For this critical play, I chose to play Monopoly, a game I hate with a burning passion. In other words,I very much found it “not great”. Monopoly is a board game targeted at a broad audience, including families, children, and adults. It is typically suitable for players aged 8 and up, but reactions and gameplay styles may vary depending on age, personality, etc. The game was originally created by Elizabeth Magie and later adapted and published by Charles Darrow. From my experience playing Monopoly, I believe that its issues with balance across the various balance dimensions significantly detract from the gameplay experience. If someone were to revise the game through the lens of the four types of game balance, Monopoly could be significantly improved into a more strategically diverse and enjoyable game that could avoid the extremes of frustration and rage that ply many of its players.
Monopoly, though a multiplayer game, can be construed from a solo perspective when considering each individual player’s challenge of managing properties, money, and strategies. From my perspective, Monopoly’s challenge level often feels inappropriate. A game begins with equal opportunities for all players, but as it progresses, the balance gets skewed significantly based on initial luck with dice rolls and properties. The challenge, or frustration rather arises from the difficulty in making a comeback once I fall behind. The pacing of the game makes early disadvantages snowball into larger deficits, making it almost impossible to recover! This imbalance in challenge level just takes away from the overall enjoyment and makes the game feel punishing rather than challenging.
Moreover, Monopoly is inherently asymmetrically balanced due to the randomness of dice rolls and initial properties you land on. This randomness created significant imbalances from the start in every game I have ever played. If a player lands on valuable properties early on, they gain a disproportionate advantage over others right from the get go. This initial advantage is further worsened by the luck of drawing Chance or Community Chest cards, which can provide additional money or relief from negative consequences and can seem like “stacking” benefits for someone. As I mentioned before from the solo balance perspective, the imbalance in starting conditions often means that one player’s early lead can be difficult to overcome, leading to a game where one player seems like they’re going to win from the beginning, discouraging me from wanting to keep playing.
In terms of strategic balance, Monopoly has a dominant strategy problem. The most effective strategy as mentioned before involves buying properties early, building monopolies, and putting down houses and hotels to maximize rent. While theoretically, players can “choose” different strategies, the reality is that deviating from this dominant approach results in always worse outcomes. For instance, focusing on utilities or railroads, while theoretically beneficial, is actually less than the profitability of owning a complete color set and developing it. This imbalance in strategies makes the game less engaging, as players can just figure out that there is a “correct” way to play, reducing the variety and efforts put towards strategic decision-making.
Additionally, within the game’s system, different objects have varying costs and benefits to the detriment of gameplay. The properties on the board are not balanced in terms of their cost to benefit ratio. Higher cost properties like Boardwalk and Park Place start of with a lot of rent when developed, but when I played longer games, we can compare them to mid-range properties like the orange or red sets and see that those could provide a better return on investment. This unevenness means that some properties are almost always more desirable than others, creating a skewed experience where no one cares about the “less valuable” objects.
However, we might apply the three ways to balance game objects to see if we could revise & improve Monopoly. Applying transitive balance to Monopoly would involve making sure that the cost of each property is proportional to its potential benefit, as for example the difference between Park Place and Baltic avenue is just not proportional. Adjusting this appropriately would help create a more balanced playing field where each property has a fairer potential return relative to its cost. Continuing with intransitive balance, we could add this to Monopoly by creating different advantages for different types of properties. This could mean that while one set of properties might generate high rent, another set like Mediterranean & Baltic could provide strategic advantages like immunity from certain penalties or reduced costs for development. By diversifying the advantages of property sets, players could find more than 1 viable strategy to pursue, making the game more dynamic and less reliant on a single dominant strategy. Finally, “fruity” balance for Monopoly would involve making each property or set of properties so unique that direct comparisons are difficult. For instance, owning a particular set might allow a player to build houses at a reduced cost, while another set could grant immunity from certain types of taxes or penalties, a kind of feature we usually see in video/online games but might be nice to add to board games. This revision would require a lot of playtesting to ensure these unique attributes are balanced, but it would add a layer of complexity and uniqueness to each game, making it more engaging and less predictable. Maybe this could be a feature on Monopoly Online.
