You're playing Monopoly wrong
In 2005, online gaming fanzine Critical Miss posted an article titled The Campaign for Real Monopoly. This single post enlightened the world to a hidden truth: most of us have been playing the board game Monopoly wrong our entire lives, and the game is worse for it.
The Campaign For Real Monopoly
The concept of an “online fanzine” is unfamiliar to most Internet users nowadays, but in truth I can’t think of one other than Critical Miss: The Magazine for Dysfunctional Roleplayers. It released its first issue in Autumn 1998, in a time before Wordpress or even LiveJournal, when the dominant method of publishing online was to learn HTML and code your own website by hand. There was no standardized style of structure to a website, leading to a great variety in early non-commercial websites.
Critical Miss patterned itself after amateur print fanzines, collecting its articles into a single issue before releasing it. This would go out of style once blogging became the norm, where sites would post new articles on a regular basis to attract regular viewers.
By its final issue in September 2011, Critical Miss would count its biggest impact on society as a single 2005 article titled The Campaign For Real Monopoly. This was unexpectedly re-discovered in 2011, when it was linked on political analyst Ezra Klein’s blog, and again in 2013, where it was linked on The Penny Arcade Report on May 16. Penny Arcade was a huge part of Internet culture back then, and merely being linked from their comic could overload a site into inaccessibility, a phenomenon sufficiently well known to have a nickname: “wanged”. Perhaps by 2013 server bandwidth had improved enough to mostly alleviate this problem, but from here it appears to have made its way into mainstream news.
As the article’s original author describes, it soon spread throughout multiple major news sites, all copying each other, including mistakes. Journalists, paid to generate stories rather than fact-check, gladly repeated the source’s name as Near Miss rather than Critical Miss, and believed that The Campaign For Real Monopoly was an actual ongoing campaign. Even the reputable BBC believed it.
The rule everyone forgets
The crux of the Critical Miss article is this: In Monopoly, when you land on an available property and do not purchase it, the Banker immediately places it up for auction and it is sold to the highest bidder. This is not a house rule, but one of the standard.
How come nobody seems to know this? Most likely, it’s because nobody reads the rules when they first sit down to play, but learns the game by playing it. If professional journalists can’t Google to get the name of a website correct before reporting on it, what hope do we have that casual family board game players will do their own research?
Even when the auction rule is pointed out, other players frequently ignore it because it’s not tradition. It’s not culture. Players agree amongst themselves how the game is played.
How bad is it?
It may not be an exaggeration to say that ignoring the auction rule ruins Monopoly.
The result of ignoring the rule is that players can only purchase new properties at full price. As a result, they run out of money sooner. They own fewer properties, and so there are fewer opportunities for money to change hands, which prolongs the game without making it any more interesting. Players land on properties they cannot buy until they have passed “Go” a few times to build capital. It takes longer for anything interesting to happen.
Luck becomes a greater factor, making the game feel less fair. Whoever goes first has a huge advantage, because they can buy properties first. Even then, they can’t afford to place houses on their properties, which slows the rate of entropy, keeping the game going longer than many players’ patience. It becomes stodgy.
Without the auction rule, you can only purchase properties on your own turn, which gives huge advantage to whoever lands on it first. It’s harder to collect a set, which in turn delays construction of houses, which in turn slows the rate at which players are knocked out of the game. More turns will see you land on properties you can’t afford, or which are underdeveloped by the owner.
There’s less need for players to pay attention on other people’s turn, except to watch for anyone landing on their properties, so the game becomes less engaging as everyone is just waiting for their own turn, which occupies only a fraction of the play time (e.g. a quarter, if there are four players).
Everyone’s a game designer
It can be argued that anyone who ever house-ruled, modified, or interpreted a game rule is a game designer, in a sense. That doesn’t mean they’re good game designers.
When I first read D&D 5th edition, what impressed me most was the overhaul to low-level wizard spellcasting. In 3rd edition, a first-level wizard had perhaps two first-level spells per day, and the most useful of those (i.e. sleep, color spray) were awkwardly constructed so that they could be powerful, but only at low level. The game pretended that wizards were the ultimate damage-dealers, but on most rounds of combat, you just shot with your crossbow instead. Fifth edition turned first-level wizards into real arcane artillery, and I consider this good design.
Once, I heard of a D&D 5th edition group who previously played 3rd edition, and were amazed to discover that the wizard could cast fire bolt as a cantrip at-will, dealing 1d10 damage. This was a huge boost over 3e, so the group agreed that it would clearly be more balanced to nerf it to 1d6. The wizard’s spell now dealt less damage than a crossbow (1d8), rendering it pointless.
