
Monopoly as a Markov Chain - cantdutchthis
http://koaning.io/monopoly-simulations.html
======
hermanschaaf
A very interesting little experiment! Based off this, the author notes that
the orange streets will provide a steady stream of income, and this is useful
information.

But the trick in Monopoly is to get hotels on your properties as quickly as
possible, because this not only provides you with a revenue stream (and
fastest return on investment), but also takes money away from your
competitors, who would have used it to buy/upgrade their own properties. An
important factor is therefore how quickly you can acquire all the streets in a
block so you can start putting up hotels, and p * rent of a single street is
only one part of that equation.

~~~
blowski
Instead of hotels, put 4 houses as quickly as possible so there are no houses
left for other people to build. Only upgrade to hotels when you can afford to
put the houses that will become available onto another of your properties.
Other people's sets are worthless to them if you own all the houses.

Combine this strategy with the fact that the highest ROI on most properties is
3 houses, and you have a winning strategy against most non-experts.

1\. Do whatever it takes to get cheap sets (other than risking somebody else
getting the red or orange set). This is where blues and purples are very
useful.

2\. Put as many houses as you can as quickly as possible.

3\. Wait for desperate people to trade with you to get the oranges or reds.

4\. Spread your houses across the sets you own with 3 on each property,
prioritising the reds and oranges.

NB - nobody likes me at Christmas.

~~~
jon-wood
That last line is the rub here. I used to play Monopoly as if my life depended
on it. Now I don't, because no one will play Monopoly against me anymore.

~~~
DanBC
Monopoly requires player elimination. That's seen as "mean", whereas winning
isn't seen as mean. That's the main reason Monopoly isn't a good game. The
other reason is that people have house rules, which often have the effect of
reducing the risk of player elimination, which then increases the playtime to
stupid lengths.

There are a bunch of great, easy to understand, easy to play games that are
much better.

(HN search might find a few, there have been several threads before. Board
Game Geek tends to skew toward the more complex end, but there's probably good
lists of great family games.)

~~~
blowski
There are some interesting variations of the game, using a standard Monopoly
set. One I've seen allowed things like Lynch Mobs - if enough of the players
agree, they can send someone to prison, remove their assets, or even eject
them from the game. You could also institute a rule like "90% tax on cash
holdings" or "those with assets under $200 receive an extra $1000 when they
pass Go". It sort of combined Werewolf with Monopoly, because it required more
skill at the human level to persuade your fellow players to vote with you.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Sounds like "Monopoly: Regulatory Capture Edition".

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cantdutchthis
hi all, glad to hear you guys like it. im the guy that wrote that post, didnt
imagine that it might be trending.

some of the comments here are indeed very valid. the fact that you can push
all the houses to your deeds actually might make it more interesting to push
for the the cheap investment places that otherwise don't give too much of a
return.

my main goal was to figure out which house yields the best return on
investment. which was a problem that had been bugging the back of my mind for
a while.

ill add strategies that ive missed and give credit to it when i recheck the
blog for spelling.

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toolslive
This is also solves project Euler assignment 84.

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iraphael
Another cool article from this website: [http://koaning.io/canvas-trees-and-
communities.html](http://koaning.io/canvas-trees-and-communities.html)

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admiralpumpkin
A comment on the display of the data: more decimals don't make your results
look better.

Only show a relevant number of decimal places. In the case of this data most
of it needed 0 to 2 decimal places.

~~~
cantdutchthis
fair enough. the reason why there were so many numbers was lazyness, i just
copied the R output directly.

~~~
admiralpumpkin
options(digits = 3) is our friend. :-)

___

Also I should have said, "nice simulation!" instead of just nitpicking.

~~~
cantdutchthis
no worries. this way i've learned something. +1

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takk309
I have read about some of this before in the book "Luck, Logic, and White
Lies: The Mathematics of Games"

[https://www.crcpress.com/Luck-Logic-and-White-Lies-The-
Mathe...](https://www.crcpress.com/Luck-Logic-and-White-Lies-The-Mathematics-
of-Games/Bewersdorff/9781568812106)

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DenTheRed
I was playing around with this Java simulation recently that does include
Chance and Community Chest cards
[http://tesuji.org/monopoly.html](http://tesuji.org/monopoly.html)

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mizzao
Not to nitpick, but it seems like what you did would have been much more
suited for an IPython (Jupyter) notebook directly outputting with matplotlib
rather than writing Python code to generate data for R?

~~~
cantdutchthis
out of curiosity, how many lines of code do you need in matplotlib to generate
[http://koaning.io/theme/images/monopoly_plot3.png](http://koaning.io/theme/images/monopoly_plot3.png)?
in R, you'll only need one. also i have done this work in a python notebook,
you can specify R cells to take pandas dataframes allowing you to still use
ggplot2 for plotting. see old video of mine:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW8Aei2wlsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW8Aei2wlsM)

~~~
rrggrr
Using the Python Seaborn library one line sounds about right:

[http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/examples/scatt...](http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/examples/scatterplot_matrix.html)

~~~
cantdutchthis
thats not a facet grid though, in a facet grid you'll have split data across
different cells. this is a cross plot across 4 columns. i did find this tho:
[http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/examples/facet...](http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/examples/faceted_histogram.html)

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edem
"players can go bankrupt" is listed twice at the end.

