My friends and I had a game of Monopoly just 2 nights ago. It was a fast and fun game, but I wasn’t satisfied with the game at all. It didn’t give me any stimulation.

The end state of the game on Saturday.

Anyone who plays Monopoly long enough would know which stretches are the best stretches to buy. Alternatively, if you simply cannot live without Markov chains (ahem, you know who you are *coughcfgtcough*), you can calculate the precise probability, but someone already did the work and calculated the probabilities of earning in each square.

But anyways, the game ended with a draw because quite early on in the game, I made a rather unwise deal (we would have ended earlier if not for the deal) with Cat. That deal was the stalemate maker (though in terms of liquidity, Cat was the winner, having twice the amount of cash I have).

By the end of the game, I had the Navys¹ with three houses each, and the Yellows² with four houses each, while Cat had the Light Blues³ with a hotel each.

She was exempt from paying rent on my yellow blocks, but not on my navy blocks. I had to pay rent on her light blue blocks. By the end, it was pretty much a 2 player game (whittled down from 5) - since the third player (consolidated from all the rest who were bankrupted earlier) had insignificant rents - they were blocked pretty much early in the game.

The odds of Cat landing on my properties is 12%, and the odds of me landing on her property is 6.5%. However, since she is exempted from paying rents on my yellow spots, the odds of her landing on my property of which she has to pay a lot suddenly drops to 4.5%. At this point, you surely think “so, she’ll win!”

If every property had rent of the same price, then, yes, she would have won the game about 3 rounds earlier than it would. But since the rents for the Navys (an average of $13,000) are significantly higher than the rents of the Light Blues (an average of $8,000), when you calculate a score based on probable rent collections, it turns out that the Navys would have a higher score than the Light Blues. But not by a lot. I didn’t have time to do a chi-square test to see if the difference were any bit significant, but I’m quite sure we can do what economists do all the time - chuck it into the error value and blame Lady Luck. LOL.

But even if the score is significant on a say, 90% interval, it would have taken ages for us to declare a clear winner. Which is not the point of a board game with many people playing. Hence we can quickly assume it is insignificant, and the game is a stalemate (the winner was eventually decided in terms of liquidity).

The Problem with Monopoly®.

Here, I must say, there is an inherent problem with Monopoly - after some time, small amounts of rent doesn’t matter anymore. Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s a real life phenomenon called inflation. Our game ended as Oligopoly (hey, I should trademark that - since most games with deals and trade involved usually end up as ologopolies), but it was an inflatious one. Prices for things you pay will repeatedly get dearer and dearer, and remember, the bank never runs out of money.

Free Trade and Capitalism

Oh wait, a side track: speaking of trade, the Monopoly game is supposed to demonstrate how a capitalist system works. But IMO, it fails badly. For one, trade is limited. It is limited to your dice roll - I don’t want to buy a place like Old Kent Road⁴, because its returns and the probability of people stepping on that square is supremely low. But I will still buy it anyways, on the off-chance that it might be actually useful. There is no ‘free choice’ so to speak.

You could argue that I do not have to buy that property. But I would be at a loss if I do not buy any available property when I land upon it. Even if you take into account  the opportunity costs of buying another property (i.e. if you pay $60 for Old Kent Road, you might not be able to afford Mayfair or Park Lane, but the odds of that happening is very very low).

Within the first 5 rounds of the game, every single player will be busy buying property, of which, the right to buy is ‘bestowed’ upon by the roll of a dice. If that sounds familiar, you must have grown up in one of the communist/socialist countries (China, Russia, India…) where the State assigns you a piece of property⁵. It almost feels as though you’re playing a rent seeker, and that’s all to the game.

So much for the concept of free trade in Monopoly. Heh.

Inflation in Monopoly

Ah, back to inflation. After a few rounds in Monopoly, you’d realize that things are slowly and creepingly becoming more expensive. Soon enough, undeveloped property on the board and the Go To Jail (11% chance!) squares are the most sought after refuge points. Players would rather pay rent in underdeveloped lands because they are still cheaper than any of the developed properties on the board.

By then, the whole game becomes pointless. The gap between the rich and the poor become more and more apparent (hey! this is what’s happening in capitalist societies… maybe my judgement of Monopoly has been too quick afterall). Then the first player quits, and things continue to become dearer.