And these are D&D players, a category of people who are typically above-average at house-ruling and adjudicating. Monopoly is a game of casual players.
Bad house rules
Monopoly players are often aware that the game plays poorly, and try to solve it by implementing house rules. Unfortunately, these often make the game worse.
One common house rule forbids players from purchasing any property on their first go around the board. This may have been implemented to prevent the player who goes first from buying up properties sooner. In practice, it just delays the game even longer. The game board also displays no means to track how many loops a player has made, so it’s easy for a player to forget and purchase property on their first go-around by accident.
There’s an unrelated but interesting similar story about how mana points (MP) appeared in RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons originally had a spell memorization system, by which author Gary Gygax meant that each spell could be memorized once and cast once. Players misinterpreted that a memorized spell could be cast an unlimited number of times, which of course was too powerful. As a fix, some players developed the MP system to put a numeric limit on spell use. Even when Gygax clarified the intent of the rule, many players simply ignored this because they didn’t want to nerf their characters or change how they played.
More house rules
On December 22, 2004, the Wikipedia entry “Official rules of Monopoly” was spun off from its original article, which was moved to Wikibooks on August 3, 2005. Since then, the edit history on that article has been interesting, to say the least.
Despite the rules being well-defined in a readily available PDF from Hasbro’s website, edits were made to the wiki which wildly diverged from this document. Users entered house rules as if they were standard rules, as do “clarifications” that are not supported by any official set of rules. In particular, a series of edits in 2015 reverted a number of such accumulated rules.
One such false rule forbids buying more than one house per turn. Another forbids buying houses on your first go around the board. You can’t buy houses while in jail; by another, you can’t collect rent while in jail. You can’t buy houses unless you’re currently on the property. You can’t buy a property if another player owns a property of that color. Auctions must start at half of the usual price, but only the person who landed can bid, guaranteeing a half-price buy.
The wiki editors’ rules on trading and mortgaging properties are especially lax. When you buy properties from other players, you get the houses on it too (the normal rule requires them to be demolished first). You can sell houses back to the bank for the mortgage value, rather than half the purchase price of the houses. Any player can force the sale of a mortgaged property. If you land on an owned property, you can buy it at the price of the property plus the rent, even if the owner doesn’t want to sell. You don’t have to pay rent if you roll doubles; alternatively, you can’t buy property if you roll doubles.
The bank, by one rule, can loan a player $500 at any time. This keeps players in the game long after it should have ended. You have to pay it back in full before you reach Go, or you’re bankrupt. Another false rule has you pay $500 when landing on jail for “Just Visiting”, which would bankrupt players quickly. As if to balance that out, landing directly on Go lets you collect $400 instead of the usual $200. Rolling double ones gives you one of each bill in the bank, worth $686. A lot of these rules seem to be about injecting money into the game which wouldn’t be necessary if you could buy properties more cheaply at auction.
And, of course, there’s the house rule that all money collected in taxes, fines, and so on, goes into a pot which is won by whoever lands on Free Parking; the pot is then initialized to $500. Now the game is even more random, and the bank can run out of cash more quickly. (The bank can always write IOUs, but it’s an inconvenience.)
Some rules are so confusingly written that I can’t even tell what they’re trying to say:
If you rent something from someone you now get the place and the money. Recieving what has not got you pay worth.
The user-editable Wikibooks page thus stands as an example of people using changed rules and assuming that these are just how the game is played, or communicating such to everyone else.
Solution
Frankly, the optimum solution is not play Monopoly. As a family game, it too often repeats an unfair scene where a parent guides a distraught young player through the process of dismantling all their assets to pay a debt, culminating in their ejection from the game. The rest of the players are then forced to go around the board even though it’s clear who’s winning, so the game usually ends by mutual agreement at this point.
A much better family game with a similar theme is Machi Koro. There is no board to go around. You roll dice, and the numbers activate different buildings, which give you money that you can use to buy more buildings. Some buildings can earn on other players’ rolls too. It’s complex enough to benefit from player skill, but simple enough for a family game. You’re competing, but not actively taking money each other, so it’s more friendly and less hurt feelings.
There’s also Splendor, a game about investing in gem mining industry; and 7 Wonders, about building a civilization. Both are simple to play, making them suitable for all ages, but have skill elements that allow the game to be enjoyed even by grown-up players.
There’s no need to subject your family to the awful game that is Monopoly. It is a terrible game invented to demonstrate how monopolies on land ownership benefit the land owner but can create unpleasant circumstances for tenants. Judging by the high chance that the game regularly ends in tears, it is very successful at this task, but not at being a fun game.