5ywjdPumpkinPrincess
19848
569
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Mar 20, 2026 11:18 PM
5ywjdPumpkinPrincess
19848
569
12
wowzie
And everyone HATED playing it. It caused fights and hurt feelings and exposed weaknesses in relationships. If the person who won enjoyed it, they were an asshole
wattsdass
“The system is able to co-opt and absorb any form of dissent.” -Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism
10acszomby69
A game that demonstrated the ills of capitalism was adopted for profit by…wait for it…capitalists.
WorkerLurker
Monopoly, aka family fight club.
MidnaDS
And despite all the changes to improve upon the game, it is still a horrible board game.
ryftness6
I live in the city this lady was from. We have monuments dedicated to it on our square and a virtual monopoly game you can play by walking around.
DeusExPocky
Had no idea. Thanks for the post, OP! Now I really want to play the original version...
billstranger
Go read the short story "War Game" by Philip K Dick. Is relevant here.
Degarafarat
The fact that hardly anyone actually plays according to the rules is proof enough.
chiefrunswithscissors
The game monopoly in it's current state is not a celebration of capitalism. It's just a fkn game, a tradition with no meaning.
southflhitnrun
I knew it's origin story as a kid, but wasn't aware a women invented. This is a good thing to learn today.
AShartInTheWind
You cannot regulate capitalism, you can only mask its abuses or export them overseas.
Clockworkdancerobot
and it still causes fights between family.
conMan76
I buy all the cheapest property I can, then I jam as many houses I can and never promote to hotel. Ultimately leading to a shortage of houses, and when people whine about it I show them the rules that clearly states that there are only 32 houses in the game. The game then continues almost indefinitely... leading to no one wanting to play this shitty game ever again.
fillerbunny9
The Dollop ep. 379 goes into the details of how and why the modern game of Monopoly evolved from The Landlord’s Game, and how the original creator never got nearly what she was due.
Daemencer
This is, to me, a good moment to remind everyone of capitalism's most terrifying feature (imho): it can turn anything into a tool to serve it, even if that thing was initially created to critique it. Want to write a book against capitalism? Sure then it becomes a best seller and suddenly it's sold and exported everywhere and you are getting rich off of calling capitalism out...
lovehandlesmessiah
This was a major plot point of the recent thriller/horror film Heretic. Hugh Grant chews the scenery with these two Mormon girls over various religions and it just gets weird from there. Worth the watch.
Grimmrog
What dangers its amazing. - rich people
rbudrick
Weird that the only way to win is if everyone else rage quits.
WebDragonG3
I want the original rules to The Landlord's Game
wadatahmydamie
So this version is public domain then?
CammunistManifesto
And then the idea was stolen, changed. And to this day is regularly whored out as much as possible.
davefleming19903
Thats, thats what the post says
Whatdoyousaytoanicecupoftea
Enshitification in a nut shelk
TinaEveFox
What you doing like Krabappoly?
TheShogunOfSarcasm
Celebrated?!? Monopoly has broken up more families than alcoholism.
TheWombatStrikesAgain
It is objectively a bad game. At a certain point you have a few players who can only lose if they have a streak of catastrophically bad luck, while the rest is basically walking a downward spiral through a minefield.
It's a long way from from the moment you realise that to the moment you actually finish the game. And it's no fun playing a game you know already lost.
jimicus
The thing that really makes it drag on is almost nobody follows the rules properly. Do that, and it lasts about 40-45 minutes.
But most “invented” rules have the effect of making it go on for hours.
J3lek
My friend still has his ".com monopoly" game. It's fun to take out every few years to laugh at the failed websites on the board. The monopoly money is denominations of $billion. instead of $1 it's $1billion.
southflhitnrun
Nice
dashers
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/monopoly/images/0/05/DotComBoard.jpg seeing Sun on there made me sad
ExTechOp
Finland: also seeing Nokia there made me sad, the way they failed to counter the rising smartphone threat of iPhones and Androids, and went and trusted Microsoft.
shalafi71
$10 food and clothes in 1904?! That would be ~$340! Wife and I spend $230 at Aldi and eat like kings for 3-4 weeks. We make more selling...
shalafi71
...used clothes than buying them. Guess it goes to show $1 isn't comparable across years. My first computer (VIC-20) would be $1,800 today.
