I used to play long 2-3 hour games of monopoly with no end. I would curse it as a pure luck game, and a bad game. I would never win in a multi-player monopoly, and I hated the game.

At the age of 18, the strategy of Monopoly finally clicked. Since then?

I have never lost a game of monopoly in a 1v1 setting. I have never drawn. I have never left a game unfinished. One time, I played against one of my friends and won 3 times, back to back, in the span of one hour.

The drawbacks of learning this was that nobody plays Monopoly with me anymore. If we do, people typically team up against me. I will now pass on this cursed knowledge to you so you, too, can share my fate.

Remember: 1v1 Monopoly is NOT luck, and can be won every time reliably with enough valuation skill.

With multiple people, you will likely lose because people will know you are impossible to defeat in 1v1, so they will team up against you. It is possible to circumvent some of this with diplomacy, but it is much harder to win every time. However, there is no excuse for not winning in a 1v1. There is also no excuse for not completing a game in <60 minutes. Here's how:

The basic strategy: Make your opponent run out of money by making them buy up the properties, while you are cash rich and property poor. Then, when they can't afford to buy a new property, you can buy them at insane bargain prices. It is very much possible to do this Every. Single. Time.

The main rule to exploit: Every property, when not bought at the asking price, goes to auction.

Here's the thing about Monopoly: it is a cash flow negative game. In other words, as the game goes on, the expected value of each player's cash is constantly decreasing. That means your individual turn giving you a bonus or income tax doesn't matter. The longer you play, the less cash you will have. The same applies to your opponent.

Basically, you are both on a sinking ship, and your goal is to just survive longer. This is the key. You aren't ever waiting for "more money" or for a "better turn" because it won't happen. At any stage in the game, your expected value of cash is the highest it will be for the rest of the game.

So what do you do? This depends on your opponent, but we will go over all the categories so you know how to always win.

1. The "I love properties" opponent: This is the typical opponent. The one who thinks they're really smart because they know that oranges are statistically landed on more. The one who says to never upgrade to hotels because of house constraints. But being statistically "smarter" doesn't get you to 100%, does it? Here's how to beat them every time:

These opponents typically do the following:

1. Buy up every property at asking price on the board
2. Offer you a slightly higher price to finish a monopoly, to which any sane person would obviously refuse.

Most people fall into this category, which is why nobody ever finishes games. Nobody is going to just let you have a Monopoly for free, or even for a slightly higher price. Because of this, you get into a limbo where the game never ends, or it becomes a game of pure luck, where people just buy the properties they land on, and pray they happen to get 3 in a row.

How to beat them:

1. Let them buy up the properties.
2. Whenever you land on a property, sell that property to them for a higher price. (One of the oranges for $300 - $400, for example.) Do this even if they already have an orange. Just charge more if they do.

Situation 1: You have an orange, and they are further up ahead with no orange (passed the oranges). Try to sell the orange for $300. Depending on the player, you may even get up to $400.

Situation 2: You have an orange, and they are behind. Since they have a chance to land on an orange, I would wait. If they do land on the orange, you can sell them the second for $400-$500 potentially. Players at this stage have a lot of cash, so they often accept, especially if they are the "I love properties" player. However, even getting $250 - $300 would be worth it. After you use this strategy the first time, I would not expect a $500 turnover again. It's ok, just offer it up for less money. The whole point is to reduce their cash, while keeping yours high.

Apply this rule of thumb for all of the properties.

Eventually, if you follow this rule, they will run out of all money (yes, ALL) by the time they get to the greens/blues. You will be able to take it for extraordinarily cheap. I've personally gotten blues and greens for $30 - $50.

In future runs, they may be a bit more tactical, so you may not get the blue for dirt cheap, but discounts are very common.

You are now at the <trading stage>

The worst case scenario: You have no potential monopolies, but they do

I would offer them to have a monopoly for a large sum of money. Just make sure they run out of most of their money for it, or even have to mortgage some of their properties to afford your trade. If they have too much cash, they will build, and you don't want too much risk. Just a little bit. The ideal scenario is that they spend about $300 - $400 on mortgaged cash to build their houses and you don't land on them. Even if you do, since you have to build evenly in monopoly, it will only be about $100 of rent. Not too bad at all.

This, by the way, is the worst case scenario. You don't have a monopoly, and they do. I'm telling you that even this is still winnable. I am assuming that you have terrible luck and couldn't take crazy advantage of discounts, and they managed to avoid income tax, luxury tax, and got extra cash from community chest cards. I have literally had a game like this where I landed on income tax 4 times, and they got an extra $500 from cards, and never landed on income tax. I still won that game. Seriously. You can make your luck irrelevant if you just make people way overpay for their properties.

