I was recently at home with my parents and siblings for a week, and after a family dinner, we came to the inevitable choice of which board game to play that evening. As a family, this path is well-trodden. Classics such as Cluedo, Scotland Yard, and Ticket to Ride were all mentioned. There was one notable exception though, three copies of which were staring us down from the bookshelf: Monopoly.
It's a game many families will have a box of, tucked away in a cupboard. Some will have a story of a game ending in a flipped board, a shouting match between two siblings - and sometimes even violence.
I brought this up, and we got talking: why is Monopoly so bad? From a modern game design perspective, Monopoly is simply a terrible game. It's incredibly long, it's based almost entirely on luck, and it forces players to sit out for hours after they're bankrupt. It even boasts a 4.4 out of 10 on BoardGameGeek. So why, for nearly a century, have we kept playing it?
The answer is that the famous flaws and gripes of Monopoly aren't failures in the design - they were all intentional. Monopoly became a cultural phenomenon not because it's a good game, but because it's an almost perfect, if accidental, simulation of the very thing it was invented to critique.
The Landlord's Game
In 1904 in the US, a woman named Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, a prominent feminist and Georgist, patented the concept for a game named The Landlord's Game. Henry George, the namesake of Georgism, believed that the solutions to many of our problems with inequality could be solved via principles of land rights and the breakup of monopolies caused by land ownership - and Magie agreed.
So, she didn't design the game to be fun; she designed it as an educational tool to demonstrate the evils of land monopolies and the inherent unfairness of "land-grabbing".
In fact, she designed two versions of the same game:
- The Monopolist Set: This is the game that we all know. It shows how landlords get rich and tenants get crushed, leading to the inevitable outcome of one person owning everything (how the game ends). It was meant to be a frustrating experience.
- The Anti-Monopolist Set: In this version, wealth was shared more equitably, cooperation was encouraged, and everyone benefited when property became more valuable. This was Magie's proposed solution for the economic problems of the time.
The game slowly became more popular, spreading among economics students, then their professors. Game designers in various towns soon realised they could customise the game by featuring street names and businesses from the cities they lived in - and the idea quickly gathered steam.
Charles Darrow is commonly credited with the invention of modern Monopoly. In fact, Magie's original game design made its way over to Darrow through Atlantic City, he decided that the Monopolist version was more fun, stripped out the anti-monopolist rules, simplified it, and sold it to the Parker Brothers - and the rest is history. He made millions. (Darrow was actually the first ever game designer to become a millionare from royalties). By doing so, he and the publishers extinguished its entire political message, marketing it as a celebration of the American Dream and pushing the message that everybody could get rich off property - the exact opposite of its creator's intent. Not least because Lizzie Magie made less than five hundred dollars from the whole affair, after the Parker Brothers discovered her patent in 1935 and bought it outright to prevent any legal trouble.
But What Makes It A Bad Game?
Before I dive into criticism, remember, these were all intentional flaws to demonstrate the flaws Magie saw in the system of land ownership.
In Monopoly, there is only one winner. There is an extremely limited amount of skill involved. Different people will tell you different things, but it primarily comes down to which numbers you roll and which squares you land on. The player who eventually wins may feel skilled, but it truly comes down to the dice.
But, you may say, my ____ is really good at Monopoly! And indeed, in my memory of all the times I've played, my brother nearly always won. And he would tell you himself - there is only one way to play Monopoly:
The Golden Rule: Buy everything you land on.
There's a reason it was originally called The Landlord's Game. The best way to get ahead early is to buy property early. There's really nothing more to it than that - if you keep buying and buying, the chances of you earning rent each turn go up and up (as you buy up more and more of the board), and this effect will only compound.
This results in a brutal positive feedback loop - the person with the most properties gets the most money, and then builds the most houses, gets even more money, until it's almost impossible for anybody else to catch up.
It also means there's very little other strategy involved - you have no meaningful choices in the game. Your fate is almost entirely decided by the roll of the dice, and desperately hoping you land on Mayfair so you can buy it.
Then there's one of the biggest sins of modern board game design - player elimination. The first person to go bankrupt is simply out of the game. They have to sit and watch, or more likely go make a cup of tea, and wait for potentially hours while the game grinds on. It is fundamentally not fun to watch for those not involved - and that was the point. Magie wanted to show us that for people locked out of the property market, there was no easy way in; you had to simply watch as those more fortunate than you built up their wealth.
To Auction or Not to Auction
Each family who has played any board game will inevitably develop their own 'house rules' over time. My brother and I agree that you should be able to auction off properties to anybody at any time - not least because this benefits us whenever anybody chooses to do this (see the Golden Rule). Other families double the money you receive for landing on Go, and a popular one is collecting all the money people lost through Chance Cards when you land on Free Parking.
Another popular house rule allows houses to be built on a property before you own the entire colour group. This speeds the game up, by upping the aggression to 10; the second you buy a property, you can start charging people thousands in rent, building houses and hotels to your heart's content.
House rules are fun. It's an unshakeable benefit that board games still hold in my view over video games - they allow you to play it as you see fit, not just as the game's creators did. Especially since in this case, the game's creators made it a terrible game on purpose. But house rules for Monopoly feel like us trying to 'patch' the flawed nature of the game. Adding the collection of Free Parking money is a functional welfare handout - a chance for those less fortunate to catch up with that one person who owns half the properties on the board. We're trying to 'fix' a game that seems broken, but what we are really doing is adding economic equality to a game that was built to demonstrate what life is like without it.
Why Some People Still Love It
All of the game's "flaws" - the distinct lack of player agency, the brutal feedback loop, and the slow grind towards bankruptcy for all but one player - they are an accurate and pointed simulation of the frustrations and inequalities of unchecked capitalism.
Monopoly gives us a safe and consequence-free place to act out our most capitalistic impulses. I think it was so popular, and still is, because people feel powerful. It is an exhilarating experience to be handed thousands of fake banknotes, pretend you own dozens of luxury properties across the city, and that feeling of demanding hundreds in rent from a (soon-to-be-former) close friend is second to none.
It's also a game with immense customisability - not just house rules, but the very way the game is designed has spawned over three thousand variants. The nature of the game being made up of various street names and utility companies means that anybody can change the words on the board, and suddenly you've created a whole new game. There are even companies that sell customised Monopoly boards for you and your friends.
Just some of the thousands of Monopoly variations
It's now been ninety years since Charles Darrow sold 'Monopoly' to the Parker Brothers. It has sold over 275 million copies across the world, was banned temporarily in China for capitalist propaganda, and has made its way permanently into hundreds of thousands of households worldwide.
But it remains a terrible game. It wasn't designed to be good, and it says something about the success of Lizzie Magie's original intent that I and so many other people hold this view. To celebrate the 90th anniversary of the game (121st, if you stick to the origin story), I plead with you and your family to play a different game, for once.