MONOPOLY was invented by an anarchist who wanted to demonstrate the folly of capitalism. She called it The Landlord’s Game. Virtually unchanged, Parker Brothers’ Monopoly still teaches that the land grab end game always results in a monopoly. Players don’t consider such an outcome objectionable because board games need a single winner, and since everyone starts at square one, all have a chance to drive the rest of humanity bankrupt. You don’t have to tweak Monopoly much to render a perfect forecast of a child’s prospects in the real economy. Start the game with all the properties fully populated with hotels and houses, all owned by the player who won last time. Now go.
Just kidding.
But dispense with the New World homesteading delusion. Unless you’re planning fresh conquest and genocide, land ownership today is sewn up. Fully populate the properties and distribute them in advance, to one or all of the players, it doesn’t really matter. The real monopoly lies with the bank.
The banker in this tweaked version of Monopoly doesn’t play at all, as far as rolling the dice to progress around the board. The banker’s token doesn’t need the wage earned by passing “GO”, nor does he need to risk going to jail. Yes the banker is a white male. The banker’s token lies idle wherever it wants on the board, while the bank doles out the money and reposesses the properties whose owners go bankrupt.
Actually in the tweaked mode, the banker doesn’t distribute the money, he lends it. Every $200 to pass GO, he keeps a share. Every property and building is actually on loan, so he collects interest. What’s lent and what’s collected are secretly recalculated every round to leave the bare minimum which players need to keep circulating the board.
That’s the game. Enjoy!
If it doesn’t sound fun to you, too bad. Keeping a player’s interest in an unfair game is unimportant because monopoly is compulsory.
