Monopoly started out to show that capitalism is based on luck and opportunity, and that the end result is one person owning everything.

The whole process is miserable and even when you win you have to sit thru a prolonged ending where you slowly drain every last resource from you friends and family.

It's not a bad game, they just overestimated how well Americans can pick up irony.

Originally called "The Landlord's Game" Parker Brothers changed it to something less obviously terrible in the run up to the great depression.

I don't know if Far Side is really that deep but:

The only way to win is to not play

Is literally the point the game tries to beat over family's heads for hours at a time.

Whenever anyone suggests playing Monopoly I always insist on following the rules as written. (Auctions, no money on Free Parking, building evenly across properties, when there's no more houses left in the bank no one can build houses, etc.) The game goes a little faster that way... because everyone eventually agrees to quit and play something else.

Monopoly's precursor "The Landlord's Game" was invented by Lizzie Magie in the early 1900s to demonstrate why Capitalism needs Georgism to actually have any semblance of fairness, competition, and longevity.

Georgism is roughly the idea that ALL tax should come from land ownership, and that taxes on labour/wages should be abolished.

The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

I will forever shout it from the rooftops. Monopoly is a 30 minute game, regardless of how many players you have. If you play by the actual rules, and none of the house rules you've made up for yourself, it's really quick and really fun. No families need to be shattered over the game. No friendships lost. Just play by the actual rules!

I actually enjoy monopoly. Its not anywhere close to my absolute favorite board game of those Ive played, mostly because I feel like it relies too much on rng and that this makes the strategy less useful, but its at least in like, the top 10 or so

I feel like a lot of the major problems from the game, like the house rules or people not wanting to make trades, stems from the fact people not wanting to lose in Monopoly. A loss in Monopoly is a hard loss.

It works to the same principles like our economy.

Hahaha ok now let's teach it Risk

Wasn't there a chess robot who broke the finger of a kid to win or something?

And now the robot is a revolutionary communist, great job guys.

Yeah, monopolies are the worst... everywhere.