chuckro | Game Strategy with ARR

Jethrien has mentioned before that ARR really likes Monopoly. He’s played several variants at school and my parents bought him Dino-poly for Christmas. It wasn’t until I saw it used in full force that I realized he has a consistent, high-risk, high-reward strategy when he plays: He’ll buy Boardwalk and Park Place (or equivalent) at the first opportunity and load Boardwalk with houses as quickly as he can. While I suspect this wouldn’t work as well in a multiplayer game, when there’s only one other player, it means he’s unlikely to pay out enough in rent to bankrupt himself before you land on his massively-inflated property by pure chance. Yesterday, I owned half the board but he still had a good shot of not landing on my property (because a lot of spots went unowned), and because I hadn’t built much, the rent for any of my spaces was $10-50. All I needed to do was land on Boardwalk once, and the $2000 rent bankrupted me instantly, even if I mortgaged everything.

(Apparently, according to the internet, the optimal strategy to win a proper multiplayer game is to buy a cheap monopoly ASAP and build four houses on each, but never upgrade to hotels. Because you’ve tied up half the houses in the box, most other players won’t be able to build up their properties and you’ll eventually grind them all down.)

We’ve also been playing the “fast version” of the game, where you shuffle the properties and each player gets 4 randomly chosen ones to buy at the outset; and then the game ends after 1 hour. I’m eventually going to try to find other alternate rules that’ll hopefully make the game more fun and less random.