Monopoly is the featured game on Games From The Cellar this week

Hoo boy, but here's the thing -- I paused halfway through the game and assessed, and the other three people at the table were clearly having a good time. Laughing, joking, heads-down and playing seriously. At the end my buddy Sam said, "if you could roll four dice and select the two you want to use it would be great" and I thought to myself that the game would never, ever end.

But everyone sounded like they were having fun? So why was the post-game show so contentious?

Have a listen if you please -- gamesfromthecellar.com/episodes/monopoly

I enjoyed it if only because I got a quarter of the way to hearing your wife do all the voices.

I wouldn’t be excited for a game of Monopoly myself, but I think a lot of the hate it receives is due to its ubiquity less than its gameplay. Some well-meaning relative knows you like board games and gets you some themed edition as a gift. It’s like being into women’s soccer and they say they like Mia Hamm. Exciting things have happened in the intervening decades.

Am only halfway through the episode, but I appreciate the vigorous discussion. I also think that Monopoly gets too much of a bad rap from many people, not least because, as noted at the beginning of the pod, too many people play with popularly-assumed house rules that only increase the length of the game until a lot of the table want it to be over because it should have been an hour ago. I completely disagree with the assertion that it's 75% luck and I'm glad that (just as I was getting home from our game of Magical Athlete), someone chimed in with the fact that it's not about having a "strategy" to buy certain things. It, like many dice-driven games, is about setting yourself up to take advantage of circumstances. The best players of Games Workshop's fistful o'dice games aren't the luckiest people on Earth. They just know how to hedge against bad rolls of the dice with the way they play the rest of the game. Same thing with Monopoly. You take advantage of the opportunities presented to you. Yes, things can go wrong. That's games/business/life. But it's about setting yourself up to be able to take some hits and never, ever, trying to rely solely on what the dice do for you or other players. It's not a great game, but it's not the scion of all evil that many present it as, especially if people would actually play by the damn rules.

I don't think that a lot of modern board gamers have the intestinal fortitude to play a game with player elimination that lasts more than 30 minutes.

Great episode as always. Monopoly is a fine game as long as it's played by the rules. I also like the rule (it was on the inside of the box lid on one of the editions I had) that as soon as the first person goes bankrupt, everyone else liquidates everything and most money wins.

Re: history of monopoly.

Content warning: extreme nerdery with tenuous connection to games.

I went down a rabbit hole on mostly-forgotten American economist Henry George a month or so ago, unrelated to board games. But the connection is that The Landlord Game was originally made to spread his theories, which have had a minor resurgence in the last few years.

The basic idea behind Georgism is that recessions, and inequality generally, are caused by private land speculation. When land is privately owned, landlords will raise the rent on it to the maximum possible (just below what would cause the tenant to go work on a less productive piece of land elsewhere).

George's solution is to tax 100% of the annual rent of the unimproved value of a piece of property, a "land value tax." This is different from property taxes, which taxes the value of the land, but also the improvements too (buildings etc.).

His justification for this was partly moral -- all humans are the common heirs to the providence of the earth and if you are going to have a temporary monopoly on the use of a particular piece of land, you should pay the rest of us for the privilege -- but mostly practical. If the state taxes buildings, then it discourages development -- why build a new apartment building to replace a shack, if your taxes will go up exponentially? Taxing land, on the other hand, discourages speculation on undeveloped land, because all the profits from it are taxed away. Taxing improvements instead of land leads to things like sprawl (lots of little cheap houses spread widely apart), and things like parking lots in downtown San Francisco.

Another interesting feature of the land value tax is that, unlike other taxes, it doesn't drag the economy. Generally, if the state taxes a thing, then that raises the price and thus less of it is sold. Then factories make less (because they're selling less) and hire less people, who then buy even less of a thing, and so on. But not with land -- if you tax land, you don't get less land.

George (and Elizabeth Magie) were certainly not anti-capitalist. Karl Marx (a contemporary of George) hated his theories. George was not opposed to investing in a business or factory and making money from it. And he didn't think it was necessary to have all land owned by the state, as long as the profits of land ownership were removed. In his theory, the exploitation of workers is another thing related to land monopoly -- if the price of land is elevated due to speculation, then a better/fairer workplace cannot be easily built, and so the workers have little option. One of George's mottoes was "ten jobs for every nine men," so that workers would have options.

