Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a familiar example.

"The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make any sort of political point.

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

Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set.

The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it.

It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author.

edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way.

It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.

Sounds like the plot of Megalopolis

I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is passionate about Monopoly. I don’t think there’s too much strategy there besides “don’t let property go unsold” and “hoard houses” but he disagrees.

It depends on the people you’re playing with. With an active group there’s a lot of strategy that goes into the negotiations, and also a good amount of “push your luck” gameplay. In my experience, a lot of the game comes down to one or two extremely intense negotiation sessions that everyone at the table ends up jumping in on.

Wouldn't the game's rules make the point regardless of the author's intention?

It also depends on the rules you are playing. Monopoly is a game that most people learn not from the rules but from family and a lot of families have very different house rules.

The in the box rules state that every property must go to auction on first landing if the player refuses their option to buy it at face value. There's a lot of strategy possible in auctions, but a lot of house rules don't like the auctions and either avoid them entirely or make them much rarer than the in-box rules state they should be. (In part because early and often auctions increase the cutthroat feeling earlier in the game, whereas a lot of house rules are about pushing the cutthroat stuff off later into end game.)

There's an enormous amount of strategy, but all bound up in a few points, and virtually all of them rely on social skills and values that are in short supply these days. It's virtually all in the trading.

If you play Monopoly and you don't trade, you haven't really played. And I don't mean all of the wacky trades that some families do (although I'm not against that), I mean trading money and property with other players. The two keys are:

1. In all games (not just Monopoly), people who cooperate win. If you make a mutually beneficial trade with another player, even if that player gets the better end of the trade, all other players lose ground. If you cooperate with another player by trading whenever there's any reasonable opportunity, the game is between you and that player; no other players will have any chance of winning. If you trade with everyone, and they don't trade between each other, you will inevitably win. Cooperation is making 1 + 1 = 3. No matter how that remainder is split, the more you get in on that split, the more ground you're gaining. Jump in front of every trade offer and offer a better one.

Almost every player that I've talked to who doesn't understand how Monopoly is a good game (and I've had a lot of Monopoly discussions) is completely incapable of understanding how a trade that gives somebody else a Monopoly can result in you winning the game. They look at you like you're stupid when you say you do it all the time. We live in a sick, atomized and alienated society. Getting the property that completes somebody else's Monopoly means you have a good basis for friendship.

2. You may do a lot of little trades during a game, but inevitably you are building up to the big trade which is your big gamble. You've calculated all of the probabilities, you've judged your competitors positions, and you're going to offer another player (or maybe a couple of other players over two succeeding trades) a huge trade which will set the conditions for how the random endgame will play out. You've made it look like you're giving the other end of the trades a chance, but you've calculated ahead of time that you've maximized your own chances. If you're playing against naive players, you'll always win if you do this first and you know what you're doing. If you're playing against someone skilled, it's a question of who calculated the odds better and whether the dice hate you.

edit: Another game with a similar feel and a similar benefit to cooperation is Container. A good game to soften up people who don't know how to trade is Bohnanza. A game designed to show aggressive cooperation is So Long, Sucker, which requires you to cooperate to be in contention, and requires you (mathematically) to betray someone's trust to win.

True. You also need a group that knows what they're doing and is trying to be cutthroat. Then the whole table is trying to trade for color sets and dissuade others from trading for color sets, which often leads to this absurd mass negotiation where people are just throwing away massive amounts of money and property in order to not be shut out. Sometimes you end up bribing another player just to keep them from undercutting a deal, or you work with that player and cut out the original person you both were haggling with, at which point they're trying to bribe another player to intervene.

As long as you're using the correct rules and everyone is playing the game fast, they know what they're doing, and they're competitive, the game can be quite fun. It's also a lot less time intensive than many other board games where lots of people are negotiating.

There were two sets of rules to the Landlord's Game, monopolist and anti-monopolist. One of those was left out of Monopoly, making it harder to get the point across, I'd guess:

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

Also important is that the supply of money, of houses and of hotels is fixed.

George was only "radical" because he sought out the root of the existence of involuntary poverty in the midst of riches, and then described a simple way of eradicating it.

Economists employed by universities founded by monopolists understood that their route to security - tenure - did not have room for even mentioning George's ideas to their students. (Witness what the Wharton School at Penn did to Scott Nearing, whose ideas up to that point (1915) were largely Georgist.)

As Thoreau said, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The evil he was referring to is poverty.

George was pointing out the root, and provided the tool for removing it. It's too bad that it hasn't yet been implemented.