
The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly: 21 Seconds - barredo
http://scatter.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/the-shortest-possible-game-of-monopoly-21-seconds/#
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jerf
"Whenever you land on an unowned property you may buy that property from the
Bank at its printed price. You receive the Title Deed card showing ownership.
Place the title deed card face up in front of you. If you do not wish to buy
the property, the Bank sells it at through an auction to the highest bidder.
The high bidder pays the Bank the amount of the bid in cash and receives the
Title Deed card for that property." -
[http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm#buyingproper...](http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm#buyingproperty)

Player 1 lands on two properties, but this auction does not occur.

This can easily be solved by simply saying "'no auction' house rule". Few
people actually honor this rule anyhow. I don't object, I don't think it's a
very good rule either. (Then again, I don't think it's a very good _game_ , so
my opinion may be suspect.) The biggest problem is the word "auction" is
underspecified; it could mean many things and you'll spend more time arguing
over it than playing if you try to take this seriously.

I have found it remarkable how few people play by the actual rules, and how
few people realize they are not playing by the actual rules. Including some
people who claim to hate the game because they are not following the rules.
(Often this revolves around not using timers which the rules will often
explicitly mention; my version of Scrabble does, for instance, though the
online rules I find do not.)

~~~
jluxenberg
Easily fixed: the auction does occur, but no one bids on the properties.

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jerf
I have seen it argued that sells at auction does not admit the possibility of
not selling it. I do not remember if that was tournament rules or not. You can
then buy it for a dollar, if you like, it won't change the results.

If you're going to rules lawyer, you gotta do it all _proper_ like.

I'm not arguing this will necessarily make the game any longer, I'm just
saying this isn't a by-the-actual-rules game. It shares this in common with
probably 99%+ of all games of Monopoly that are played.

It is not uncommon for games to fail to cover cases in the rules, such as
nobody even bidding a dollar for property in Monopoly. Jenga sort of crashes
if you get the game into a state where there are no more levels with removable
pieces, or at least strictly read mandates that the next person to move is a
loser, which is an undesirable outcome.

~~~
sh1mmer
Using an auction maybe you could make the game shorter by getting player 2 to
buy properties, thus loosing money, so when he lands on something player 1
buys she has none left.

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jerhinesmith
Couldn't this game theoretically be over much faster?

From
[http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/en_US/discover/strategy/rules...](http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/en_US/discover/strategy/rules.cfm#buy)

    
    
      Whenever a player lands on an unowned MONOPOLY property he may buy that property
      from the Bank at its printed price. He receives the Title Deed card showing 
      ownership and places it face-up in front of him.
    
      If he does not wish to buy the MONOPOLY property it is sold at auction by the 
      Banker to the highest bidder. The buyer pays to the Bank the amount of the bid
      in cash and receives the Title Deed card for that property. Any player,
      including the one who declined the option of buying it at the printed price,
      may bid. Bidding may start at any price.
    

This article doesn't seem to be following the official rules (at least,
according to the multiple "Action: None"s scattered throughout).

Faster variation:

 _Player 1_ : Rolls a number causing him to land on ANY property. Declines to
purchase, but bids the price up such that Player 2 receives the deed but pays
all of his money.

 _Player 2_ : Lands on community chest, has to pay some amount of money
greater than the mortgaged value of property received on last play, goes
bankrupt.

Am I missing something?

~~~
what
This is also brought up in the comments of the article itself. Yes, the game
could be over in fewer turns/dice rolls this way. But then, would someone
really pay that much for the property at auction? Maybe not.

~~~
jerhinesmith
Agreed, but we are talking about the shortest _theoretically possible_ game
anyway, so might as well put all options on the table.