RooGryphon
so, whats the OG rules? is it kill the rich? or should that be our new rule
Ghlargh
That might make for a fun variant of Monopoly, once you get over a certain amount of money or property ownership your risk of getting eaten increases, going bankrupt still kicks you out of the game, but so does getting eaten for being rich, the winner is still the last person standing.
dashers
https://landlordsgame.info/games/lg-1906/lg-1906_egc-rules.html
lovehandlesmessiah
I remember the Mad Magazine equivalent where the goal was to go broke.
TheMoonBnuuy
That's not exactly true. It was created to promote a flat tax on land ownership. It had two rule sets. One was "Monopoly" where without a flat tax, everybody goes broke but one person. The other was "Prosperity" which is "flat tax on land value that then gets distributed to everyone else"
Note that the flat tax it was promoting is all land owners pay the same rate regardless of land value. 1/2
TheMoonBnuuy
The thing is, that could end up shoving poor people out of land ownership because a yearly 10% of the value of a house means poor people could be shoved out of home ownership.
So no, it was not anti-capitalist. It was pro-capitalist.
Furrieskys
How is it that all land owners would pay the same rate regardless of property value, but then in the next comment you say it would be 10% of the house value? That seems contradictory.
Anyway, poor people wouldn’t have a house to begin with, so they wouldn’t have to worry about losing it.
TheMoonBnuuy
Meaning it's not a sliding scale. It's the same rate of 10%. Also residential, commercial, industrial, all 10%.
revasseur
Same rate, not same amount.
3Davideo
I mean that sounds more like an idea with good intentions but with unintended results. Like how simple price ceilings sound like they'd make things more affordable but instead they result in supply shortages.
TheMoonBnuuy
Price ceilings do not inherently result in supply shortages, that only happens if the supply doesn't meet the demand at that price. Price ceilings that focus on limiting the grift of organized price gouging where prices are not set due to supply and demand alone would not have that effect.
Hint: most things aren't priced based on supply and demand, but rather on maximizing profit based on how much people are willing to pay, especially for basic necessities like housing.
drinkthederpentine
Nah. Repeatedly, over and over, price ceilings in the real world are shown to reduce supply in the long term. You can't just hand wave profit because you think people making it is bad. Suppliers stop entering nonprofitable markets regardless of your moralistic views
TheMoonBnuuy
If landlords get out of the land market, they sell the land.
We're not talking about widgets. We're talking about land.
You don't manufacture land and sell it on store shelves.
I'm also not advancing price caps as a solution. Someone else brought that up and collapsed categories doing it. I'm being more nuanced with it than "price cap = supply disappears". That logic only applies in some situations when it comes to commodities that are sold on store shelves with very little actual competition.
FromTheVortex
We have price ceilings for rent in Sweden, people all around the world seem to have a skewed negative to the way we have it. Like it's bad. But the majority of Swedish people are happy with it. Sure there's people never moving from their homes because their rent is low, but why the fuck should we move around all the time? Just force people to move because their rent suddenly jumped. If i live in an old building it should be priced as such!
3Davideo
Maximizing profit is a factor, no, THE primary factor in determining that goddamn supply curve. If suppliers feel that the market price is lower than they like, they stop selling the product. Result: shortages! Assuming of course the price ceiling is set below the present market price. If it's set above the market price, well, then, it might as well not be there.
It's like people don't even remember the 1970s oil crises anymore.
TheMoonBnuuy
So clearly the solution is to allow price gouging.
I mean landlords are MORE THAN WELCOME to stop supplying housing, but they're not exactly going to be making any money that way.