Monopoly, the Bad Frontman for Modern Boardgames

Modern boardgames are pretty awesome. In the past ten years or so there have been some fantastic innovations in the tabletop world. If you are unfamiliar with boardgames, however, you probably wouldn’t know about any of these great progressive things because boardgaming is misrepresented by a 1936 title that is painfully oldschool. Yep, Monopoly.

Monopoly and its mainstream companions (Scrabble, Candyland, Risk, etc.) are as outdated to modern boardgames as the coin-operated arcade is to modern videogames. In fact, Monopoly is quite frankly the Pong of videogames. First of its kind, by far not the best.

There is of course the argument that boardgames are timeless since they do not rely on looking pretty and are much more tied down to gameplay, but what if the gameplay is outdated? Sure, Chess and Go have earned their status of timeless classics, but Monopoly is marred by archaic designs such as roll-and-move, player elimination, and a long playtime with very little interesting gameplay to merit such a lengthy endeavor. In this millenium people have slaved over creating boardgames that solve the very blatant problems old-time games like Monopoly have. Player-elimination is practically a thing of the past. Many boardgames can be played within an hour instead of six, and offer more interesting play than even the best of Monopoly. Luck in newer boardgames has been designed to not dominate decisions in play and more be a factor a player has to deal with (but they can deal with).

What’s the point of all this bickering? Why should I care that Monopoly is the first thing that people think of when someone says ‘boardgame?’ It’s because, frankly, Monopoly is not a good game. Videogames at least have Super Mario Bros. as the first thing people think of when ‘videogame’ comes to mind. Super Mario Bros. is placed about a third of the way through the videogame timeline. Where are boardgames a third of the way through their timeline? Even looking at the same genre of financial management, a greatly better design than Monopoly, Acquire, had been published, among a plethora of good titles (wargames were pretty big around this time!).

The biggest issue I have with Monopoly is that it stops people from being interested in modern boardgames because they think of what is pretty much not that great a game and don’t want to go through a mediocre experience that lasts for who-knows-how-long. It is a crappy frontman for modern board games. Settlers of Catan, get more popular please.