Monopoly is a famous property trading board game. A game of luck, chance and wheeling and dealing Move around the board buying and selling properties. A perfect game for family fun and one you can use to teach children Geography, Economics and Money. It was awarded as Game of the Century by the TRA (Toy Retailers Association).

On 10 Sep 2019, Hasbro launched Ms. Monopoly, in which $1,900 in Monopoly money is given to female players and $1,500 to each male player. Investments in real estate from the original game have been replaced by investments in innovations made by women, such as bulletproof vests, WiFi, chocolate chip cookies and ladies’ modern shapewear,

About Monopoly the Game

Monopoly is a game for 2 to 8 children which comes with 16 Community Chest Cards, 1 Pack of Monopoly Money, 32 Green Houses, 12 Red Hotels, Game board, 8 Tokens, 28 Title Deed Cards or Properties, 16 Chance Cards, 2 Dice, 1 Speed Die and Instruction.

Each side of the square board is divided into 10 small rectangles representing specific properties, railroads, utilities, a jail, and various other places and events.  In the original version, the spaces were named after streets. These streets are actual streets in Atlantic City in New Jersey in the United States. In the British original version, they are named after streets in London. Indian version has cities.

• At the start of the game, each player is given a fixed amount of play money;
• the players then move around the board according to the throw of a pair of dice.
• The player who lands on an unowned property may buy it or allow the bank to auction it to the highest bidder,
• but, if he or she lands on a property owned by another player, rent must be paid to that player,  according to the value of the land and any buildings on it.
• If a player owns all the spaces within a colour group, i.e acquires a monopoly, he may then build houses and hotels on these spaces, generating even more income from opponents who land there.
• There are Certain nonproperty squares. These places cannot be bought, but instead require the player to draw a card and perform the action on the card, pay taxes, collect income, or even go to jail.

A player continues to travel around the board until he or she is bankrupt. Bankruptcy results in elimination from the game. The last player remaining on the board is the winner.

It’s a real estate trading game that nearly everyone plays for fun and a chance to be a pretend real estate tycoon.  Monopoly is a simple game: you start off with some money, and your goal is to be the last player standing with money.  The way you win in Monopoly is by collecting rents on property, or cash flow so you go round the board which has many properties or cities. Once you visit the properties, you can either buy them or just pass through without doing anything, as long as it has not been bought by another player. When a player lands on properties bought by others, rent has to be paid to the owners. It’s all about making deals and making money. But don’t land in Jail! Go broke, and you’ll lose everything.

Speed Die: In order to accelerate the speed of the game, a fabulous Speed Die is introduced. This Speed Die can be used only on receiving Go for the first time. The Speed Die gives you the benefit of playing along with the regular die. Once the player rolls this die on the board along with the regular dice, you can add up the numbers to zoom around the board.

The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly

The shortest possible game of Monopoly requires only four turns, nine rolls of the dice, and twenty-one seconds, shown by Daniel J. Myers, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame University. Read here.  One player moves around the board very quickly, to buy Boardwalk and Park Place, and places houses on them And the other one ends up drawing a Chance card that sends them to Boardwalk, and they don’t have enough money to pay the rent with three houses, and the game is over.”

So, what is the statistical probability of that particular game happening? The odds are very, very, very slim. it would happen “once every 253,899,891,671,040 games.

Video on How to Play Monopoly

Monopoly Board Game Indian Version

Funskool (India) Ltd. has published Monopoly in India since 1987. There are versions such as Business and Vyapar (Hindi version), using Major Indian Cities, Airports and Railway Stations and Indian Rupee for currency.

