Hasbro is Crowdsourcing Official Monopoly House Rules on Facebook

[Rhykker]

Hasbro is Crowdsourcing Official Monopoly House Rules on Facebook

Monopoly: House Rules Edition will include house rules crowdsourced from around the globe and selected via Facebook.

Hasbro will release Monopoly: House Rules Edition this fall and the company is soliciting feedback about which player-created rules to include. Starting today through April 3, fans are encouraged to visit the Monopoly Facebook page and partake in a discussion about the pros and cons of 10 house rules that were selected as a result of global crowdsourcing. After the debate, Hasbro will identify the top house rules and incorporate them into Monopoly: House Rules Edition. Further, the chosen rules will be included in the classic Monopoly game guide in 2015.

Just how popular are house rules? According to a recent survey conducted by Hasbro, 49 percent of Americans said they've made up their own Monopoly rules, and 68 percent admitted to not having read the official rules in their entirety.

The ten house rules chosen for debate are:


Free Parking, Fast Cash: All taxes and fees will be collected in the middle of the game board, if you land on Free Parking, it's your lucky day: collect all the money from the middle of the board.

Dash for the Cash: Landed on Go! Amazing, you get to double your salary - 400M dollars instead of 200M Dollars.

Frozen Assets Rule: When in jail, a player cannot collect any rent money from other players. Sorry about your luck.

Lucky Roller: Did you just Roll Snake Eyes (double one's)... odds are in your favor, collect 500M Dollars.

3's a Crowd: Are there 3 players in a row on 3 unique properties? Well done, each player gets an extra 500M Dollars.

Cash Advance: Don't have enough to buy Boardwalk? With this House Rule, players can make loans between each other to co-own properties. Who collects rent money? That's determined amongst the new property owners!

Break The Bank: At the start of the game, leave half the money in the bank. Then mix up the other half of the money in the center of a board. On the count of 3 every player grabs what they can! Free For All!

Mum's the Word: Mum always gets out of jail free. Always. No questions asked. She's just that special.

See the Sights: Players must travel around the board one complete time before they can begin buying properties. Hurry up and get to GO before everyone else!

Property Boom: Anxious to begin building? We hear you- with this rule, players do not have to own a complete set of properties before they start to build houses.


Source: Hasbro [http://investor.hasbro.com/social/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=835277]

Permalink

 

[Covarr]

I've only ever seen the first three of these, and generally only play with the first two. Some of them (Break The Bank) seem really stupid. That said, I find it mildly annoying that they don't also have a straightforward poll with all of these rules, and an easy yes/no vote.

P.S. Thanks

 

[erbkaiser]

The first three are always rules we use. We also use See the Sights a lot, depends on how long we want a game to take though. Sometimes the rules is that special properties like railways and utility stations can still be bought then, just not the streets.

The rest seems silly or game-breaking to me.

One rule which is not included which we do use sometimes, is that you are allowed to build hotels before you have four houses on all streets in a set.

 

[Ymbirtt]

I sort of play with Cash Advance enabled, but more as a variant of a far broader rule, namely that arbitrary contracts can be drawn up between players, stipulating basically anything that the involved players can reasonably enforce, and that does not directly affect another player. Contracts may be traded, bought, sold, or simply bullied out of people. The result is a game in which the slimiest, most underhanded of tactics are not only allowed, but are encouraged.

Also, on their turn a player almost always loses money. Putting someone in jail but still allowing them to gain money from other players makes jail an advantageous thing. This should not be the case. Getting rent in jail has always been dumb.

Also, they're £.

 

[MahouSniper]

I find it amusing that the main complaint people have about Monopoly is the games take too long, then they add in a bunch of rules like the first two that just make the game last way longer. More money means a longer game. I play without any house rules and I've completed games in half an hour before.

 

[webkilla]

In my family, the free parking, free cash and sightseeing houserules are the norm

 

[weirdee]

The money grab start sounds like it would cause a lot of torn currency.

 

[Llil]

Monopoly is designed to take money out of the game so that it will end in a reasonable amount of time. Most of these house rules bring more money in, which just means the game will go on forever. People usually don't use the auctions either for some reason, which again, makes the game longer and more luck based.

Monopoly isn't a good game, but it's not nearly as bad or drawn out as people think if you play by the correct rules. But most people don't. I guess they just really like boredom or something.

 

[TheSYLOH]

The HSBC rule.
Players caught cheating suffer only minor penalties if they are too big to fail.

 

[FPLOON]

This may just be my biased opinion talking... but, like hell am I EVER playing Monopoly based on MOST of those house rules!

Granted, it's been a LONG while since I've played Monopoly (under legal official ruleset circa 2001), but some of those "house rules" basically remind me just how fucked up you can get with a board game about something corporations should NEVER do here in the US...

 

[Baldr]

I've played a lot of these rules, most all they do is speed up the game, which can be a good or bad thing. However I have never played the Frozen Assets Rule. Being in jail late game becomes a good thing instead of a punishment.(You can roll to stay in jail and avoid going around the board hitting your opponents houses and hotels, while waiting for your opponent to hit your houses and hotels) I would love to see some variation on how much someone can collect while in jail.

 

[RealRT]

"Official" house rules? Don't they stop being house rules if they are official?

 

[Kinitawowi]

The first two are pretty much defaults in all games I've ever played, the third isn't unknown, and See The Sights was always a controversial one; on the one hand it does something for the first-turn advantage, but then on the other there's always one poor schmuck who keeps landing in jail before he ever gets near to Go.

However:

1) MahouSniper was right - these rules pretty much all just make the game longer than it needs to be.

2) Three very common house rules that I've seen before aren't included here.

* No Auctions - pretty self explanatory. They always end up with some twat going "ONEPOUNDGOINGONCEGOINGTWICESOLD", so they just get abandoned and ignored.

