Lord of the Rings Monopoly's One Ring Rules
If you're going to be stuck playing Monopoly, play this One.
This will be 2022’s last post from GMDQ. Any writing I do for this blog over the holidays will be queued up for 2023’s inbox deliveries. I hope you all catch up on rest, loved ones, and gaming. I also sincerely hope you don’t lose any of this precious time to Monopoly.
Monopoly is a shit game for twats. It was designed to be a shit game for twats. The twats being lampooned in The Landlord’s Game just so happened to learn all the wrong lessons from it and popularised it as Monopoly. The only nice things I can say about Monopoly’s design are that the paper money is fun to play with, the miniatures are pretty, and Uncle Pennybags is the most likeable-looking capitalist in history.
How does Lord of the Rings Monopoly improve the base formula? Simple. It ends the game before it turns you into a Dark Souls Hollow. Just check out these rules!
There are 28 property spaces in Monopoly, and you start at Bag End, which means you just need that pesky Eye of Sauron to turn up 27 times, and the game is over! This of course happens once in every six rolls so that means you’re only expected to sit through an average of 6 x 27 = 162 rolls of the dice, which with a typical 4-person game amounts to about 40 complete rounds of the table. To put that in perspective, that’s just under 6 times you have to pass GO until you can do something else other than playing Monopoly. Genius!
So there you have it, a merciful Monopoly mechanic that ends Monopoly before it… *monopolises* an entire afternoon. Also see Lord of the Rings Risk, which has a similar game truncating rule. Also, fuck Risk.
To end on a positive note, if you’re looking for some good family-friendly alternatives to Monopoly, you could try:
Splendour: It’s cheap, it’s easy to explain to parents and kids alike, and you get to futz with poker chips - which are cooler than paper money.
Carcassone: A stone-cold classic. Lay tiles, build a nice tableau of a historic walled cityscape and play the easy version with some mulled wine. Chill as heck
Food Chain Magnate: Monopoly from Hell. The rules are confusing, the difficulty is set to 11. The evil Napoleonic strategist in your family will love it and everyone else will feign interest in the King’s Speech on TV so you can all do something else. Jokes aside, it’s a great game once you’ve earned the right to enjoy its depth. Also, it comes with wooden burger counters. It’s also out of print and monstrously expensive to acquire. Happy hunting.