Thursday, May 24, 2007

Chris Farrell is posting about Monopoly - and he's taking the game seriously:

We've been playing Monopoly a bit recently, and enjoying it. We've settled on the 4 player configuration, playing to the second bankruptcy, and then counting assets ..... This configuration works well, and I honestly have enjoyed it more than many new eurogames.

6 comments:

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Link?

Yehuda

Peter said...

Thanks Yehuda! That's what comes of posting when tired.....

Phil said...

The whole article is annoying, because what the guy doesn't realise is that there is a specific rule in Monopoly that forbids buying of property until you've been around the board and past go once. This eradicates his "going first is an advantage" theory.

I know I'm overreacting, but I hate the way that nimrods sometimes selectively omit rules, for no apparent reason.

Peter said...

Phil I've just checked and there is no such rule. Not sure where you got that idea from. One thing I've noticed about Monopoly is that hardly anyone has read the rules - they just remember being taught by their big sister or whatever. But I would be very confident that Chris has read the rules and understood them!

Phil said...

Seriously?!

Wow, just goes to show that you really don't know the rules to Monopoly, or any other game, unless you've read them yourself.

Please pass on my apologies to "the guy"

cfarrell said...

Well, in fairness, I have been guilty of getting the rules wrong from time to time.

The "once-around-the-board" thing is a putative solution to the start player problem in Monopoly, but in the end I don't think it helps that much. It just sort of randomized the spots players start on, it doesn't alter the fact that players who move first (or pass Go first) get the best crack at the lots while later players are more likely to just land on already-purchased lots and end up paying rather than an opportunity to pick up property.

With smaller numbers of players, the effect isn't to bad, but with more (and the game says you can play with up to 8!) the effects become quite pronounced. I wouldn't want to be going 8th in an 8-player game, that's for sure, whether we all started on Go or whether I was the last one to make it around the board once.