Monopoly: Is It a Cornerstone of Games?

Monopoly this year has hit it’s 86^th birthday. The game has been a titan of board games since its initial publishing by Parker Brothers in 1935. However, as the board games industry has started to regrow and new, arguably better games are now seeing mass publishing, why does Monopoly still hold a shelf space in everyone’s home? This paper will address how the game has adapted for new generations- whether by design or by its publishers. It will address the history, the media, its competitors and how everything has played and still plays a role in how the game is perceived and often, hated.

By interviewing people from different generations, this project will cover a range of different topics including the amount of sets players have owned, asking about their ideas of the rules and how they feel when they play the game. I will be asking publishers of Monopoly related media about the amount of content they produce, how long they produce merchandise for and how they alter it as time progresses.

I believe that my answers will point towards most people not knowing the difference between house and standard rules. I think that most people will own about 2 editions, 1 original set and 1 themed/alternative version. I think that people continue to play the game due to its simplicity and that they “know” the rules, despite that they will have had disagreements with other households about the rules- sometimes even their own families. Publishers will not have complete lists of the Monopoly sets that they have and nor the media they have produced.

Monopoly will continue to have many more sets created, these will include sets that are purely themed on brands and others that update the ruleset to change up the game. Publishers have been creating branded sets regularly since 1990 and have shown no sign of stopping. These sets coincide with the concept of the game and the values that it teaches the players. These are forever drilled into the mindset of humans; the ability to own something, invest and nurture to reap a further reward are instilled in us, not only by this game but by our parents, society and games as a whole. It is hard to not see that the game will continue to be a cornerstone of the board games industry.

The game has remained almost the exact same since its inception except for the addition of the Speed Die. The publishers would not risk altering the standard edition- by doing so, they risk alienating the generations before that passed down their knowledge of the iconic board game.  By negatively changing core values and challenging how players look at the game, the game moved away from its roots and alienated their market. However, editions such as Cheater’s and Longest Game Ever were praised for accentuating the core values in positive ways.