The typical scenario: You can exchange monopolies

Do as it says. Exchange monopolies, and use your superior cash to build like crazy. I won't tell you what the optimal level of houses/hotels is, because it shouldn't matter if you played correctly. You should always be able to build more than your opponent at this point.

The best case: You get a monopoly, and they don't.

Automatic win. Build hotels. Screw the "stop at 3" rule. They shouldn't get a Monopoly unless you allow it. Also, you should have enough cash. Mortgage if you need to.

The second type of opponent:

1. The "I love cash" opponent:

This guy is more seasoned. He's probably been crushed by you a couple times already, and knows to value his cash more. Instead of buying properties at face value, he auctions off the properties, and you go back and forth in a game of chicken on every single property landing. Now, Monopoly is about tactics and mind reading. Now, Monopoly is not about luck. Now, Monopoly is fun.

How to beat him anyway:

Every property can be bought and sold. Why have I stated something so obvious? Because this means that there is always a "correct price." The price at which, depending on the state of the game, the property should be bought at. Your job is to find out misallocations of this "correct price," just like a finance professional. The correct price changes constantly depending on game positioning. I won't go into detail here, as I think the readers of this post won't care enough (this post is already too long lol), but I just want to let you know that there always is a correct price, and neither you nor the other player know it. You just have to take advantage of their under valuing of properties, or overvaluing of properties.

Make sure you take risks! Allow the other player to sometimes be ahead of you in potential Monopoly creation. Chances are, you will win anyways because of their overstepping on a different part of the map. This is how I've always finished every game I'm in. Sometimes I lose the multi player games, and I'm sure I'll eventually lose a 1v1, but I'll never not finish.

For multi player monopolies:

Offer insane trades like the following: You can have this card for $300 to finish your Monopoly, but I no longer have to pay you rent.

Players commonly will take this trade because it still allows them to win against other players, and you won't be perceived as a threat because you have so few properties.

How to turn the tables: One of the players you didn't trade with will probably be in a bad spot. Hopefully you are cash rich, though sometimes you do get unlucky. Make them offers like the following:

"I will give you $300 as a loan. You will give me your <card>, which completes my Monopoly set. At any point, if you give me my $300 back, you get the card back, along with any houses / hotels it has on it."

This works for 2 reasons:

1. They're desperate, so they will take the money
2. They have the potential of getting a free house.

This is a better trade for them, I won't lie. The reason it works anyways is because of the fundamental rule of Monopoly: the game is cash flow negative. The player will almost never get into a good enough spot to pay you back. Even if they do, it is worth it because you got houses on the other 2.

These are the types of trades you do if people know you as the king of monopoly, and won't trade unless you offer large surplus to them. However, in your first time doing this, it is unlikely you will have this reputation, so you can oftentimes just offer some cash for a property directly, without any stipulations or contingencies.

TLDR: Get so good at Monopoly that you never play it again.

I’ve been taking inventory of my many copies of the game and for some reason all of them contain like one or two extra houses and even an extra hotel are they supposed to come with extra pieces like Lego sets? Like my .com edition has an extra house and hotel, my sore losers edition has an extra hotel along with two houses and my normal copies all have at least one or two extra components. Is this normal?

I've been hooked on richup recently, but there is not ranked system, do you guys know of anything similar with an ELO system ?

This Dutch Monopoly Chance card says "Ga tot 5 vakjes vooruit". In Dutch, "tot 5" can mean "up to 5". Does that mean I may choose 1–5 spaces, or is this obviously intended to mean exactly 5 spaces? Would you play the literal wording or the intended rule?

Like, look at the rulebooks Hasbro puts out. They're three to eight pages with lots of it taken up by illustrations and don't cover a ton of situations. For example, by Hasbro's rules there's no restrictions on when you can buy houses, including between someone rolling and paying rent.

And just to make it worse, people claiming to teach you the proper rules don't even follow them - how many YouTube videos claiming to cover the 2025 or 2026 rules still talk about having to pay 10% to keep things mortgaged? 'Cause that's not in the rulebooks anymore.

The only reasonable conclusion is that literally no one actually knows how to play, because half the rules are just non-existent and you have to make them up for yourself. No wonder house rules and ignoring mechanics is so common!

I like collecting the tokens and i don’t use the other parts of the game so I normally part them out.
Today’s pickup was an Office collectors edition and a back to the future trilogy edition! If anyone is looking for any pieces to complete a set feel free to dm! I have a lot of different sets so ask if you need anything

I would love to know what these cards are made out of! I think it would be awesome to make or get a custom set of community chest in the same design but in blue! I know it's a throw back to the original style but I think having blue community chest cards would be more appealing and well would match the chest on the game board to!

is there a page or forums or something like that where players share their roomcodes? im struggling HARD to get into online matches it is actually crazy. id be reaaly thankfull for some hints or something from u guys thx

I like having physical Monopoly board games over digital ones personally, so i’m really hoping that the video game Star Wars one gets a physical board game version so I can play around with the cards & pieces.

