"The contentious board game Monopoly…."

Here’s an amusing article about a fellow category of board gamers: Monopoly players.  It describes, among other things, the top 10 cheating tactics in Monopoly and the top 10 reasons to fight over Monopoly, and it gives the astonishing statistic – based on a Hasbro survey of 2,000 adult Monopoly players – that 51 per cent of Monopoly games end in a verbal or physical dispute.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/hasbro-offers-u-k-hotline-to-curb-monopoly-fights-at-christmas-1.3209406

@wittmann:

She hates losing.

In fairness, most people do.  There was an amusing line in an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Commander Riker was trying to explain to Worf that team sports are all about having fun and making friends, not about being victorious at all costs.  Worf’s retort was basically: If winning isn’t important, then why bother to keep score?

@Private:

Thank the heavens that A&A has such clear and easy to understand rules. :-)

And it’s also fortunate that all A&A players always play strictly by the book rather than coming up with their own, um, house rules.

@frimmel:

That is exactly the biggest problem with Monopoly. No one actually plays by the rules particularly the one about auctioning off landed on but unbought properties.

Monopoly is in distinguished company from that point of view.  The Kriegsspiel wargaming system devised by Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz for the Prussian Army – which unlike his father’s original version was intended to be a serious military training tool, and was played on actual military maps – was criticized by many officers as being too rigid and clumsy, and apparently its rules weren’t always followed to the letter when it was played.  Some officers also questioned the realism of its dice roll result tables, and argued that as a training tool it needed to have more flexibility in order to provide a greater range of lessons.  After von Reiswitz died, his original rigid system was tossed out the window and replaced by what could be called the ultimate house-rule: the idea of putting most of the decision-making power into the hands of the umpire.  Under the old rigid system, the umpire was basically just somebody who computed combat results based on the game’s prescribed statistical tables; in the new “free” system, the umpire “went from being a calculator to God” as one writer once put it.

@Flashman:

I did an Axis and Allies Monopoly board once. Never got beyond that.

Interesting idea.  I imagine that Industrial Complexes would serve the function of houses/hotels?