After fans voted, Monopoly has replaced the iron token with a cat token. Apparently Monopoly updates its tokens from time to time in an attempt to stay relevant, although I’m pretty sure cats have been around longer than irons. But shuffling the tokens on the Monopoly board is like shuffling the deck chairs on a two-dimensional Titanic. When it comes to turn-based board games, Monopoly is still woefully outdated.
Blasphemy, you say? You still have nostalgic memories of glorious Monopoly nights? I know, I scoffed too, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that innovation in the turn-based board game industry has left old fogies like Monopoly (1934) and Risk (1957) far behind.
Let’s look at a few of the elements that render the gameplay of Monopoly and Risk inferior to a newer game like Settlers of Catan (1995).
Gameplay Qualities
1. Long, inefficient lulls where almost nothing happen. Due to inherent probabilities in the dice rolls by which players cycle the board, there are often lulls in Monopoly where game progress essentially pauses as players go round and round the board until somebody finally lands on the right piece(s). This can even happen more than once – first while players are waiting to build monopolies, and second while players are waiting for other players to land on their monopolies.
Risk has similar lulls, where troop build-ups lead Alice and Bob to roll their dies dozens of times just to see if Alice’s104 troops in Ukraine can conquer Bob’s 84 troops in the Middle East. You may see this as a “feature” that allows Charles to go to the bathroom while Alice and Bob are dueling, but that is only even necessary because the inefficient lulls make the game so long that nobody dares prolong the whole game for five more minutes to allow everyone to get a snack or bathroom break.
To make matters worse, both games get more inefficient as they progress. The first few times around the Monopoly board, almost anything can be purchased, but as the properties are grabbed up, progress slows. The increasing reward of reinforcements in Risk means that the number of troops on territories – and thus the length of die-rolling battles – also continue to increase.
By contrast, Settlers of Catan progresses constantly. Almost every roll of the dice gives resources to at least one player (with the exception of the 7’s slight redistributive pause), and as settlements are built and upgraded, the number of resources acquired increases as game progression accelerates.
2. Players can be eliminated hours before the game completes. In both Monopoly and Risk, players can run out of money or territories towards the beginning even though it may still take hours for the remaining players to brute-force a victory after enough trips around the board (these hours are of course exacerbated by the inefficient lulls). In fact, the incentives of the game are structured to encourage players to eliminate the weakest other players as quickly as possible.
This reduces the potential utility of these games in a group setting, especially as a family activity where the younger players may be most likely to be eliminated, forced to spend the next few hours watching everybody else or reading a book in the corner. If you see the slow progress of these games as a “feature” that enables people to spend a lot of time together, well, that’s only generally true for about half the players.
By contrast, no one is eliminated from Settlers of Catan until the end. And even though it may become obvious as the game progresses that certain players are very unlikely to achieve a victory, the lack of inefficient lulls at least means they won’t spend hours as zombie players. (Sometimes unlucky Monopoly or Risk players will spend hours as zombie players waiting to be eliminated and then still more hours waiting for everyone else to finish!)
3. Limited variation in gameplay. Monopoly and Risk boards are laid out the exact same way every time you play. Park Place and Boardwalk are always in this corner; there are always three openings to North America, etc, etc. This leads to a limited number of viable strategies (e.g. start in Australia), as well as a faster drop-off in marginal utility from playing the same set-up repeated times.
Settlers of Catan innovates by completely eliminating this assumption. The board is built by a series of hexagons that are randomly distributed every time the game is played. Sometimes certain resources are next to each other; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes certain resources are assigned frequently-rolled numbers; sometimes they aren’t.
This allows for much larger variations in strategy. Each board is a fresh chance to assess the best locations for developing and acquiring the resources you need. It also allows for a much slower drop-off in marginal utility as each fresh board can be a whole new experience that is more fulfilling than simply repeating the previous one.
4. Limited expansions to gameplay. Monopoly and Risk have done little over the years to address these shortcomings. Monopoly merely changes the names of the tokens or the board pieces with the endless parade of Beatles Monopolies and NYC Monopolies and all the other themes that have the exact same deficiencies as the original. Risk does the same thing with “Lord of the Rings” Risk. There is “Mission Risk,” but that’s not so much an expansion as it is a limitation of rules to make up for the default inefficiencies.
