It’s the Most Popular—and Most Hated—Board Game in the World. Maybe You’ve Been Playing It All Wrong.
Slate · L · trust 38/100
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According to an old bromide, nobody has ever finished a game of Monopoly—every session drags on into eternity until it is mercifully abandoned, perhaps right after your father installs a hotel on Connecticut Avenue. And as someone who can recall innumerable rainy weekends spent glumly traversing Monopoly’s gauntlet of scams, I have always considered this correct. The game has ghastly built-in qualities that make it at once indeterminably long and terminally random, more than earning its deplorable reputation among gamers, teachers, and parents alike. In 2018 Slate even named Monopoly one of the 10 worst family games on the market , putting it in the same tarnished league as Candy Land and Tic-tac-toe, a consensus that has been echoed by pretty much everyone else . (“Happenstance quickly separates contenders from also-rans, leaving one player gleefully collecting rents while the others wait sullenly to be finished off,” surmised Slate alum Noel Murray.)
And yet, there is a quiet constituency out there who believe that we’ve got it all wrong. They maintain that Monopoly is strategically dynamic and richly marbled with clever counterplay opportunities—and, more controversially, that it’s actually good . If, that is, you play by Monopoly’s official rules. Which almost nobody does.
These rules come packaged inside every Monopoly box and are written on a pamphlet that urges players to remember certain core principles that are always, always forgotten. These protocols differ from the ancestral precepts of Monopoly, passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition. And if you are one of the 275 million people who have purchased a copy of Monopoly since Parker Brothers first published it in 1935, the ramifications of these rules might sound paradigm-shifting—perhaps even a tad sacrilegious.
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 go 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 .
“The game is fun if you actually play by the rules,” bemoans the headline of one post made on the r/UnpopularOpinion subreddit. Elsewhere, board-gaming YouTubers have pleaded that, contrary to what the haters might say, a proper game of Monopoly is a worthy and unembarrassing way to spend an evening with adults. (“Why Monopoly Doesn’t Suck with Official Rules!” reads one characteristically exasperated title.) And I think that’s because most tabletop-gaming hobbyists—the folks playing Wingspan at your local coffee shop—tend to speak about Monopoly as if it is essentially demonic. Across 40,000 user reviews of the game submitted to the tabletop community nexus BoardGameGeek, Monopoly holds an abysmal average score: 4.4 out of 10. The central idea articulated in those reviews isn’t so much that Monopoly is a bad game—that part goes without saying. Instead, it’s that due to Monopoly’s exhausting ubiquity, a huge swath of Americans has been indoctrinated to believe that every other board game is bad too.
“When all you know is Monopoly, trying other board gaming feels foreign and strange,” said Tom Vasel, a veteran board game critic, in a video titled “Five Things I Hate About Monopoly,” uploaded two months ago to his YouTube channel. Vasel cites the game’s punitive nature, arbitrary swings of luck, and fiddly mental arithmetic—how the players around the table are constantly being asked to calculate the sum of, like, 37 and 68, a hell I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
“So many people I want to introduce board games to have had a miserable time with Monopoly,” continued Vasel. “And it turns them away.”
Here is where I must admit my biases. Much like Vasel, I have also harbored a lifelong distaste for Monopoly. I entered the board gaming hobby in college and am writing this article from a home office, surrounded by several Ikea bookshelves filled to the brim with tabletop games that have been accumulated, piece by piece, through decades of collecting. I would ballpark that I inventory more than 200 board games in total, a fact that fills me with either beaming pride or wretched shame depending on the day. But that’s exactly why I’m fascinated by the select few who assert that Monopoly has gotten a bad rap. Because like countless other Americans, I’ve never played Monopoly by its stated rules. And maybe that means I’ve been missing out.
The thinking goes like this: If you play Monopoly while adhering to the overlooked rules outlined above, the game’s most glaring…
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