• Currency papers are in denominations of 1,5,10,20,50,100,500
• It has some major cities like Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, etc. Also, it has all 4 metro cities railway station.
• The cities or properties from Go are:  
  Guwahati – Community Chest – Bhubaneshwar – Income Tax – Chennai Central Railway Station – Panaji (Goa) –,Chance – Agra – Vadodara,– Jail – Ludhiana – Electric Company – Patna – Bhopal – Howrah Railway Station – Indore –,Community Chest – Nagpur, Kochi – Free Parking –  Lucknow – Chance – Chandigarh – Jaipur – New Delhi Railway Station – Pune – Hyderabad – Water Works – Ahmedabad – Go To Jail –Kolkata – Chennai – Community Chest – Bengaluru – Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria terminus) – Chance – Delhi – Super Tax  and Mumbai.
• The Indian edition has India specific plastic tokens like Auto-rickshaw, elephant, peacock, tiger etc

Ms Monopoly

on 10 Sep 2019, Hasbro released Ms Monopoly. Rich Uncle Pennybags has willed his empire to his niece, Ms. Monopoly, in Hasbro’s latest iteration of its iconic board game, where female entrepreneurs and inventors are not only celebrated but paid more than men.

The banker gives $1,900 in Monopoly money to female players and $1,500 to each male. When players pass go, women again get the upper hand — receiving $240 to the men’s $200. Investments in real estate from the original game have been replaced by investments in innovations made by women, such as bulletproof vests, WiFi, chocolate chip cookies and ladies’ modern shapewear. Along the way, players can pick up tokens, such as a barbell, a glass or a jet plane.

In marketing the game, Hasbro made a short video advertisement featuring three young female inventors talking about gendered stereotypes around technological and scientific achievements. In the short film, the three girls receive $20,580 in real — not Monopoly — money to fund their own innovative projects, which you can check out here.

Monopoly Electronic Banking Board Game

We are moving towards the digital age and India is progressing towards a cashless economy. Monopoly Electronic Banking Board Game is in sync with today’s changing scenario.

• The fast-dealing property trading game goes high tech with an all-new electronic banking unit. So Buy with Cards, Not Cash
• No more bills to keep organized-just one card that keeps track of your balance. Collect gifts from your generous opponents with the swipe of a card. Pick up your hard-earned salary at the touch of a button. Time to pay rent? Get it paid quickly.
• Store millions with a swipe of your bank card as you stack up transactions, track cash and collect properties to win
• E-bank makes it so much more fun to play

Some Interesting Facts about Monopoly

In 2008, Hasbro released Monopoly Here and Now: The World Edition. This world edition features top locations of the world. The locations were decided by votes over the Internet. The result of the voting was announced on August 20, 2008

Anti Monopoly game  was created by Ralph Anspach as a response to the lessons taught by the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail them in the real world. The game was produced in 1973 as Bust the Trust, but the title was changed to Anti-Monopoly.

In 1941, the British Secret Intelligence Service had John Waddington Ltd., the licensed manufacturer of the game in the United Kingdom, created a special edition for World War II prisoners of war held by the Nazis. Hidden inside these games were maps, compasses, real money, and other objects useful for escaping. They were distributed to prisoners by British secret service-created fake charity groups.

Monopoly championships: Hasbro conducts a worldwide Monopoly tournament. The first Monopoly World Championships took place in Grossinger’s Resort in New York, in November 1973, but it wasn’t until 1975 that they included competitors from outside the United States. It has been aired in the United States by ESPN In 2009, forty-one players competed for the title of Monopoly World Champion and a cash prize of $20,580 (USD), which is the total amount of ‘Monopoly money’ in the current Monopoly set used in the tournament.

Lessons from Monopoly Board Game

Monopoly is way more than just entertainment for the family fun night. While you can enjoy the fun of becoming a real estate tycoon playing this game, there are also many educational lessons to be learned as well. The game offers the opportunity for players to make budgeting, investing, and financial decisions, which can help in remaining financially prudent. Some of the lessons you learn are given below.

Geography and History Lessons: Where the places are in India, what are the places famous for, they are capital of which states, Which are Metro cities, the differences between Metro and Non-metro cities, towns and villages. Why is Delhi and Mumbai priced so high etc.

Economics: What is Monopoly, How do business run? What is Mortgage? Is it good to pay rent or buy?

Basic Math Skills: One makes financial transactions like purchasing and paying rent. This is great for practising math skills and using different denominations of currency.

