Winning Monopoly Strategies

I’ve always had a simple approach to winning at Monopoly: Buy everything. If you land on it, buy it, period. Mortgage other properties if you have to, but don’t pass up a chance to own more of the very limited real estate available. This is because, in my experience, the person with more board space is most often the winner.

That’s just my strategy for Monopoly, though, and it’s far from perfect. If you’re looking for something a little more comprehensive, Tim Darling has an interesting strategy based on property-specific ROI. There’s some great analysis to back up his conclusions, although his final exception rule (i.e., buy properties to prevent opponents from controlling monopolies) seems like it would reduce his rules to “buy everything.” Nevertheless, I plan to try out his suggestions whenever I can convince my friends and family to play me again (don’t hold your breath…).

If you’re interested in giving this strategy a shot, though, don’t count on being able to play Monopoly online. The old Monopoly sites like Games.com, Hasbro.com, and Atari.com don’t fit the bill anymore, and a few that do make you download and/or pay. The only free, online, multi-player Monopoly site I’ve been able to find that doesn’t look like total spam is this Australian site, and I can’t vouch for its authenticity. If anyone knows where you can still play Monopoly online for free, let me know and I’ll link to it.