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[2 Minutes Turkish]

So what, not on PS3 though? Seems a bit silly.

And yeah, like everyone else, would sell well as a downloadable title.

 

[TheDiabolical]

Monopoly is on Pogo.........so why would i "pay" for this?

 

[Agent X]

So what, not on PS3 though? Seems a bit silly.

It is available on PS3. They probably made the decision to release a PS3 version after they made the initial press release.

I'm surprised they didn't bother making PSP or DS versions.

 

[Speevy]

I'll be buying the $80 Limited Edition.

 

[SapientWolf]

By the time the game drops in price nobody will be playing online.

It might not even have online. It hasn't been announced yet.

 

[Dega]

i've been waiting for this for a very long time

then i saw the price

i can fucking wait longer

:lol

Is Risk out on Live/PSN/WiiWare? That's the game I want!

 

[trinest]

So you play mini games to advance? Or what. Whats the story?

EA should learn that mini-games don't work in boardgames.

 

[the-iek]

received my copy from electronic arts yesterday. the release is today in europe and it costs about 30€, so it's budget pricing. i'll post my impressions after playing it with my friends this evening

 

[FutureZombie]

The thing about Monopoly, is that it's not a good game. Eventually, people learn to buy everything they land on, and no one wants to trade for fear of giving someone else a monopoly. Basically, it's just a game of chance. Boring.

 

[Stumpokapow]

The thing about Monopoly, is that it's not a good game. Eventually, people learn to buy everything they land on, and no one wants to trade for fear of giving someone else a monopoly. Basically, it's just a game of chance. Boring.

:lol :lol :lol

I've got... 23 Monopoly sets. I've played with a wide variety of people. I don't know anyone who opts out of trading. It's very rare that someone gets a dominant enough position naturally to win the game without trading.

 

[Classic_Gs]

Retail? No thanks.

 

[DrLazy]

:lol :lol :lol

I've got... 23 Monopoly sets. I've played with a wide variety of people. I don't know anyone who opts out of trading. It's very rare that someone gets a dominant enough position naturally to win the game without trading.

People aren't willing to listen. You'll never convince them. To this crowd a game that relies on a good heaping of luck = bad. Monopoly does not involve Dungeons and Dragons amounts of strategy. But there is strategy. Trading is part of it. I've seen people spend every penny for boardwalk/park place trade... then never get the chance to build on them.

You mentioned others, like auctions and mortage costs. There's also the simple strategy of balancing how much cash on hand you'll need to purchase properties versus paying rent. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the rules state that when you sell a house/hotel, you only get half your money back, which makes building a more strategic decision. At least that's how we play. By making it more of a decision to sell homes or mortgage properties, all the sudden players need to use good cash management.

 

[Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew]

I'll be buying the $80 Limited Edition.

I heard it includes the actual board game :O

 

[AstroLad]

it's not that it relies on luck--i actually hate games that don't have any luck element--it's that roll-and-move isn't exactly captivating in any way and you make very few material decisions especially for a game of its length, and the endgame drags on for AGES. relatedly, the elimination mechanic guarantees that in any game with >3 players you will likely have someone sitting out for hours (and it's not exactly an entrancing spectator game).

if you like bartering there are better games out there. you can house-rule it to hell and back but i'd rather just house-rule a fundamentally better game (or at least one that looks nicer). i totally understand the nostalgia/brand-appeal factor though even if it's never lured me back to a game of monopoly in about eight years.

 

[Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew]

btw, can the thread title be changed to "Monopoly (PS3/PS2/Wii/X360/PC/C64/Amiga) Officially released"? :lol

 

[XiaNaphryz]

People aren't willing to listen. You'll never convince them. To this crowd a game that relies on a good heaping of luck = bad. Monopoly does not involve Dungeons and Dragons amounts of strategy. But there is strategy. Trading is part of it. I've seen people spend every penny for boardwalk/park place trade... then never get the chance to build on them.

You mentioned others, like auctions and mortage costs. There's also the simple strategy of balancing how much cash on hand you'll need to purchase properties versus paying rent. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the rules state that when you sell a house/hotel, you only get half your money back, which makes building a more strategic decision. At least that's how we play. By making it more of a decision to sell homes or mortgage properties, all the sudden players need to use good cash management.

WTF? It's not the luck factor at all, it's just that there are better games out there if you like auction mechanics or anything else that uses luck in a better fashion. AstroLad also nails it with his response.

There may be elitist types on places like BGG that eschew luck, but they're just one faction of many. Some hate abstracts, others euro games, others card-driven ones. Some may not like Monopoly because it features luck, but a lot more don't like it because there are better alternatives.

Here's a good quick review on why a lot of boardgamers don't like Monopoly.

This was written for the Gen-Y Mensa newsletter, and so its intended audience is not hobby gamers. The title should be taken literally; it is an explanation to people who might not know a lot of board games as to why most hobby gamers do not like to play Monopoly.

