This is just a guess, but I think the auction rule doesn't make sense thematically, and was more complicated, so people may have been more inclined to skip it and play in a way that made more sense. If you are out looking for property and decide not to buy it, an auction doesn't suddenly pop up, you just don't buy it and move on.

The strangest thing is that those two house rules seem to be universal. I live in Greece and we have the same house rule here. I guess if you asked some random guy living in the Himalaya, you would get the same answer. What on Earth is going on with this game??

The reason is that no one reads the rules and they just learn from whomever taught them. This seems to be the most common house rule.

I remember when I tried to read the rules as a kid, I didn't understand a number of terms as I was quite young. I gave up and just played by the house rules I was taught which seemed to be quite common even decades ago.

Also, you couldn’t make plurals in Scrabble.

YOU CAN, MOTHER, YOU CAN!!!

I played Monopoly exactly ONCE with my children: we were in a holiday home, it was raining, and they found it and wanted to play.

At one point one of them got in a dominant position and could crush the table. So when her little sister landed on her hotelled properties, she would clandestinely pass her money under the table so she could pay the fine.

Was very cute but the game would NEVER end.....

If one doesn’t obey monopoly rules, the damn game never ends

Quite like UNO.

A bit like the stock market then.

My favorite house rule is mortgaging non game assets to take out bank loans. For example taking out a $400 loan against your daughter’s Yorkshire terrier. And if you don’t pay that loan off before the game ends, who ever wins gets the dog. Sorry pumpkin, Charlie is going to live with uncle Dan until he loses at monopoly.

My house rule: you can cheat as much as you want as long as you don't get caught.

Mine are. If in jail you have to move everyone’s pieces and make change for every transaction (prison labor)

If a player can’t afford something send them to Jail.

If a player expresses any malcontent about playing monopoly, jail.

If someone yawns, jail.

Money and houses carry over between games permanently.

Dealing real world drugs actually makes the game last way longer, a lot of people don't know that

https://imgur.com/a/d8etefI

Rules for your pleasure! There are 3 pages, and one of the three are the children's version u/bash717 u/whirlydirlymcflurry

My version is from 1984 and it specifies the "Court" rule as :

The Court: When you land on the Court square, you throw the dice as usual on your next go. If you do not throw a double you may move as usual. If you do throw a double it means that you have been found guilty by the Court and must pay a fine of E 50 to the Budget Controller and must stay in Court until your next go.

Hope this helps!

Did anyone have the full rules? I've been looking for a few years now!

The rules are simple: You’ve been trolled, deal with it.

In my experience they just add uneccesarry time to he game. Monopoly is quite short if you play by the rules.

I would argue the bigger issue with monopoly is that luck of the roll can quickly turn that game into one where all but one or two players can quickly be in a position of "rolling dead" where they have no chance to win but are not bankrupt for a significant portion of the game. House rules generally have the effect of balancing that by creating income sources that give you a chance to make a comeback by not getting wiped out after landing on that first hotel or getting money to build your first hotel.

The game basically has to be lengthened to balance out the painfully lopsided nature of the mid-end game (3+ house rents). If you want to create house rules to actually make the game better, you would have to compress monopoly rents and make monopolies easier to get (2 properties in a color counts as monopoly after the first hotel has been built.), and then pull money out of the economy ($50 for passing go, and anybody who lands on an unowned property pays rent to the bank)

The big joke is that the game was actually designed to torture you by making most people sit and play a super long time knowing they had already lost. The game was a big critique on capitalism to show that with a little bad luck at the start you have to keep playing forever knowing it's just a matter of time before you lose, and you know early that you already lost.

Yeah everything should be limited in monopoly. I haven't played it in forever but my strategy in HS was always "buy everything you can as soon as you can" and games seemed to move quicker and usually go my way when I did that.

Monopoly is actually shorter if you play it by the original rules. A mandatory auction if you pass on an unowned property and no free money if you land on Free Parking cuts down the game time by so much by accelerating the early game to get you to the end game much faster.

Absolutely, monopoly at its base is a poorly designed game and house rules make it so much worse.

90% of Monopoly house rules result in a longer game.

I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up yet, but Monopoly is not a good game, even if played strictly by the rules with all refused properties being auctioned and stuff. It's bare of strategical decisions, it has an interminable endgame, and half the players will not even be playing in the endgame.

Once you've decided Monopoly is a good game to spend your time on, game design considerations are already out the window.

Monopoly is actually pretty well designed and plays fairly fast when played by the rules. That said, there are four scenarios that aren't forbidden by the rules that hurt or break the game if exploited.