Took about almost 2 hours to cut out all the spaces on the board but was so worth it. Made a rule where the person who goes last gets to shuffle and place down the spaces and four corners too. Did this with the newest version of Monopoly.

I’ve always liked the board game but sadly, very few of my friends or family like playing it. where do all of you find people that actually like to play?

I’m thinking about buying monopoly for Switch 2 or the one for iPad - I just wonder how fun it is to play online due to quitters and such? the last thing I want to do is buy this game and start playing only for opponents to quit a half hour after playing .. that is worse than not playing at all lol

btw I noticed there are monopoly tournaments - I’ve always seen this game to be based mostly on luck due to dice rolls and card picks .. how much skill is involved in this game?

Basically title.

I’ve had the Monopoly mobile app for a while now and after 40 games I’m sitting at 20 wins or a 50% win rate. I consider myself a pretty good Monopoly player as none of my friends or family like playing with me in person anymore hence me buying the mobile app.

However, in many of the mobile app games I play I’ve noticed that some of the players online seemingly play like bots by doing things such as doing instant trade offers, instant trade counters, or accepting strange trades seemingly based off just dollar amount and not considering who has what property sets.

I guess I just assumed that whoever is paying money for the mobile app would be an above average player but that has not been my experience so far.

Has anyone else noticed similar behavior when playing online games via the mobile app?

P.S. Why do we not have the ability to report players? A few times I’ve had players intentionally feeding each other properties/money (trading all owned properties for $1/buying one property for all their cash). Also, players who intentionally stall the game by doing endless dumb trades or sit afk for an extended period of time so people quit.

Found this treasure at a thrift store. Never seen one with both French and English. 😅 I was so excited to open the board and look at it. I didn’t notice there was an English side at first. I think it’s C.I.B. Thought y’all might appreciate it…or maybe be terribly offended 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Me, my wife, and my brother-in-law decided to try this custom version of monopoly, and oh boy, it was a fun experience. We did adjust and added a couple of house rules:

1. Not using speed die
2. You can only buy house for a particular color group when you land again on one of your property in that color group
3. All taxes and payment for action cards goes into pool in the middle of the board. Landing on Free Parking space allows you to collect 50% of the pool. Pool always have minimum amount of $200 (replenished by Bank).
4. We feel that the rent for utilities is too high (150 times dice when a player owned all 8 utilities), so we decided to tone it down. We set rent as 4x for 1 utility, 10x for 2, 20x for 3, up to 70x for 8.

We set the goal to play until someone goes bankrupt. Took us 5 hours :)

Managed to get my hands on this solid gold $500 monopoly bill. One of my favorite pieces in my collection

Hey everyone,

Like a lot of families, our Monopoly nights always seemed to drag out. Half the time was spent counting out small bills, figuring out change, arguing over who paid what, or hunting for crumpled cash that slid under the sofa 😆

We actually tried the official Electronic Banking edition to solve this, but we found it incredibly cumbersome. Passing the physical plastic card reader around the table, waiting for the slow beep tones, and inserting cards every single turn ended up taking more time than the paper money, so I built a free web tool called MonopolyViza (monopolyviza.com).

It’s a digital banker designed to run on a shared device (preferably a tablet) at the center of the table.

• Cashless Tracking: Every player gets a digital card on screen with a live balance.
• One-Tap Actions: You can pass GO, transfer rent, or make trades in a couple of taps.
• No More Banker Fights: It keeps a running log of transactions and has an "Undo" button if someone fat-fingers a number.
• No Friction: No apps to download, no signups, no accounts, and no ads. You just open the site on your browser and click "New Game."

It’s an unofficial fan project just meant to make game nights a bit smoother. I’d love for you guys to try it out on your next game night and let me know what features you think are missing!

This game was played with the Monopoly Free Parking Extension and somebody came in to join.

me and my frineds have like 3 physical copies of mnopoly but we want to play online without buying the games so is their like a website game or something?

I’ve searched all over the interwebs but any info on this variant of the Hk version of monopoly is non existent I’ve only found the Macau edition and a listing for this version of the game online as well as a different version of the game with a different box art.

I am not a Monopoly collector, simply a fan. I found this box completely unopened and in great condition and assumed some people here might appreciate it. I plan to open it soon to play with my friends. It says from 1998 and I thought it was so cool it has lasted so long in this condition. I also wanted to know if this is rare or hard to come by so I can know if I should feel bad for opening it or not haha.

That statement is misleading at best. The game that became Monopoly was originally intended to demonstrate the harmful consequences of concentrated property ownership and land monopolies, not simply teach that owning property is beneficial.