 Hi everyone, this is Chih-choo. Welcome to my channel. Now, in a video that we put out a while ago, I showed you guys my board game collection. And from that video, or during that video, I mentioned that there are some of the games that we've played a lot and some of the games that we had sort of come up with our gaming group. We've come up with variant versions of the game. One of the main ones being Axis and Allies, and the other main one being Monopoly. And there was some requests in that video for me to tell you guys what the variant versions of those games are. So I thought I'd start off with Monopoly. That's one of the games we're playing right now. Or we started playing again a lot more because we're coming out of the summer and a lot of people from my gaming group, there were ways. So it was like a basically a three-fourth, well about a three-month hiatus that we hadn't played game and we're starting back up and we're playing Monopoly. And we just had our first game last week and what I ended up doing was writing down the rules of my little notebook. And what I've done is sort of written down, you know, taking some of my notes and written them down for you guys that I want to go through with you. And I've sort of created a table of what the layout of the game is, depending on how many people are playing, okay? So I wanted to, you know, share this with you because it's a brilliant game. For me Monopoly, I don't know if it's the first board game I ever learned how to play, but it's one of the first board games I ever learned how to play. And that was when I was like pre-tween. Like, I don't know how old I was, six, seven, eight years old, we were playing Monopoly. And, you know, we came in and out of the game. We continued to play it during high school times as well, right? But then there's a period where we didn't play. And what happened? Monopoly came back into my life, became sort of a routine, a board game that we I constantly went back to different gaming groups that we had. It sort of came into play basically in the 1990s. In the 1990s, I was playing a lot of board games. Specifically, I was holding game nights at my place. We were playing a lot of poker. Sometimes we had a couple of tables going and we'd play craps as well. I have made, you know, I've shown you guys doing that video. I showed you guys a little craps board game that I craps table, mini craps table that I created. And one of the other games we played was Monopoly. And we wanted to sort of have a break from poker because we played a lot of poker, right? And as you can guess, with poker, the games go fairly rapidly. With craps, the games go fairly rapidly. And we really didn't want to wait until everyone went around the board to be able to buy properties and stuff like that. So what we ended up doing to speed up the Monopoly game was basically deal out the cards. Okay. And what we would end up doing is basically shuffling the cards and then dealing on the mouth, right? And this game became a pretty big routine in our game nights. I don't know if we played it every week because we were basically having poker games where I was holding poker games basically once a week at my place, sometimes more, sometimes less, right? But we were playing Monopoly a fair bit and that sort of became part of my routine with my gaming groups. And, you know, sometimes the gaming groups disappeared and they come back again. And right now, for the last few years, actually, we've had a really nice gaming group within the family. And there's basically about five to six of us avid players and some of the players, some of the people in our main game group, they have other people that want to play as well. So there's a nice mix. There's brown, you know, eight to a maximum of 10 people that are coming in and out of the game with about six people being the core group. And we've been playing Monopoly a lot. We were before the summer and we started back up with Monopoly again. And that's the way we're playing up to speed up the game. So when we're getting together, you know, for an evening of board games for either Monopoly or something else, if we're playing Monopoly, if we play for anywhere between three, four, six, seven hours, in about four hour period, we could probably get in about three Monopoly games. Sometimes we've had up to five games in Monopoly in about a four hour period. So it does speed up the game a fair bit. And just to give you a heads up, there are a couple of variants that you can do with this game as well that we did or played in the 1990s to speed up the games with the group that was coming specifically for poker and crafts and Monopoly would be sort of a side game that we're playing. We wanted to speed it up. So instead of dealing out the cars individually, we would actually deal out sets. And then there's a couple of other rules that we changed in the main game, where sometimes the games of Monopoly would only last a few minutes. And I'll give you guys those variants. It's just three different variants at the end of going through all of these things. Okay. And one thing I'll mention, I wanted to talk about the history of Monopoly, how Monopoly came to be and what was the main purpose of Monopoly and how it's sort of evolved to the state that's in. But I'll skip over those. But basically, the quick version is the game of Monopoly was wasn't called Monopoly at first. It was called something else first. And the person that came up with the game of Monopoly was actually trying to show how our current economic system is dysfunctional, really, when it comes to property, rent, mortgages and all that jazz, right? And it's very interesting. So if you want to know about the history of Monopoly, how it came to be, I highly recommend reading up on it. And you sort of get that feel once you start playing it that for sure, this is, you know, there's only in the limit, there's only one end to the game of Monopoly, which is sort of mimicking our current economic system where basically one person takes everything, right? But as far as a board game goes, it's a brilliant game. It is an absolutely brilliant game. Okay. So let me tell you, you know, the points that I have here, how we go about playing this game, right? So I'm going to, you know, I've created a table