A family member wrote four house rules to address those. In my mind, these should be in the rule book, so these are the only house rules that we use.

1.) Agreements to alter rent agreements beyond the current turn are not allowed.

2.) You may not develop properties in the time between when a person rolls the dice and moves their piece to the appropriate space.

3.) You must wait at least three seconds after someone else has landed on a space before you roll the dice to give the other players an opportunity to assess whether that person has landed on their property.

4.) If you owe an entity money (either the bank or other player) you cannot enter into a transaction with anyone that decreases your book value net worth prior to paying the entity whom you owe money. You may however negotiate with other players any other transaction which you deem fit so long as that transaction does not decrease your book value net worth.

Edit: These rules weren't because of people in the household. These rules were because so many guests play by weird household rules.

Apparently one of the rules growing up was my sister always had to be banker and could help herself periodically to extra money. It must have been a rule since it happened every time we played.

Forced Buyouts - If you land on another player's property, you can forcibly buy it from them by paying them 5x the shop's listed price.

ex. If a property is listed as $120 on the board, you would need to pay them $600 for a forced buyout.

Additionally, if there are houses or hotels built on a property, it can not be forcibly bought

No house rules. We play play bankrupt the other players and are done quickly.

Always the free parking payout. I can't remember if this is a house rule, but free exchange at any time.

If you land on Free Parking, you get $500.

If you roll snake eyes, you get $100.

You can't run out of houses or hotels.

The deeds are shuffled at the beginning of the game. The deed on top is free. The deed on the bottom is 50% off. Each time a deed is bought, you move each deed on top to the bottom of the pile until you get to the deed that someone purchased. This continues until 3 deeds are left, at which point discounts end. Therefore, sometimes many discounted deeds are purchased in a game, and other times every deed can be sold without any being discounted.

The point of nowmaw Monopowy wuwes is to funnew money into one pwayew; wuwes that add ow keep money in the system pwowong the game and unbawance it.

Yes, you found the point of the game

The point �� of normal ��‍�� Monopoly �� rules ������ is to funnel �� money ���� into one ��☝ player ��; rules �� that add ➕ or keep �� money ������ in the system �� prolong the game �� and unbalance �� it.

So basically, the rich start rich, make the rules, and keep getting richer while the poor struggle just to stay in the game

Added twist:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game

This is the origin of Monopoly, with the exact opposite message of the published version.

So this was actually done as an academic study, IICR, and the people who started with the most credited their wins to their skill, not the head start.

You are absolutely right with your suggestions.

But there is one thing, people can learn from Monopoly: How our monetary system works.

At the start of the game, the Bank (in Nations terms it would be the central bank) creates the money out if nothing and distributes it to the players.

Now the Bank is in debt. On the other side, the players have a wealth exactly the amount of the banks debts.

And the Bank only will get it‘s money back through taxes, fees and fines. Just like in real life.

So one can learn that governmental debt always means private wealth and if the Government runs a surplus, it takes out Money from the wealth of the private Sector.

So yeah: Government debt is absolutely a necissity for private wealth to exist. That’s something the Libertarians won‘t tell you.

Government debt then is just a Boogeyman of the rich to be able to cut social safety nets. It’s the Distribution of the wealth in the private sector that‘s the true problem. And this can also be learned by playing Monopoly.

One time, it's because I've actually read the rules that a fight started. I specifically asked before the game started, "Are we playing by the rule book or with some common house rules?"

"The regular way," they told me but it sounded more like a question than a statement.

On the first turn, not even mine, there was an argument about what the rules were. Player 1 landed on a property and didn't buy it, so I bid on it.

"YoU cAn'T dO tHaT. yOu HaVe To PaSs Go OnCe BeFoRe YoU CaN bUy."

Not according to the rule book you said we were playing by!

It's a bad game to start, house rules make it four times worse. Especially the dreaded free parking rule that's so common.

There is a card game called mao which is quite the opposite. It only has two rules

1. you don’t talk about the Rules
2. the first two rules are exceptions of the first rule

To be fair, both are fixed once you understand the true goal of Monopoly. It's a common misconception that the goal is to be the wealthiest player / bankrupt the other players.

It's pretty widely known that the game takes most of its inspiration from "the landlord's game" which was designed to teach players about the flaws of capitalism. The original designer wanted players to walk away thinking "I hated that game so much that I want to change the foundation of the American economic system."

In that spirit, I propose that the true goal is to convince the other players to never ask you to play monopoly with them ever again. If you can convince them to play a better game, spiffy. If you can't, it's better to not play board games at all than to play Monopoly.

Just like any other popular game, like uno