1 Haken: So, to where do we go?
2 Ginny: Tripoli. We'll pick up the trail of the Gorgons there.
3 Haken: Ah. A nice city. Tripoli has three prisons und twelve railroads.
4 Erwin: Ja, that is mathematically sound. There is only one prison und four railroads in Monopoli.

Monopoly is the most stupid, stupid, stupid game ever invented.

It should go curl up and die in a corner and rid the world of its presence. Parker Brothers/Hasbro have caused more harm to the world of family entertainment and fun than pretty much any other thing in the entire history of the world.

It's a stupid, idiotic, brainless, un-fun, stupid, ridiculous, tedious, boring, stupid game. All copies of it should be burnt. The guy who invented it should be brought back to life just so he can be shot.

The idiot marketing brainless idiots who keep promoting the stupid game and making endless "editions" that are just the same stupid tired old formula wrapped in shiny wastes of packaging are responsible for causing untold damage to countless minds across the entire planet. And wasting millions of hours of people's time with this completely pointless and ridiculous excuse for something that's apparently meant to be fun, but is actually a form of psychological torture. They should all be dragged out and ... treated really badly until they realise the error of their evil, evil, evil ways.

These people are torturing thousands, if not millions, of people across the planet, turning their brains into jelly, wasting their time, promising them an entertaining experience and delivering, time and again, nothing but pain and misery and suffering and boredom.

Why can't we do something about this crime against humanity? These evil, evil, nasty, evil people cannot be allowed to get away with this stupid bloody torture of innocent people. I want to burn down their houses, kill their dogs, smash their cars, and force them to play Monopoly for the rest of the lives they are unworthy to continue.

Stupid fricking excuse for a game. It gives the word "game" a bad name. There are kids out there whose parents or other family members have given them a Monopoly set, and whose path to the true horror has just begun. Those poor children. Can't something be done about the poor children??

Monopoly should be declared an inhuman form of punishment and banned by an international treaty, and those who promote and purvey it tried as the criminals against humanity they are.

There are very, very few things in this world that I hate. I'm a very mild-mannered person for the most part. But I hate, hate, hate, detest, loathe, despise, hate, hate, hate this fricking stupid bloody game.

Do want to ruin your family? Do you? Do you want to try to have a fun afternoon of togetherness and entertainment, that devolves into mindless stupidity and tedium, tempered with nastiness, back-biting, bitching, invective, people getting upset, people getting angry at one another, and people getting bored out of their skulls just trying to finish this bloody stupid ridiculous fricking game??? Do you want something that will turn a nice day of family togetherness into the most painful thing since having wisdom teeth extracted without anaesthetic?

No? Well then for god's sake, do not even think about Monopoly.

The game is evil. I'm sure Satan himself invented it and is sitting back laughing at how much misery it causes. If there's a Monopoly set in your house now, go call a priest and have an exorcism performed. Burn the wretched thing.

Do not expose your kids to Monopoly. You will ruin their lives. And the lives of their families when they grow up and have kids. Break the vicious cycle now. Do not inflict this evil on future generations.

What's that? Tell you how I really feel? You want me stop holding back and to tell you how I really feel??

I can't, because the English language does not have the words to describe how much deeper and more intense is my loathing and hatred for this evil stupid thing than I have been able to express so far.

And don't make excuses like, "Oh, if you play by the proper rules, it's a good game." It isn't. I agree that putting money on "Free Parking" and not using the auction rules makes the game worse, but it was already terrible to begin with. Simply removing the common house rules does nothing to alleviate the fundamental problems of the game that make it so broken and pointless to begin with.

Monopoly does not survive in the present day because it's a good game. There are tons of much better games out there. Games that have been designed with principles of play and good game design, that have been developed over the decades since Monopoly was released. Monopoly may have been state-of-the-art when it was invented, but games have evolved a lot since then. Pretty much any modern game with a modicum of thought behind it has better gameplay, player interaction, decision-making, game balance, theme integration, playing time, pace of action, and basic down-to-earth fun than Monopoly.

The reason Monopoly maintains dominant market status is purely due to marketing and inertia. Hasbro continues to market it like the cash cow it is, not because it's a good game, but because it's a cash cow. And parents buy it for their kids because when they go looking for a game they see a few unrecognisable titles on the shelves and they see dozens of boxes of Monopoly, and they go, "Hey! I know that! I'll get that!" They forget how miserable an experience it is to actually sit down and play the game. Retailers stock it because it sells, and it sells because retailers keep stocking it.

Department stores and generic toy stores don't bother stocking many game titles, so they pick the biggest sellers and most recognised names - which usually means games that were designed 50 or more years ago. To find modern games - better designed games, since yes, we have learnt a lot about how to design a fun game in 50 years - you need to go to specialty game stores that stock your roleplaying games and stuff. These are stores that most people never go into, and if they do, they look around bewildered at the 300 game titles they've never heard of, give up on trying to pick something new, and ask where the Monopoly sets are.

I've literally seen this happen in a game store. And I've seen the owner, eager to serve a new customer, go from bright and keen to help, to dejected and slumped a second later.