One could argue that rolling doubles 5 times in the first 7 roles is just as
unlikely. :)

~~~
what
Ah, right. My thinking was that in the scenario proposed in the article, it
doesn't matter what player 2 does (apart from the dice rolls, which is beyond
their control anyway) they'll still lose. You only have to control the actions
of player 1. While in the auction scenario you need to control both players to
make it work. So if you were actually playing as player 1 and all the dice
rolls lined up, you would only be guaranteed to pull off the scenario in the
article. But I guess it doesn't matter since both scenarios are theoretically
possible.

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BrianHV
There's a tool-assisted speedrun of Monopoly for the NES that takes a
different approach than the one described in this page:

<http://tasvideos.org/520M.html>

~~~
Natsu
Oddly enough, I came to post exactly that. To spare anyone having to hunt up
the obsoleted movie to find the strategy (which hasn't changed in the newest
movie, which merely improves luck manipulation), here's a link to their
strategy which tells you all the rolls they used:
<http://tasvideos.org/988S.html>

Actually, there were two routes and the one that would, in theory, be faster
ended up being slower because they would have been forced to wait too long for
the dice to hit the right numbers. Lest you think that's easy, I suggest
looking up the TAS of the Shining Force games. The videos are incredibly
boring. The interesting part are the complex process they've gone through to
disassemble the random number routines and manipulate them to their benefit.
They actually have complex programs in Lua, Matlab or possibly a few other
things to optimize the randomness for them, which are pretty crazy.

One such discussion of the complex end of luck manipulation can be found here:
<http://tasvideos.org/2258S.html>

And the scripts it mentioned are in the forums proper. There may be more (I
haven't read the whole thread), but a lot of them can be found here if anyone
is interested:

[http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1759&postdays...](http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1759&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=160&sid=37a9886c0fd9bd1281a3a230bdfc8d8c)

It's a LOT more involved than you might expect.

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leelin
The article itself is quite interesting, but I almost skipped the video, which
is at least as amusing! It was worth the watch.

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barredo
Does monopoly has a set of notations like Chess for game tracking?

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veqon
Shortest game I ever played was less than 3 minutes. On my first turn I bought
St. Charles Place. On the other player's first turn he bought on of the light
blue properties. On my second turn I bought Virginia. On the other player's
second turn he bought States Ave. I mortgaged my 2 properties and traded him
them for his one property and all his cash. On his next turn he landed on
Community Chest and couldn't pay the school fees.

~~~
DLWormwood
While I could see why you'd offer the deal (he wouldn't be able to build on
his new monopoly until he passed Go a couple times to unhock), I'm not sure
why he'd take it. I would think he'd know that being out of cash would keep
him from getting any new properties for a long time...

You did make sure he had the money to pay the 10% interest fee on transfer,
right?

~~~
veqon
Yes he paid the 10%. He likes to play with rules I don't like: Free Parking
pot, double money for landing on Go, and no even build rule. So he may have
been lucky and I may have been unlucky. He took a chance and it could have
paid off for him. Either way it was probably going to be a short game.

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cawhitworth
I found this article completely incomprehensible until I remembered that
Monopoly is localised. Park Place? Boardwalk? You mean Park Lane and Mayfair,
surely? :)

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bendm
A shorter way would be for one player to buy a property then have another
player trade all his money for it. Then that player would have to mortgage the
property. Then they would get a community chest that makes them lose more
money than the mortgage value. This would take only 2 turns.

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tmsh
another solution (i think)

player 1

    
    
      1, 1 --> community chest, collect 200
      4, 4 --> lands on jail, just visiting
      2, 4 --> purchases st. james
    

player 2

    
    
      2, 2 --> -150 from income tax
      3, 7 --> lands on virginia avenue
    

player 1

    
    
      1,1 --> purchase tennesse
      2,2 --> chance (go to new york), purchase new york
      purchase 3, 3, 4 houses (costs 1000)
    

player 2

    
    
      1,1 -- lands on st. james, pay -550
      1,2 -- lands on new york avenue, pay -800
    
      GAME OVER
    
    

shit, this is a hard game...have spent the past half hour going for sub-seven
moves...anyway

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cloudkj
If you can enumerate all the rules, properties, cards, etc., it seems to me
the shortest game problem can be solved with dynamic programming. :)

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pkulak
Why buy Park Place?

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jerhinesmith
You have to own all of one color before you can put houses/hotels on them.

~~~
pkulak
Oh yeah! It's been a while since I've played.