George does not fit easily into the typical economic framework of Karl Marx vs. Adam Smith that we mostly view things through today. Both Marx and Smith lumped landlordism in with capital, which was opposed to labor. George insisted that landlords were as distinct from capital and labor as capital and labor were from each other.

George wanted to replace all government revenue with the land value tax, and return any excess proportionally to all citizens -- an early UBI. I don't think this would work today as the size of the state could probably not be funded solely by land value taxes.

I have never played the original version of The Landlord Game, so I don't know how well Ms. Magie succeeded at promoting Georgism. Not very well, I think, as I'd never heard of George until recently and no one seems to connect Monopoly with his ideas. The lesson from Monopoly seems to be that owning stuff and getting rich is awesome, not that land speculation is terrible for society. It might be an interesting exercise to design a modern game that tried to address this.

Anyway, if anyone wants to be Georgepilled, I'd start here:

gameofrent.com/

I've found it pretty interesting; I don't know if I'm completely sold but it's been fascinating to read about. The California state legislature is currently considering a bill that would commission a study on a land value tax in the state. The mayor of Detroit is advocating for it. So it's not just me! (For better or worse.)

Sir, that post has the distinct aroma of an excellent front page article on TWBG. Submit it so it doesn't get lost in the members-only forums.

I was utterly obsessed with Monopoly for a couple of years when I was in grade school, after receiving The Monopoly Book for Christmas. Our family had a jigsaw puzzle version of the Monopoly board, and we would do the puzzle first and then leave it out and later play a game of two of Monopoly on it before finally putting the puzzle away. We also occasionally played on the regular board. We played with the dumb Free Parking house rule but otherwise played the rules as written. I also played a few times with friends, but it turns out that kids tend to hate getting eliminated early from a game that might last hours. It was never as popular as Acquire in our household, and by 1978, I had moved on to war games and rpgs.

During my Monopoly obsession, some company published an Anti-Monopoly game. Instead of playing capitalist real estate investors trying to create real estate monopolies, players represented government attorneys trying to break up monopolies. The board and the game play were unimaginative derivations of Monopoly, only somehow less fun. Our family played it twice and lost all interest.

Sagrilarus wrote: Sir, that post has the distinct aroma of an excellent front page article on TWBG. Submit it so it doesn't get lost in the members-only forums.

FINE

1500 words in. Should finish up this week.

I completely disagree with the assertion that it's 75% luck

Yeah, Monopoly is the kind of game where, sure, if you intentionally slam closed all the doors that allow skill in, then sure it's mostly luck. For example, if you always buy every unclaimed property you land on (which "everybody knows" you should do), never going to auction, then that's one major slam in the face of skill right there.

The blue and green properties are overrated. You want to pick up the properties between Jail and Go to Jail, because that is the more heavily traveled half of the board.

Oranges and Boardwalk/PP have the highest payoff per build. In fact the high-end Orange is exactly half, in cost to buy, build, and purchase, as Boardwalk. And Boardwalk is the best property on the board.

Funny enough, recent editions of Monopoly yell in your face that you shouldn't use bad house rules, and to actually use auctions.

The auction rule, btw, I just learned was relatively recently deemed an obscure rule that nobody knew. lol. See: www.insider.com/monopoly-auction-rule-changes-game-2017-11

Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever played a software version of Monopoly before, such as on iOS/Android, PC, or going back further NES, etc. I recall playing it for Commodore 64 as a young child in the 80s and learning that those house rules weren't universal, heh.

Monopoly must be the only game that's 1) completely mainstream and a classic, 2) everyone has strong opinions on, often negative and 3) the majority of players don't actually know how to play. Such a strange phenomenon.

NeonPeon wrote: The auction rule, btw, I just learned was relatively recently deemed an obscure rule that nobody knew. lol. See: www.insider.com/monopoly-auction-rule-changes-game-2017-11

Which is absurd because in every edition of the game I ever played, the auction rules are right on the back of property cards. You simply turn the card over and it tells you exactly what you have to do if you don't want to buy the property.

All right, article submitted. It's all in the hands of our supreme overmistress now.