Confronting the Fun and Folly of Monopoly Go
I’m a weird person in many ways. (I’m sure this is not news.) As just one of myriad examples why, I like playing the board game Monopoly. Yes, I know it has a reputation as being the thing that is guaranteed to get the knives out at a family gathering, but for me that’s never been the case. Maybe there’s something in my warped brain that treats the game like I did Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: I never have taken it as seriously as others do.
But yes, I am a fan, as evidenced by the zombie rules we came up as well as the multi-board madness we concocted. (I still have Monopoly games that have themes like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and Cthulhu, and someday I plan to host the bleakest tri-board Monopoly tournament ever.)
Alas, it’s not the easiest thing to get a game of Monopoly going. Not only is the shortest game usually considered to last too long, but,,,well, there’s an pandemic apocalypse (still) in process that makes it difficult to get a bunch of people in one place safely. Enter Monopoly Go.
It’s brought to you by Scopely, the same people who created Marvel Strike Force. That was the Marvel mobile game I played for ages (and recently stuck my head back into to find it’s an absolute mess). The first time I installed Monopoly Go though, it didn’t stay on my phone for long. During the tutorial, it became clear just how different this was going to be from the board game. Specifically, the part where I was to seek out another player’s “landmark” (more on that in a moment) and smash it with a wrecking ball.
Now, setting aside the fact that the tabletop version is about buying properties and not smacking the shit out of them…attack a player I don’t know? The board game, at its core, is about driving your friends and family out of business… i.e., people you actually know. Without that, I pondered…what was the point? So I uninstalled it.
But curiosity eventually got the better of me and I went back. Apart from the arguing and deal-cutting with friends and family, the actual game, of course, is about going around and around the board buying up properties in the hopes that you will have enough to survive while your opponents will land on your properties, give you all their money and exit the game. (As time progresses, this appears to be more and more indicative of real life, but that’s a completely different article.)
In Go, however, you have the board. You go around said board by rolling dice (which you can do with a multiplier to blow through your rolls faster and score higher). There are Chance cards and landing on railroads is important. You go to Jail and can get out by rolling doubles within three chances. You pass go and collect some money. But that’s pretty much the extent of the board game that translates here.
In Go, you get money from pretty much any property you land on. If you land on a random player who happens to be hanging out on a space, you get more money from them. You don’t buy any of the properties on the board. Instead, each board has a theme, and five themed landmarks. You build up these landmarks until they’re all completely upgraded and then you move to the next board. When you land on a railroad, one of two things happens. You either do the aforementioned property damage with a wrecking ball to one of the other players, or you do a heist and steal money from their bank. (Again, the very rich being thieves who mostly break shit…very 2025.)
I’ve tried to figure out a better place to put this paragraph and I don’t believe there is one, so here goes. You try to complete sticker albums. You’re supposed to be able to do this by winning stickers by completing tasks and trading with other players. However, there is no way to actively trade with other players built into the game. As a result, there’s posting to Facebook groups, Reddit groups, Discord servers, etc. All of that is inefficient and mostly unhelpful. So if you are intending to play this game for any length of time, let me recommend the app Sticker Go to you. You plug in the stickers that you have and people can seek out the duplicates you have and offer you trades. I make no coin from pointing you at this app, it just makes life in the game so damn much easier.
You can’t actually beat someone to the point that they leave the game. They can always repair their landmarks and bankruptcy doesn’t stop them. They can always make money. The only way of making someone leave the game is if, I suppose, they just rage quit. (I’m not going to explain every nook and cranny of the game because it would get confusing, take a while, and you probably don’t care.)
Is there a social aspect to the game? Of course. Eventually, every mobile game has a social aspect whether you want it to or not. In Go, you can have friends, either met via the game or from RL or whatever. Go is a different sort of friends game than most because when it’s time to use the wrecking ball or stage a heist, it’s almost always a friend that’s your target. Attacking a friend seems to bring you no added benefit beyond the money you get from smashing or snatching. And it sets them back.
You do join forces with friends for things like racing around a track (you win tokens that you can turn into rolls of dice to determine how far you travel) or baking a gingerbread house (you win tokens to turn into spins of a wheel to turn into points to determine how far along you progress). This is perfect if you miss the halcyon days of school where there would be a group project and you had to make up for the slack of others.
But let’s stop there and ask the question: is the game fun? Yes, right up until the point you realize that essentially all you’re doing is rolling dice over and over again. The majority of time I was playing there was no strategy or skill involved whatsoever. You’re rolling dice or spinning a wheel or something that calls upon RNG to decide. The closest thing you got was: if you knew the most likely roll result from 2d6 (which is seven) then when you were seven spaces away from a beneficial target, you’d maximize the amount of rolls you’d use. And the main decision you could make was whether or not to buy (with, you know, actual money) dice rolls when you ran out.
It can be frustrating as well, because when you get bonuses for landing on the corners, you land on them less. Or when you get bonuses for landing on the utilities, you land on them less. At least that’s how it seems at times. It is well known that we humans are crap at recognizing true randomness. So, as any stat nerd might do, I decided to run a test: are the dice rolls really random? If they were, in theory it should wind up looking like a standard bell curve.
Well, I kept track of the results of 250 dice rolls, and here were the results:
As you can see, it’s…a bit wonky. There was a paucity of nines rolled. And we had more eights than sevens. What does this all mean? Honestly, I have no earthly idea. Does this mean the digital dice are loaded? Hellifiknow.
Now, there are some factors that I did not make part of my test here: is there any effect when you’re doing one roll vs. fifty rolls at once? And…does your chance of getting a number change depending on what the most beneficial roll outcome would be? I may be a stat nerd but I am also lazy. So I didn’t enter into any of that. So for the moment, the rolls…look…kinda legit? Not sure.
There is a game mode that does seem suspect…the Peg-E round lets you basically play a pachinko game, if the pachinko game was, without your knowledge, leaning to your left. Balls would launch themselves from the opposite end of the board to dive into the far left hole. And the entire time I played the game, they only went down the far right hole twice. If this was in a pachinko parlor, it would be closed down. Or at least I hope so.
Two points to mention here: first, I think Scopely understands that just rolling dice can get old, because I ducked my head back in there last month and saw they have two new game modes. The first is where you’re presented with an array of colored balls and have to guess what order they go in. This at least involves some thought and isn’t just straight up random. Also, they have an “Adventure Club” where you are part of a team of nine (I think it was) players trying to accomplish goals by drawing cards. The cards are supposed to be random, so there’s your RNG savior again, but at least here the group is nine people, so if somebody gets sick or busy or pinned under a boulder, you have enough people to still get things done. So perhaps the game is evolving in a good direction.
So…it can be fun. And if you find yourself somewhere where you need a completely mindless game to spend some time on, where you’re basically just hitting “Roll” over and over again while every so often adjusting the number of rolls you’re doing at one time, this might do the trick. A couple of weeks ago when I was under the weather, rolling dice over and over was about the most complex task I could fathom, so it came in handy. Going forward, I might poke my head in every so often to see what’s going on (and if you wait long enough when you come back they give you a bigass welcome back sort of prize stash, so that’s worthwhile).
But it’s just not the same as the thrill of “forgetting” to pay someone the rent you owe them because they got distracted. Then again, what is?
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