be contracted out to management. If they do labor, such as maintaining a property, sure that’s value producing labor, but is only coincidentally occasionally shared with the role of raw ownership (landlording)