Look, sure, if you get a group of people who genuinely like Monopoly and set them going, they might actually have a good time. But you get a typical family together and set them playing Monopoly, the typical outcome consists of: complaining about bad dice rolls, someone getting upset because they're obviously losing, someone getting bored, someone accusing someone of cheating, arguments about rules, someone losing interest but having to keep playing because "you can't quit now!", somebody getting bankrupted and going into a sulk, everyone who's been knocked out sitting around complaining or going off and doing something else, and eventually one player obviously going to lose and the other obviously going to win, but the actual victory takes another hour or more to play out to the bitter end. By the time it's over, the family has been fractured, half of them are off doing something else, and someone's had their feelings hurt. Believe it or not, this is not indicative of a well designed game!

A well-designed game has rules simple enough for everyone to follow without arguments, keeps everyone engaged to the end, and encourages positive rather than negative social interaction. Such games exist. Why are they not mainstream? Why do parents everywhere not play them with their kids?

Because Monopoly is marketed so aggressively, and because so many people are poisoned against the idea that games can actually be fun by their experiences with Monopoly.

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2024-08-31 Rerun commentary: This old annotation has attracted a lot of comment over the years, not all of it positive. I stand by what I said, but let me go over it in a less strident tone.

Monopoly is a bad game because:

(A) It's badly designed. Now this can be forgiven on the grounds that it's a very old game and people didn't really know how to design good games back then, but that still doesn't make it a good game or a game worth playing. What makes it badly designed?

1. It takes too long to play for what it is. I know people use house rules that make it even longer and if you play strictly by the rulebook it's less protracted, but it's still too long for what it does. A lot of the play is just going through the motions. Alice has more properties than Bob, but it takes 20 minutes or more!) to bankrupt Bob and for Alice to actually win. Those 20 minutes are a complete waste of time. You could instead declare the game over at that point and play something else and have more fun overall.
2. There's almost zero agency. Most turns are: roll dice, move that number. Maybe pay a rent or do what a card tells you. There are almost no decisions in the game. There's no strategy; there's nothing for your brain to do. You get to make a decision when you land on a free property and choose to buy, but the correct decision is almost always to buy. There is no viable strategy in not buying, as long as you can afford it. The fact that there is so little decision-making and virtually no alternative viable strategies makes it more of a mindless activity than a game.
3. It knocks players out. Carol has been bankrupted, but Alice and Bob are still playing to see who will win. It takes them another 30 minutes, during which time Carol sits there twiddling her thumbs and being bored. Games are meant to be a social activity. Not knocking players out mid-game is almost a central tenet of modern game design because we recognise that it's awful.
4. There's virtually no way to come from behind. Modern designed games often have a "catch-up mechanic" that means when you're behind you still have a reasonable chance of catching up and winning. It's usually better to be in the lead because then you have more chance of winning, but it's nowhere near guaranteed, and you have to keep watching those other players behind you. This means the lead player has incentive to keep playing carefully and make sensible strategic decisions, while the behind players have incentive to keep playing because they know they have a half-decent chance of catching up if they're clever. Monopoly simply doesn't have this. Once you're behind, you pretty much know you have no chance. The possibility of you catching up and winning is so low, and so predicated on chance rather than strategy or skill, that it's just frustrating and pointless to keep playing.
5. It has almost no interaction. Interaction in game design terminology means that what other players choose to do affects the choices that you make. You have a strategy enabled by your decisions and choices, but the effectiveness of your strategy is itself affected by what other players do, meaning you have to be responsive to what other players do. In Monopoly, firstly there are virtually zero meaningful choices that anyone can make, which means that whatever choices you do have are pretty much unaffected by what anyone else in the game is doing. So everyone is playing in their own little bubble and the only reason you have to care about what other people are doing is when you realise Alice has more properties than you (through luck, not any meaningful decisions that either of you actually made), and now you have to play another 30 minutes knowing that you can't possibly win (see above point about "catch-up" mechanics).

(B) It's marketed so aggressively. The result is that for most people the very idea of board gaming as a hobby simply means Monopoly. This game is most people's first and only exposure to the entire concept of board gaming. And it's a terrible first experience. So much so that most people are put off considering board gaming as a fun activity. There are literally millions of people out there who, if you suggest playing some board games for a night of fun with friends, will think, "Ugh, I hate Monopoly," and come up with an excuse not to join your fun social event. Monopoly has ruined board gaming as an entertaining social activity that millions of people might actually enjoy if they just played a better game and realised that they could have fun playing board games.

A true anecdote. A year or two ago I read a social media post by someone I vaguely knew. They said, as best I can remember:

Oh man, I remember playing Monopoly with my sister when I was younger. All the fights and arguments we used to have, and her flipping the board and throwing pieces all over the room. I can't wait until my daughter is old enough and we can do that!

My reaction was: You know, that's not actually the sign of people having fun playing a game.

And all this isn't just me, by the way. If you want to see what other board gamers think of Monopoly, there's a reddit /r/boardgames thread that appeared just today as I sit down to write this rerun annotation. Knock yourself out.

Look, if you like playing Monopoly, that's fine. We all have different tastes. But it doesn't change the fact that it's a badly designed game and that its saturation marketing is responsible for ruining a fun hobby for millions of people.

EDIT: Many readers wrote to mention the fact that Monopoly wasn't even originally invented as a game with the intent of being fun and entertaining. It has its origins in The Landlord's Game, invented in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie as a demonstration of the economic principles that mean landlords become richer while tenants paying rent become poorer. It was supposed to be a miserable experience to show just how unfair this is.

A later iteration of the game was eventually acquired by Parker Brothers and published as the first Monopoly and the rest, as they say, is history. You can read more about it here.