The night we played, the inflation rate for rent was roughly at 9% every round - that is to say, if you average it out, rents got more expensive by 9% each time a player passes Go. It could be because somehow the players were all very lucky, and kept getting liberal amounts of money for free from the bank, but IMO, the inflation rate per round is crazily high.

And oh, the rich-poor gap? It causes unease. The poor players would almost certainly lose interest in the game (which is not the point of the game), and the rich players would then also follow suit, because it would get really boring after 30 rounds or so (and the bank doesn’t go bankrupt!!!).

Anti-inflation?

I ranted this out to cfgt, and he suggested I write some scripts to correct this error. I toyed with a few ideas. Amongst them was to limit the supply of cashflow. I thought of doing so by creating a script that would generate an infinite number of players (or at least approaching infinity) and the money supply is limited.

Then I thought, scratch that - I might sound like von Misses here - but WTF was the central bank doing there, hoarding money anyways? And so I thought up a few new rules (which didn’t need a computer when playing monopoly):

1. At the start of the game, divide the money up and distribute it to all the players equally. Whatever that is left and undivisible is put in the middle of the pot.
2. Players do not collect $200 (or in the Singaporean board - $2000) when passing Go.
3. Tax is collected every few rounds - 10% of cash.
4. The tax money will be used to facilitate whatever Chance and Community Chest cards that require the player to collect money from the bank.
5. Free parking is just free parking. No jackpot.

This way, the money is kept flowing within the system, except the outgoing taxes. A better way would be to let the Bank be a player as well, except that the Bank isn’t allowed to buy previously unowned property.

Trade Rules Changes

I also considered a few rule changes to remedy the free trade problem. But then I thought about it - part of the fun in Monopoly is playing the glorified rent-seeker. So, the dice rolling should stay. But trade can happen at any time of the game. Houses/hotels do not need to be knocked down when trade happens. Players can trade anything of value (except their tokens).

And I suppose the most important thing to change would be to allow players to charge whatever rent they wish, but cannot go higher than the market price (i.e. the rent printed on the card). True, this doesn’t help that the players still do not have a choice on what squares they land on… but it would at least give an impression that a free market exists (hah, but the players still cannot flock to cheaper rent areas). Consider this as a cosmetic change, since most players would be unwilling to move from the ceiling (which is the market price), and other players do not have a choice.

In The End Though…

In the end, this chat says a lot about what I was planning to do, and why I decided to blog this instead..

Chewxy says:
suddenly 20 dollars mean nothing
the monetary system in monopoly is poor
there is no production
everyone is seeking rent (literally
it is a FAIL game

cfgt says:
dude
the game is for kids
to be played for fun

Chewxy says:
uh, kids should be taught the harsh realities of life

cfgt says:
even for adults
we should be playing it for fun
not making it so complex that you start calculating nonsense
I can imagine at some point you’d even start adding bonds
hahaaha
why don’t you just go make a mockup in VS

Chewxy says:
actually, that is a bloody good idea

cfgt says:
I dunno
I think games should have simple rules
which can be broken by cards
having rules on cards simplifies gameplay significantly without sacrificing depth
although it increases game development complexity
but that being said
playing certain games with you economists is no fun…

LOL, hence, no python script to add extra rules.

p/s: When I was writing this, by sheer coincidence, Tyler Cowen had an article called “What are the best games“, a response to Caplan. My answer - Settlers of Catan (someone recommended me Puerto Rico, but I haven’t played that). I’d have gotten a set myself if it wasn’t crazily expensive in Australia.

1. Park Lane and Mayfair for the British version; Park Place and Boardwalk for the American version; and Parliament House and Asian Cultural Centre for the Singaporean version which we were playing [↩]
2. Leicester Square, Coventry and Picadilly Circus for the British version; Atlantic and Ventnor Avenues and Marvin Gardens for the American version; and Jurong Bird Park, Singapore Zoo and Underwater World for the Uniquely Singapore version I was playing [↩]
3. Pentonville Road, Euston Road and Angel Islington for the British one; Connecticut, Vermont and Oriental Avenues for the American edition; and I couldn’t remember the Singaporean version (ah, eidetic memory no more eh) [↩]
4. for US visitors, that’s Meditaraenean Avenue [↩]
5. I know, technically, the State owns the property and you don’t have a right to it, but I can’t think of any socialist countries who do that. And you practically given the right to the land anyways [↩]

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