and I sort of printed off the table here. And depending on the number of people playing, the float changes. Okay. Now for our group, we're basically, you know, we range, you know, with the people that we're playing, we're getting anywhere between three to six people, usually four to six people playing. Six is sort of our maximum. We haven't played with seven people or haven't played with seven people for a very long time. Six is hitting our maximum. We're trying to get at least four, five, and we're willing to play with three people. Okay. So depending on the number of people you have playing, this is how much money you give out to people. We haven't played with two people in this decade or last couple of decades, but in the 90s we did. While we're waiting, you know, where we showed up early, we'll play some Monopoly while we're waiting for the rest of the group to show up to play poker, to play crafts. Right. So with two people, we're handing out $7,000. There's $7,000 float. So basically each person gets $3,500. Right. With three people, we're kicking it up to $7,500 float. So each person gets $2,500. Four people, there's $8,000. So each person gets $2,000. Five people, you got $8,500. So everyone gets $1,700. Six people, we got $9,000. So each person gets $1,500. Seven people, you got $9,100 that we haven't tried out yet. Each person gets $1,300. With eight people, we got $9,200. And each person gets $1,150. Okay. And that's the float that everybody gets cash up front. Right. So let's assume right now, I might as well sort of do a little experiment. Right. Let's assume right now we're going to play with five people. Okay. So with five people, each person is getting $1,700. Right. So I'm going to deal out $1,700 to each person. It doesn't have to be small bills or anything. Right. Now you don't have to deal this out at first. So, you know, we'll put $1,700 here and let's assume everybody else's got $1,700. And the way we do it usually, we don't hand out the cash. We sort of have a note that everybody's getting $1,700. Okay. What we do now is we deal out the cards. Okay. And what we do, we deal out the cards. We, in general, we roll the dice and whoever has the highest number gets the first card and then we'll go clockwise. Okay. So basically, let's say everybody's rolled and this person, you know, there's five people sitting around the table including myself. Right. And every person is going to get a card. And what we do, we usually shuffle the cards like any game that you're going to do a card game, put it on the table, someone cuts it. Okay. So someone, let's say, has cut the cards and we're going to deal out the cards. So one, two, three, four, five. Right. And we go again. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three. Oh, people don't get enough. Right. So what we do is we go back and in the table, what you'll notice is that I've created, hopefully this is the final version that I'm going to load up, but basically the first column is the number of players. The second column is the money, the float at the beginning of the game. The third column is how much money each person gets. The fourth column is a total amount of worth of property on the table. Okay. Money-wise, value-wise, monopoly money-wise, of course. Right. And the total worth on the table is $5,690. Okay. So if that's the, you know, how much value is on the table in terms of property, and if the total float at the beginning, for example, for two people is $7,000, then there's $1310 free money float around the table that's not tied up in property. Right. With three people, there was $7,500 that were credit that we're giving everybody. And if the table is worth, the properties are worth $5,690, then there's $1810 float money circulating. Right. Right now we're doing it with five people. With five people, we're giving every person $1,700. So there's $8,500 of money value on the table. That's what the game is starting with. Right. And there's still only, or there's still $5,690 in property value. That means free money float that's going around that's going to be available, you know, distributed between everybody is $2,810. Okay. That's how much free floating money is around. That's not tied up in properties. Okay. And there's 28 property cards on the table. And we dealt out basically with five people, every person gets five cards. Right. And that's cards per person. If there's five people playing. And there's three cards that no one has right now. And what happens with these three cards? And these are pretty nice cards. Right. What happens with these three cards? These cards belong to the bank. And you could acquire these cards just like the normal game of Monopoly. Whoever lands there and the card is still available to repurchase the person can purchase it. Okay. That's the way we're starting the game. I wanted to really quickly let you know how that works. Now, what we do after dealing out the cards, right, we count up the value each person counts up how much money they have. Right. So for example, if this is me, these are the properties that I have. Right. I got States Avenue. I got New York. I got Atlantic Avenue. I got Shoreline Railroad. And I got Electric Company. Right. So each person counts up how much money, you know, what properties they have. They count up the value of the property they have. And you subtract that value of the property from the $1,700 you were getting at the beginning. Right. So at the beginning of the game, everybody gets the allowed amount of cards that they have. And then they add up the total value, subtract that from the total money that we're getting at the beginning of the game. Right. So let's do this for myself anyway. Let's say I have these. Right. And usually what we do is we just add up the mortgage values of the properties multiplied by two because that gives the total value of the properties. Right. So right now Shoreline Mortgage is worth $100. Right. Plus Atlantic Avenue is $130. Mortgage $130. Oops. Let's do this again. $100 plus $130 plus New York Avenue Mortgage is $100, $100 plus States Avenue is $70 plus and Electric Company is $75, $75 equals. So that gives me $475 for mortgage. Right. And I multiply this by two times two. That makes it $950. Right. That's how much property value I have. If