Monopoly is by far the best selling board game in America, if not the whole world. This alone might lead people to believe that it is a good board game. A lot of people also only had Monopoly, or maybe had Monopoly and a couple party games, when growing up. Monopoly is a strategy game and not a party game, and so for people who like strategy, it might have seemed pretty good when compared to games like Taboo or Pictionary. There are even people who play Monopoly in tournaments, and books have been published on Monopoly strategy and statistics.

In spite of all this, find a local hobby gaming group in your city, and Monopoly is not likely to be one of the games that hits the table very often. Maybe hobby gamers don't like Monopoly because it is old. Or because they are elitist snobs Monopoly is popular. Or maybe it's because it's American, whereas most of the games they seem to be playing come from Germany. Or maybe they just don't like games about making money off of hotels. These reasons seem to disappear though, when you consider the game Acquire. Hobby gamers will generally be happy to play a game of Acquire, which is another popular (though admittedly less-so than Monopoly) American game released in 1962 in which players compete to make money off of hotel chains.

Brief Game-play Overview

So why don't hobby gamers like Monopoly? Well let's look at Monopoly and see how it measures up to other board games:

In Monopoly players roll two dice and move that many spaces around a board. Some of the spaces on a Monopoly board will cost them money, some do nothing, and some tell them to draw a card and do what it says which could be either good or bad for them. Most of the spaces, however, are properties. Landing on a property owned by the bank (the default) means a player must buy it at the listed price or auction it off to everyone. Landing on a property owned by another player means they must pay rent (usually much less than the cost of the property) to the player who owns it. Properties come in blocs, and if a player manages to get an entire bloc (a monopoly), either by luck or by trading, then they can vastly increase the amount of rent charged on it by buying houses and hotels and placing them on that bloc. As players run out of money, primarily from paying rent to other players, they are eliminated from the game until there is only one remaining player who wins.

Just to get this out of the way, there are two variant rules that a lot of people play with: the first is that if you land on a property owned by the bank you can just do nothing rather than buy it or auction it, and the second is that all money payed in taxes (from various board spaces and cards) go into a pool which is won by any player landing on the "Free Parking" space. Both of these rules do almost nothing good for the game and can make it take a lot longer, so I am only addressing the rules as they were intended to be played: without those variants.

Problems with the Game

On to the problems: The first is that the distribution of properties is the most important determinate of who will win, and they are distributed randomly by rolling dice and moving onto them. A game in which the most important way to win is rolling the right number on a set of dice can never be terribly interesting. This can be mitigated somewhat by fair trading, but unfortunately there are incentives against fair trading; each player's first priority should be getting a monopoly while preventing others from doing the same, so if two players find a mutually beneficial trade with each other, usually it means they both are getting Monopolies or at least getting close to Monopolies, which will never save the guy who ended up with Baltic, one railroad, one utility, and two get out of jail free cards. By contrast, in Acquire, the pieces a player has are random, but everyone has equal opportunity to buy stock in any hotel chain, without having to land on by luck.

The second big problem is called the "Runaway Leader" problem. It simply means that at a certain point in the game it tends to become obvious who is going to win, or at best which of two players are going to win, and the rest just have to sit there and get slapped with rent payments until they lose. A game in which the winner is decided prior to the ending conditions being reached is a recipe for boredom. The "Free Parking" variant is intended to mitigate this, but without changing the distribution of properties, it really just delays the inevitable. Again, by contrast, Acquire players have stock in dynamically changing companies, and so it will be extremely difficult to determine who will win prior to the actual end of the game.

Those are the two big problems. There are others. For example, roll and move along a single path is almost always a boring mechanic, since it reduces the number of interesting decisions. Also, the properties' stated values rarely correspond exactly to their value to the players, which only increases the amount of random chance in the game.

Conclusion

Finally I want to say that although this may seem like a Monopoly bash-fest, actually Monopoly is not a bad game overall. If you like Monopoly, you're not wrong to like it, but chances are if you have played both Monopoly and Acquire, you will agree with me that Acquire is more fun. As it happens, so are Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy, and dozens of other board games I can list off the top of my head. Monopoly is a fine game, but give some others a try, and you may be surprised how many games are out there that are better than fine.

 

[camineet]

No thanks, I already got this:

 

[SapientWolf]

You can get Culdcept for half the price and it's at least twice as good.

 

[bryehn]

Everything moves so slow. After playing Dokapon it seems just insane to not have game speed options available here.

The dice seem really floaty too.

Not sure why it defaults to classic, I'd think most would want to play the new world board.

The song is already driving me bananas.

Definitely not worth $40, I can tell you that much. Even with the unlockable boards. Though, I haven't checked out Richest Mode yet, I'll save that for when I have more people around, the CPU AI is terrible on every setting.

 

[drakesfortune]

:lol :lol :lol

I've got... 23 Monopoly sets. I've played with a wide variety of people. I don't know anyone who opts out of trading. It's very rare that someone gets a dominant enough position naturally to win the game without trading.

When you play with 2 people trading is stupid and pointless. With more than 2 people it becomes necessary, or a really long game of attrition. I play with my wife a few times a year, and she never agrees to a trade in a two player game if she's got the advantage, and why would you?

 

[Jamesfrom818]

I'll stick to the board game. House rules are half the fun.

