It's always been de rigeur to hate
Monopoly and my goddaughter & I seem to be the only people left on Earth who like playin
g it so it's kind of bitchily validating for me to see
this guy saying everybody would like it more if they’d shut the fuck up & play it the right way: For one, nobody is supposed to collect money by landing on Free Parking. It’s meant to be an ordinary blank space, offering reprieve from the vultures waiting around the corner. Similarly, nowhere in the rulebook does it tell you to pile cash on the center of the board. Any money lost from ill-fated draws of the Chance or Community Chest deck goes back to the bank. Also, if a player chooses not to buy an available property after landing on it, that card immediately goes up for auction, with a starting bid of $1—allowing for massive swings of fate, like scoring a huge discount on Park Place. There are no loans to be taken, no debts to be offered. Money can’t be donated to unlucky players. And you should not, under any circumstances, collect $400 for landing on Go.
All of these rules are clearly printed in the manual, but the problem is that no one—and I do mean no one—ever reads it. Instead, we learn an inaccurate version of the game from a parent or an uncle and pass it down the chain, further metastasizing the distortions across the country. This is what frustrates Monopoly die-hards most of all. They are of the opinion that the most famous board game in the world has been unfairly stigmatized essentially due to user error. And if we purged those faulty instincts—if we played by the book—something unprecedented would happen: Monopoly would become fun.
MY POLICIES ON EACH: FREE PARKING - this is the absolute worst & I fight it every chance I get. You're cruising to a win; you’ve done everything right & are enjoying slowly destroying your opponent like a boa constrictor BUT OH NO what do you know they happened to stumble into FREE PARKING and oh look there happens to be $2K in there so BLAMMO! they're back in the game; unforgivable. Firm
NO.
PROPERTY AUCTIONS EVERY TIME SOMEONE CHOOSES NOT TO BUY A PROPERTY THEY'VE LANDED ON: I've never once encountered anyone who's even considered playing this way, although I do take advantage of it when I'm playing on my phone. On this one I break from the real game - it just seems way too late for anyone who's played more than 10 games of
Monopoly to ever try playing like this. But I do have to admit to being a hypocrite by going against the very premise of my own manifesto, so I must give it a firm but respectful
NO.
LOANS TO OTHER PLAYERS: this can be fun if you’re playing with little kids because they're idiots who'll fall for anything, but otherwise it's a firm
NO; the thing really would never end if you’re allowed to do this shit.
$400 FOR LANDING ON GO: unlike FREE PARKING I've always been indifferent on this one, for some reason I don’t seem to notice/care as much. Maybe because $400 is never really gonna enough to really swing a game? Again – a respectful, calling-me-out-on-my-own-bullshit
MAYBE.
So it turns out I’m a little more full of shit about my oh-so-firm
Monopoly principles but hey, at least I’ll play with anyone who asks me.