Planning: As you play you have to decide which properties to buy. 28 properties around the Monopoly board are not equally valuable in terms of Return on investment or ROI.  Mumbai and Delhi (Boardwalk and Park Place), which many people regard as the most precious, actually are not. It turns out that the oranges and reds have the highest ROI and are the best properties to own. In part, it’s because there are three of each rather than two, so the odds of landing on these colour groups are better. But these reasonably priced properties have something even stronger going for them: They’re perfectly positioned beyond the corner where jail is located. The odds of any player’s going to jail are reasonably high over the course of the game—and when that player comes out of jail, the chances of landing on an orange or a red are good. By contrast, the green properties, which lie just after the “Go to Jail” space, are far less likely to be landed on during the game. And they’re expensive too!

Some of the expensive properties, as tempting as they may be, can leave you broke before the game ends. They can cost a lot of money to maintain, and if your goal is to go big or go home in Monopoly or life, you might find yourself wishing you’d made a different decision.

Role of the Bank: The Bank holds the Title Deeds and the houses and hotels before purchase by the players. The Bank pays salaries and bonuses. It sells and auctions properties and hands out the proper Title Deed cards when purchased by a player, it also sells houses and hotels to the players and loans money when required on mortgages.” Basically, the Bank is the economy’s guiding force in Monopoly, just as in real life.

Budgeting: As your players start buying cities on the board,  they have to think of which properties to buy, not to run out of cash before reaching Go in one round when they get their pay, plan ahead for taxes and income, make payments as they land on other player’s properties, etc. You can lose the game if you don’t pay attention to both cost and cash flow i.e how money is going in and out.

The Art of Negotiation: The game offers opportunities to negotiate with other players to sell or secure properties and even get out of jail (you can hold onto the Get Out Of Jail Free card and sell it to another player).  A player rarely acquires all the properties of a colour group by actually landing on them. So a trade is frequently required to own a complete colour group.

Emergency Fund: To prepare for a bad chance card or emergency where you may have to pay for something like hotel repairs, or railroad rent you are forced to sell off some of your properties at a steep discount.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket: You won’t win much in Monopoly by just owning one property on the board and loading it up with hotels. It’s also hard to win if you try and buy everything on the board and spread yourself too thin. Occasionally, you can get lucky and have every opponent land on your property, but usually, the winner is someone who spreads out his or her properties throughout the board and has multiple chances at capturing rents.

The same principle applies to investing. If you bet everything on one or two stocks, you are exposing yourself to a potential wipeout if something goes wrong. At the same time, you can dilute your gains by trying to own 100 different stocks. Diversify intelligently

Life is Full of Surprises:  Everyone starts off with the same amount of money but then anything can happen. One may experience some rough patches by being getting bad chance cards or dice rolls but one can also have some strokes of luck. Chance cards can be your best friend or your worst nightmare, but you don’t know which is which until you flip one of those little cards over. In life, unexpected things happen. Although we can be prepared and we can do our best to avoid undesirable circumstances in life, sometimes you get dragged back “three spaces.” Then again, you could always score a nice, unexpected dividend from the bank. It’s important to encourage your kids to take advantage of opportunities that come their way and not to get discouraged when things go awry.

Too much of a thing: If you throw doubles three times in succession, move your token immediately to the space marked ‘In Jail.’” It’s tempting to go for seconds or thirds in life, but moderation is key

Patience matters: Timing is everything in both Monopoly and life. You should know when to buy and when to take a pass. Just because you land on an appealing property doesn’t mean that you should buy it, especially early in the game. This is true of life as well. Similarly, if you just buy without discipline when investing, you will be placing your outcome in the hope that the market behaves nicely. Successful investors don’t invest based on hope, they invest with a disciplined approach. Patience is a very integral part of that approach. We’re better served by exercising patience and some delayed gratification in both circumstances.

A casual player of Monopoly might think that it’s a game of chance and that the winner is determined by rolls of the dice. The winners are actually masters of strategy and negotiation. They know how to minimize the impact of bad luck—and to put themselves in the way of an undue share of lucky breaks.

Monopoly is just a game, and even if some of its lessons about finance aren’t entirely accurate, at least it gives kids an awareness of things like mortgages, bankruptcy, property ownership, money management and taxes. They aren’t likely to get that awareness from most video games or television programs. A board game like Monopoly shouldn’t be taken as a thorough education in finance and invest but a starting point.