* Pooling Your Resources - any number of mechanisms for players to join forces with each other to knock other players out of the game. May be considered a cheap way of resigning out if you're bored (that's what usually happens); may be a temporary measure to take out a powerful player if things are going south.

* If Only The British Government Had This Problem - infinite houses. Or at least, they never run out in the way they do in the official rules.

3) One less common house rule:

* All Aboard! - a player owning all four stations can portal between them at will if they land on one (to cover for the fact that the railways are shit). Insert caveats to minimise Go farming.

 

[MahouSniper]

3) One less common house rule:

* All Aboard! - a player owning all four stations can portal between them at will if they land on one (to cover for the fact that the railways are shit). Insert caveats to minimise Go farming.

Are you joking? I hope you're joking. The railroads are possibly the greatest properties in the game. They're absurdly powerful and give you an enormous return on investment. If you get all four, they pay back their full price every time they're landed on, they take up four spaces on the board instead of three, and there are three separate cards that move you to one, and two of those cards double the rent! They sure as hell don't need a buff.

That said, it's a cool idea. I like the theme of it.

 

[clippen05]

The first few are okay, although anything past cash advance is something I would not want to play with. (I guess mum's the word is alright, but it's not really a 'rule' is it?)

 

[Verlander]

What's wrong with the normal rules? The only one of the above that I've ever used is the "go around the board once before buying property", and that's to break up a group of people in a competitive game. The rest just seem to be about arbitrary windfalls of cash, something that the cards are there to do

 

[Kinitawowi]

3) One less common house rule:

* All Aboard! - a player owning all four stations can portal between them at will if they land on one (to cover for the fact that the railways are shit). Insert caveats to minimise Go farming.

Are you joking? I hope you're joking. The railroads are possibly the greatest properties in the game. They're absurdly powerful and give you an enormous return on investment. If you get all four, they pay back their full price every time they're landed on, they take up four spaces on the board instead of three, and there are three separate cards that move you to one, and two of those cards double the rent! They sure as hell don't need a buff.

That said, it's a cool idea. I like the theme of it.

1) Everybody knows that the oranges (Bow / Marlborough / Vine Streets) are the greatest properties in the game, being the most common dice roll (6, 8 and 9 squares) away from the single most visited square (Jail).

2) The £200 station rent is beaten by every property that can take a hotel, and by half the board that can take two houses. Landing on stations in the late game has always been something of a relief, compared to what you could have landed on.

3) The double rent cards doesn't exist in the UK version, which is the one I've always played.

 

[Clovus]

Like others have said, any house rule that adds money to the game is just horrible. Monopoly's biggest problem is that it takes to long.

Not using auction system is just about as bad. Going around the board is relatively boring. To me, there is really only a couple interesting moments in Monopoly. You have the initial land grab (where auctions play a crucial role). That is followed by some trading which pretty much sets up the end game. Fallout from player nearing bankruptcy can be interesting. Then it is just a matter of going around the board and making simple decisions to increase your chance of winning. The main stuff is spending just enough money to get the properties you need to either make a monopoly or trade for one without getting bankrupted quickly.

The only thing close to house rule that I would ever use is a clarification on rent and bankruptcy. My interpretation of the rules is that if you owe money you can do whatever you want (within the normal trading rules) to get the money to the person you owe. But, if you can't give them the total cash, you are bankrupt and they get it all. This stops people from doing BS like "trading" all their property to someone else for $1 after they land on your Boardwalk Hotel. But it allows them to make complex deals with other players to get you your cash. That forces the other players to make bad deals just to stop the "landlord" from becoming a runaway leader. It also makes it clear that you can't pay with property, unless the landlord agrees to it.

I think the restriction on "rent deals" in the game is important too. It's better to have a small set of things that you can trade instead of allowing complex contracts. The latter just makes a simple game way too complex.

OTOH, I basically never play Monopoly. The main part of the game is trading property and no one I know actually enjoys arguing over deals. They always want to "keep the game moving" or something. Trading is the game!

 

[schmulki]

Imma break this ish down for ya....

Free Parking: Dumb rule, makes the game last 2x as long. Those spots suck money out of the game for a reason

Land on Go = more money: Dumb rule, makes the game last longer by bringing more money into the economy

Frozen Assets: Well, at least this won't ruin the economy, and it means late-game, it's not better to land in jail than to stay out. Not a bad rule.

Lucky Roller, 3's a Crowd: See Land on Go.

Cash Advance: Without tokens of some kind to remember who owns what and how, that becomes a mess. Also, how do monopolies work then? Who pays for things to be bought on those properties. It's just a mess waiting to happen.

Break the Bank: After 2 games, 3/4 of the money will be bent/ripped. Guess that's good for the people trying to sell you more paper money!

Mum: So.....we stopped trying to make this a balanced game a couple of questions back and now we're just making up puns? Gotcha.

Sights: Hey, back to a real idea. Of course, whoever gets out in front is still going to be in line to get things first, so it just alters it from "you go first, you have the greatest chance at properties" to "you roll the highest in the firs 6 turns of the game, you have the greatest chance at properties." Up to you which is the lesser of 2 evils.

Property Boom: A rule taken from U-Build Monopoly, the best version of this generally awful game. Yes, please, this sucks money out of the game more quickly, so the game ends in a timely manner.



Bottom line: This is just an advertising ploy. Please, if you want a game like Monopoly which is actually good, play Acquire. You'll be smarter for it, have more fun, and it'll end when it should.

 

[Crimson_Dragoon]

68 percent admitted to not having read the official rules in their entirety

Only 68%? Considering the (incredibly important) bidding rule has practically been forgotten, I suspect many of those leftover 32% are not telling the truth.