Hot Take of the Day: Monopoly Stinks

Hi, it me, Kyle Porter. Publisher of Pistols Firing. I don’t know how long we’re going to do this, but today kicks off Day 1 of a series we’re calling our hot take of the day. It could last a week, a month, a year. I don’t really know.

The idea is to expand this outside of Oklahoma State world. Some days we’ll keep it OSU-specific or Big 12-specific or whatever, but a lot of the time (like today) we won’t. 

It’s an opportunity for us to stretch our legs a little bit, think on something that isn’t a cover 2 defense or assist rate and it gives you an opportunity to holler about something in the Chamber.

First hot take of the day: Monopoly stinks.

I was playing Monopoly Junior with my kids this weekend, and I started thinking about its superiority to the American institution of Monopoly.

Four reasons.

1. It takes forever: Listen, it’s 2020. There’s a lot going on. I’m just not sitting down for a six-hour game that ultimately is more or less a luck-fest based on rolling dice.

2. Too much luck: I actually generally love board games, but the less luck (and more skill) involved the better. We can sit here and talk about how you can trade properties or grant rent immunity or whatever within the game. But the reality is that if you roll the dice in a certain way, you win 90 percent of the time. If you don’t, you lose 90 percent of the time. Might as well play Phase 10 (another game that stinks).

This is my issue with most board games. I want games to be almost solely based on skill. If I lose, I lose, but I don’t want to be able to lose to a 5-year-old unless I have to. Chess is a good example of the opposite of what I’m talking about. It’s 99 percent skill and 1 percent luck.

3. No drama: Everybody can see who’s going to win for the last three hours of the game. I want a game where it feels close until the very end, or at least somewhere near the end. I don’t need to be bleeding out for 90 minutes while my opponent slowly takes $200 bills from me.

4. People like it because it’s old: Listen, old things can be better (St. Andrews > Erin Hills), but they’re not better because they’re older. I think people like Monopoly because it sounds cool to like Monopoly and because it’s been around for forever. This is a dumb reason to like anything. The good folks over at Board Game Geek have it right. Monopoly (the original) is ranked No. 18,614 in their list of games. Hate to see it!

Bonus: I don’t need 29,000 variations of a game. Star Wars Monopoly, Star Trek Monopoly, Trek Wars Monopoly. It’s all nonsense! There are 300 games you can go buy at Barnes and Noble right now that are better than Monopoly.

This concludes today’s hot take of the day as well as my TED talk. Thank you for listening.