To win at Monopoly you have to be the last player in the game after everyone else has gone bankrupt. To achieve this, you must build a real estate empire by purchasing strategic properties, building houses and hotels, and using rents to knock out your opponents. But what are the best properties to buy? You have to try to get the ones with the better balance between frequency of passage and performancethat is, the orange boxes. These boxes, however, alone are not enough. If we play short gamesfor example with two players, a good strategy could be to combine the oranges with the bluewhich cost little and allow immediate profit. If instead the game is prolongedas happens with 5 or 6 players, the orange ones remain a valid choice, but it is preferable to combine them with more expensive and profitable terrain, such as squares red or greenbecause the profit margin grows over time, especially if we manage to build houses.
Let’s now see how to play Monopoly, let’s delve into the best strategy and how to understand what the best strategy is.
How to play Monopoly
Monopoly is one of the most famous board games in the world. The goal is to become the investor richer buying properties, collecting rent and bankrupting your opponents. At the beginning of the game, everyone starts from “Go” with a pre-established sum and, at each turn, rolls two dice to move their piece on the board. Depending on the square reached, you can buy a property free, pay rent, draw cards “Unexpected” or “Probability”, or pay taxes to the bank. Every time you complete a lap of the board you collect your salary, useful for expanding your assets or paying fines.
A player goes bankrupt when he no longer has money or property to mortgage to pay off a debt. From that moment he exits the game.
The real goal of each player, therefore, is to purchase properties strategically for earn as much as possible from other players. To increase your profits you can build houses and hotels on a group of squares of the same color, but only after completing the set and obtaining the so-called “monopoly”.
So what should you do? Investing everything in a hotel on Parco della Vittoria, the most expensive property on the board, hoping someone will stumble upon it? Or is it better to focus on cheaper properties, such as Viale Monterosa (one of the blue boxes) which guarantee lower but more frequent profits?
The most solid strategy for winning at Monopoly
First of all, as in any game based on dice or card drawing, the fortune has an important role. However, you can increase your chance of winning by choosing to buy the right boxes.
The most solid strategy is to get a color monopoly with the best one relationship between cost and performance And passage frequency. This ratio varies based on the number of players, because it depends on the length of the game. During shorter games, such as two-player games, it is better to focus on tiles orange and on blueexcellent for short games. If the game lasts longer, it is better to combine the orange ones with terrains that cost a little more, but which also yield more, such as reds, greens or yellows.
This does not mean, however, that the other properties are to be avoided. Except for the brown squares (which are not very relevant), having a monopoly on a color and start building early it is always advantageous. In Monopoly, in fact, there are few houses: Starting to build early prevents your opponents from developing. Furthermore, almost all colors offer the best return/expense ratio with three houses, therefore it may not be necessary (and indeed, almost disadvantageous) to focus on hotels immediately.
Let’s not forget, however, to always keep a little of liquidity aside to be able to pay all the rents that we will have to pay to our adversaries and any unforeseen events. Better to slow down your land buying and selling a bit to avoid sudden bankruptcy.
And late in the game, when almost all the properties have been purchased and built upon, the best place to be is the prison. Staying there as much as possible prevents you from running into dangerous rents, while still continuing to collect your own.
How to derive the best strategy
To win at Monopoly it is essential to understand that some boxes are more likely than others. The most visited of all is the prisonbecause you can end up there in different ways: by rolling three consecutive doubles, landing on the “Go to prison” space or drawing the corresponding card.
So, almost all players will find themselves having to get out of prison at least once per game. Once outside, they will roll two dice and… very easily they will land on an orange square. These boxes, in fact, are located 6, 8 and 9 steps from the prison, three of the most probable results when rolling two dice. In fact, for example, if we roll two 6-sided dice, a 2 has a probability of just 2.8%, because it can only come out with a 1 on both dice. An 8, however, has a probability of 13.9%, since it can be rolled with 2 and 6, 3 and 5 or 4 and 4. Coming out of prisontherefore, the probability of ending up on an orange square is almost 40%. This is exactly why the orange boxes are so important.
This type of reasoning can be extended to the entire board to calculate the probability of arriving on every single square from any starting point. To do this you use a mathematical tool called Markov chainwhich represents each square as a dot and each movement probability as an arrow. Combining all these probabilities with a little patience and a lot of math, you get a complete map of the most and least frequent squares.
But to win at Monopoly it’s not enough just to focus on the most visited boxes: the relationship between the cost of the investment and the time needed to recover it must also be considered. For this reason, in short games the blue boxes are advantageous: they cost little and pay off quickly, even if they do not produce great returns in the long term. For long games it is better to buy land such as red, yellow or green, which with more than 30 plays pay for themselves and allow a large margin, especially if we manage to build 3 houses on them.
