

MONOPOLY RULES FREE
Whoever lands on Free Parking collects the whole payout. Heaps of Monopoly players pay taxes and fines into a collective pot in the center of the board. Somewhere along the way, someone made up a Mercy Rule, which holds that a player who first reaches a predetermined personal wealth wins automatically. Monopoly can sometimes take all night to play. Have you heard of the Monopoly Mercy Rule? That money is supposed to represent the wages you earn by the sweat of your brow, remember? Why would landing right on the space pay double?Ģ. If you're lucky enough to land right on the "Go" space, you can collect $400. Here are some "rules" that you won't find in the official Monopoly rule book. The game is still as popular as ever 100 years on and it's led to many house rules and niche tweaks so widespread that very few people play the game with orthodox strictness these days.

Workers, who actually create value, should simply be able to collect their $200 and be on their way around the board. That line is direct from the thinking of Henry George, the 19th-century anti-monopolist who favored taxing land-owners for the value of their holdings. "Labor upon Mother Earth produces wages," she wrote on her original board. Monopoly was a clever bit of left-wing propaganda: the "Go" space text highlights this. "It might well have been called the 'Game of Life,'" she wrote, "as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth." "It's a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences," Magie wrote in a contemporary political publication. The truth is that a left-wing feminist named Lizzie Magie invented the game in 1903 under the title "The Landlord's Game." Her deliberate goal was to highlight the evils of capitalism. In fact, by then Monopoly had been entertaining players for three decades. Hasbro - the company who own the rights to Monopoly - say that Monopoly was born when Charles Darrow presented the game, fully formed, to Parker Brothers executives in 1934.īut this isn't actually factually correct.
