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.
In an ironic twist of complete capitalist predictability, the game we know today was also stolen from the original developer.
That’s what I’ve been saying all the time when my brother says monopoly sucks when you don’t win. It’s literally designed to make you suffer
Not quite. Parker Brothers had always intended it to have a pro-capitalist message. The woman (and of course it was a woman who got fucked over) who invented The Landlord’s Game essentially got duped.
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.
Yes! Here’s a video about it: https://youtu.be/B7nFA19Gzrw
It works to the same principles like our economy.
It’s actually a bit better since you don’t pay income tax every time and there’s guaranteed income.
Hahaha ok now let’s teach it Risk
Hey, we can tolerate a table flip here an there, but you are talking about
WAR
Might be good to get a warning sign that the AI wants to take over the world because it will start amassing troops near Siam and if it does manage to conquer Australia, you can be relatively sure that it will spend a few turns building up its bottleneck defense, maybe trading some border country to get a card each turn.
Lol that just reminded me of the first time I played risk with my cousins, when we thought that players got a card each time they took a country and then the 5 card max rule meant that they could (or had to) trade in for troops in the middle of their turn. The game had a few quiet turns and then absolutely exploded once things got rolling and only lasted some turns after that because we weren’t the most strategic thinkers and didn’t realize there was no reason to stop when you could reinforce your front with more armies than anyone else had combined every 3 countries you took.
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.