Monopoly in Economics

A monopoly refers to a sector or industry dominated by one business or firm. The business enjoys the power of setting the price for his goods and controlling the market. By definition, monopoly is characterized by an absence of competition, which often results in high prices and inferior products. For example, if you want to buy a new automobile and there is only one brand from which you can purchase your car, that brand will be considered to hold a monopoly. Governments may grant a firm monopoly status, such as with the Post Office to deliver posts. By Using Google to navigate the web remains the preferred method by which most people find information online, so Google is a monopoly in Internet searching.

Monopoly comes from Greek word, Mono means “alone” or “single” and polen means to sell.

Monopolies are harmful because they allow one entity to set the price on goods without consideration for competitive, affordable pricing. This is because when there is a monopoly, there are no competitors. This leaves customers at the mercy of the monopolist.

In the late 1990s, Microsoft faced several suits due to perceived violations of these antitrust laws. Had the Justice Department proved the company was in violation, Microsoft would have been forced to divide itself into subsidiaries in order to break up the potential monopoly. This is happening with Google in Europe at present.

Oligopoly in Economics

Unlike a monopoly, where one corporation dominates a certain market, an oligopoly consists of a select few companies having significant influence over an industry. Oligopolies are noticeable in a multitude of markets. While these companies are considered competitors within the specific market, they tend to cooperate with each other to benefit as a whole, which can lead to higher prices for consumers.

• Operating systems for smartphones and computers provide excellent examples of oligopolies. Apple iOS and Google Android dominate smartphone operating systems, while computer operating systems are overshadowed by Apple and Windows.
• The auto industry is another example of an oligopoly, with the leading auto manufacturers in the United States being Ford (F), GMC, and Chrysler.
• While there are smaller cell phone service providers, the providers that tend to dominate the industry are AirTel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone etc.
  The music entertainment industry is dominated by T Series,

The YouTube video talks about Monopoly in Economics

History of Monopoly

It was first published by Parker Brothers in 1935. According to the official Monopoly web site,  “It was 1934, the height of the Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the Monopoly game to the executives at Parker Brothers.”

The game is named after the economic concept of monopoly, the domination of a market by a single entity. It is owned and produced by the American game and toy company Hasbro. In 1936, Parker Brothers began licensing the game for sale outside the United States. Funskool (India) Ltd. has published Monopoly in India since 1987.

Charles Darrow’s design was strikingly similar to The Landlord’s Game, one patented on January 5, 1904, by Lizzie J. Magie from Virginia. The Landlord’s Game was based on the philosophy that the renting of land and real estate produced an unearned increase in land values that profited a few individuals (landlords) rather than the majority of the people (tenants). For more details, you can read about The secret history of Monopoly: the capitalist board game’s leftwing origins

Mascot of Monopoly

Rich Uncle PennyBags is the mascot of the game Monopoly also known as Monopoly Man, or Mr. Monopoly. He is depicted as a portly old man with a moustache who wears a morning suit and top hat.  Monopoly.He also appears in the related games Advance to Boardwalk, Free Parking, Don’t Go to Jail, Monopoly City, Monopoly Junior, and Monopoly Deal.

Video on How to Beat Your Friends and Family at Monopoly

Is Monopoly a game of Strategy or Luck?

Many classic children’s board games, like Snakes and Ladder and Candyland, are essentially pure games of chance.

Poker is a game of skill. Skilled players can win consistently. Chess is a game of skill, you can rank players in detail based on skill and the outcome of a game between ranked players is very predictable unless they are close in rankings.  But Monopoly?

Board game reviewer W. Eric Martin thinks that Monopoly is about 90% luck and 10% skill, while former US Monopoly Champion Matt McNally argues that it is based on skill and that “anyone who says it’s based on luck is lying to you.”

Luck is certainly an element of Monopoly, such as when the player rolls the dice to move or picks up a shuffled Chance or Community Chess card, but there is also a strategic element to the game: deciding whether or not to buy a property, upgrade it with a house or hotel, sell it to another player, or mortgage it for cash.

So take out your Monopoly board game and spend some great time with your family. Aside from being a great way to enjoy a game night in, it can also teach children a lot about geography, history, personal finance and investing.