Or they ignore rules that would help to speed the game up, such as the auctions that should take place if a player decides not to buy a property. Yet you will find that games go on too long mostly due to house rules that players swear are the official rules (a number of times as a kid, I played with people from different households who were convinced that ‘tax money going on free parking’ was an actual rule – yet this keeps money in the game’s economy that should be taken out, thus extending play time significantly).

There’s also that just-mentioned random nature of the game: your turns can often feel as if they’re dictated by the whim of the dice, rather than by any meaningful or strategic decisions you make during play. A clear winner can emerge relatively quickly, but due to the random nature of the game it can still take a really long time for them to actually win. It has a reputation for simply taking too long to play, for example, as well as featuring player elimination that can cause losing players to just sit around twiddling their thumbs, sometimes for hours, while the remainder of the game plays out.

It’s a game that’s simultaneously hugely popular and synonymous with board gaming itself while being reviled by nearly everyone who ends up playing it. Which is weird, because Monopoly as a game is, by modern standards, full of absolutely terrible mechanics and design decisions. Several generations of players have been introduced to it throughout their childhoods – it shows no sign of going anywhere.

It’s unbelievably ubiquitous even now, 86 years after it was first released. If you tell anyone outside of the gaming community that one of your hobbies is ‘board games’, the inevitable next question you’ll hear is “Oh, like Monopoly?”.

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