By contrast, Settlers of Catan has a variety of expansions that change or add to the gameplay, such as the Seafarers and City and Knights expansions. There is also an expansion to address one of the few inferiorities of the game: its default 4-player limit.
Why doesn’t Risk have expansions that let you conquer the Moon, or the oceans? Why doesn’t Monopoly have expansions that let you build things beside hotels or adjust all the prices depending on the state of the housing market? Because they’re outdated, non-innovating games that keep recycling the same inefficient ideas.
Abstract Qualities
In addition to the gameplay issues described above, there are a couple other abstract qualities that I dislike about these older games.
5. Inferior moral objectives. The goal of Risk is to conquer the world through violent force. The goal of Monopoly is to drive out all competition for a supply of housing that is apparently artificially limited by local government rent-seeking.
By contrast, the goal of Settlers of Catan is to harvest natural resources to develop a simplified civilization. I suppose one could argue that the island’s explorers may be exploiting the resources and may have unfairly dispatched the land from the natives, but I see no reason one cannot assume that the island was uninhabited and that the resources are being acquired without negative externalities. At worst, these assumptions are much more realistic than any assumptions needed to give Risk or Monopoly a superior moral objective.
6. Unrealistic depictions of economic scarcity. Monopoly and Risk both rely on a bit of economic magic. Monopoly has a central banker that prints as much money as necessary to sustain the local economy, handing out $200 every time everyone rolls their way around the board, whether or not they are producing anything of value. Risk has increasing levels of troop reinforcements that are apparently available in unlimited supply from their country’s Keynesian war machines.
By contrast, Settlers of Catan deals with inherently scarce resources. If there are only three brick resources, and they happen to have infrequently-rolled numbers, bricks are going to be scarce for everyone throughout the game, and this will affect strategies accordingly. (Note that no matter how scarce any one resource is, the overall gameplay still progresses much faster than Monopoly or Risk.) Players are encouraged to make mutually beneficial trades in a way that realistically reflects a barter economy (as opposed to the forced trades that are sometimes practically required to jumpstart a stalled game of Monopoly).
I think these lessons of economics are much more valuable than any indirect lessons in arithmetic from Monopoly or geography from Risk.
Conclusion
You may disagree that this is all evidence of decades of turn-based board-game innovation. Maybe it’s just one guy’s arguments that Settlers of Catan is better than Monopoly or Risk. You can probably find old board games with lots of progression and variation and scarcity (chess!!!!), and new board games with no innovation at all (Words With Friends???)
But I do think that this overall innovation is real, and not just limited to Settlers, though that’s what I focused on in this post. Wits and Wagers (2005) is a newer game that uses the transitive properties of ordered numbers to recreate all the intellectual fun of the old Trivial Pursuit (1979) without requiring anyone to actually know any of the answers! I suspect there are others as well.
You are free to continue loving Monopoly, that old classic, along with the house rules you’ve added to compensate for its dreadful inefficiencies, if you so insist. But as long as Monopoly is content to merely change the shape of its tokens, I am content to leave it behind.
Ur wrong about risk at least. Have you actually played any of updated risk games theye have q lot more different rule changes that one can use to make the game more dynamic or make the game shorter. there’s even a risk game out there that has you able to take over the moon, and risk games that has random moving atack
For some reason the last bit of my comment got cut off. There’s even a risk game that has an randomly moving attack base that one can capture, then use stratigicly to do sneak attacks on people. Do some research befor u start to bad mouth a great game.
Thanks for your comment. There may be better updated versions of Risk that I don’t know about, although I think only enhances my primary point. I do not intend to “bad mouth a great game” or argue that some game is inherently better than another, but to make a broader assertion that newer board games have more efficient, creative, and innovative gameplay than older ones. So if there actually are “updated risk games” that overcome some of the shortcomings of the original Risk, that would not surprise me very much, either!