 

[fourzerotwo]

This really belongs as an arcade game and needs online play. That said.

I played a full game last night and got 230 gamerpoints. The other 3 players were AI so it was a bit frustrating considering they'd make trades with each other that no human players would ever agree to (like trading Pennsylvania Avenue and giving them a Boardwalk monopoly). So it was a bit frustrating, but I still nearly one and may have in the long term but decided to declare bankruptcy after bankrupting the other two players in order to get the achievement.

So for the achievement whores out there:

1 Game = 11 achievements and 230 points

I actually got this game to enjoy, not just for the points so I plan on playing it some more with my wife which I hope will be more fun than with the AI.

The only really gripes I have with the game are:

- No Online Play
- Can't skip AI's turn
- Needs option to enable / disable "commonly used" house rules

 

[Danj]

So is there actually a PC version of this now? I note the thread title has PC in it but I haven't seen an updated PC Monopoly around anywhere...

 

[alex1893]

 

[The-Switcher]

 

[Stumpokapow]

When you play with 2 people trading is stupid and pointless. With more than 2 people it becomes necessary, or a really long game of attrition. I play with my wife a few times a year, and she never agrees to a trade in a two player game if she's got the advantage, and why would you?

Of course a two player game is going to devolve into attrition. That's why there are popular house versions of the two player gamer that pre-distribute <x> property cards at random to each of the two players in order to force trading.

I'd buy this game for maybe $19.99 or so, I suspect.

 

[bryehn]

The other 3 players were AI so it was a bit frustrating considering they'd make trades with each other that no human players would ever agree to (like trading Pennsylvania Avenue and giving them a Boardwalk monopoly).

- Needs option to enable / disable "commonly used" house rules

Weird, in the couple games I've played on the Wii version I've made some pretty messed up trades. I literally traded Baltic Ave for Park Place. Was a bit shocked to see the CPU accepted it.

Also, the Wii version has options to toggle house rules, there's 13 I think.

 

[DCX]

I suspect this will drop in price within the next 4 months.

DCX

 

[dk_]

received my copy from electronic arts yesterday. the release is today in europe and it costs about 30€, so it's budget pricing. i'll post my impressions after playing it with my friends this evening

It costs 37€ in Germany. Too fucking expensive...

 

[AstroLad]

Of course a two player game is going to devolve into attrition. That's why there are popular house versions of the two player gamer that pre-distribute <x> property cards at random to each of the two players in order to force trading.

I'd buy this game for maybe $19.99 or so, I suspect.

As I argued in this brilliant thread though, that's one of the big downsides of video boards games--limited options to house rule. For a game like Monopoly I'd consider this particularly fatal, even though they did apparently include a select few as options.

 

[MrDenny]

Umm, why wouldn't you just buy the real game for half the price...

 

[bryehn]

Umm, why wouldn't you just buy the real game for half the price...

Only real advantage for me is no setup/teardown. No lost pieces or money, etc. And there are 9 different boards and Riches Mode.

But on the flip side, you can play a real board version during a power outage to pass the time.

Definitely glad I rented it first.

 

[Susurrus]

$40 and no online play is just setting up for failure.

TBH, I wish there were more board games on XBLA. There's a few, but nothing I really enjoy (unless you include Uno, but unless it has changed since last I checked, introducing the camera to it pretty much makes it so now you have to be a woman and show tits, or you get booted).

 

[painey]

HAH! Just seen the gamertile pic..

Insane! They couldnt even be bothered to knock up a pic of the old monopoly dude..

 

[Danj]

Are you guys sure this is out for PC? I don't see a PC version on EA's site...

 

[luffeN]

this is the game I was language testing in madrid at EA.... let's say you have a family and want to play a relaxing 4 player game on a console, it's... ok... for the rest.. no, just no. and why they didn't include online is beyond me

 

[Damodar]

Did anyone make a joke about Gallipolopy or Edna Krabapoly yet?

 

[Quasar]

Sheesh. Talk about a screwup. No online. Stupid minigames. And only available on disc. I can understand putting out disc version to get people buying it as a Christmas gift for relatives, but not having it on PSN/XBLA as well is stupid.

And here I was hoping I'd see lots of Hasbro games on PSN/XBLA/Steam.

 

[bryehn]

In case anyone still cares, I finally got around to reviewing this.

 

[BakedPigeon]

If this was on XBLA and had online play I would be all over it. WTF EA? Why do you think you can do this shit?

 

[ThatObviousUser]

http://wii.ign.com/articles/928/928816p1.html

I walked into this one thinking it'd be in the 2-4 range, was pleasantly surprised. Really nice Presentation score, all things considered.

I hope future Wii shovelware looks to Monopoly and strives to be like it.

 

[Corran Horn]

I gameflyed it on PS3 and got it a few days ago, havnt tried yet (stupid gamefly didnt send me the games i really wanted lol).

 

[Blueblur1]

Oh EA. You're so original.

 

[SapientWolf]

I gameflyed it on PS3 and got it a few days ago, havnt tried yet (stupid gamefly didnt send me the games i really wanted lol).

They were doing you a favor.