I was buying it straight out, if we're going around, right. And what I do or what we do, we subtract that from the $1,700 float minus $1,700. That means I get $750 cash. Right. So all we do there is that's the reason we don't really hand out the initial float. Right. $750. So for me, starting this game, I have $750 cash and I have these five properties. Okay. And everybody else does the same thing. Everybody, you know, counts up how much money, you know, the value of the property they have. Right. And subtract that from $1,700. And that's how much money they're starting off with and how many, what properties they have. Right. And this is luck at the draw. Right. Like for example, this set, whoever is sitting here is sitting pretty sweet. Okay. So what I'm going to do now is sort of go through the points that I've laid out here and the odds are we'll probably mention some of the things we're talking that I've already mentioned before we're going to read through some of that stuff again. I just wanted to give you guys a quick little lowdown of how this game, game is played and we'll get into the little intricacies right now as we're reading these things. Okay. Now, as far as the game of Monopoly is concerned, okay. The objective of the game of Monopoly is to basically own everything. Right. You want to conquer the board. That's the name of the game for Monopoly. And the main strategy you're going to use for this game is basically you're going to wheel and deal and bankrupt as many people as you can. So this is the way we play. Right. And I've covered some of the stuff in the initial intro to this thing. So number one, shuffle cars before dealing. Number two, roll the dice to see who gets first card. Right. Usually the highest. Deal cars clockwise, one card at a time. Okay. Cars must be distributed evenly, i.e. everyone must have the same number of cars, which is what we did. Everyone had the same number of cars with DeltaMelt. Extra cars are held by the bank until someone purchases them during regular play, which is right now we got these three being held by the bank. And if anybody lands there first, if they want to buy them or if they're available to be bought, they can buy them. Right. If available for purchase, person landing on the property can choose to do so. Right. Pay for your properties, which is what I did. I paid for mine and have $750 left. You may have to mortgage what you have already paid for to raise enough funds to pay for your property. And this comes into play when you have, you know, sometimes, sometimes when you're dealing at the cards, one person gets all the expensive cards. Right. Sometimes what we do, we vary the amount of money that's in the table, the money at the beginning. So with the table, for column two, sometimes we reduce the amount of float on the table, how much money we're purting into circulation. And if that happens, we've had the situation where in the past, where someone's getting, you know, two or three greens, two greens in a blue, that's a lot of money. Right. Me, you know, it's lucky for them to get a monopoly if you get three greens. Right. Green colors, but that's very expensive. If you get three of those things, that's $920 right off the bat. Right. And if we decrease the amount of money available to each person, sometimes they don't have enough money to pay for the property. So what they end up, end up having to do is whatever they paid for, they can mortgage it and use that money to pay for the rest of the property that they're getting that they're being dealt out. Okay. Available, pay for your property, mortgage. Point number four, after everything's been dealt out, the money's been dealt out, everybody knows what everybody has with cards and money. You can't hide how much money you have. Okay. In monopoly, in the game we play, you might want to vary it that people can hide the amount of money they have, but money doesn't leave the table as far as we're concerned because if there's money in the pot to be won, real money in the pot to be won or anything that has a certain weight that people don't want to risk losing. Right. You can't have money leaving the table. It's like poker. You can't have money leaving the table because if money is coming out from a pocket, from under something, then they might be a mistake where extra money is appearing in the game. Right. And you don't want to take that risk. So to make sure everybody's staying honest, money stays on the table. And what we do after everything's dealt out, you've, you know, got your money back, how much, whatever cash you have left, what we end up doing, we call this the wheel and deal segment. Right. This may take a few minutes. Try to get your hands on sets. Sometimes the deals are one-on-one. Sometimes it's multiple multiplayer deals. Sometimes it's the whole table. Okay. And that's point number four. And if we look at this right now, right. So for example, my cards are these. Right. So ideally the orange, I think everyone agrees, orange is the best set to have. Right. And let's see who has what properties. Now this turned out a little wacko because no one has the possibility. No one's got doubles right now. Sometimes, you know, sometimes that happens. If you look at the rest of people's cards, sometimes that happens where no one's got doubles or anything. The only possibility of one trade to make a monopoly is just for boardwalk and park place and Mediterranean and Baltic, the ones that only have twos. Right. Or, you know, even the railroads got split up. Right. So basically what we end up doing is we look at each other's cars and try to make deals. Sometimes the deals happen very fast. Right. Someone talks to someone else and says, Oh, I'll give you this for this. I'll give you this for this. You know, they have a trade going just between the both of them and they do the trade. And that sort of forces everyone else to compromise and do trades. Sometimes the trades are between three people. Sometimes between four. Sometimes it's the whole board doing a trade. And we've had that happen. And what we end up doing is we say, you know, we sort of say, okay, someone's going to get the orange set. Someone's going to get the red set, the yellow, the greens or whatever it is. Right. And as long as everyone agrees on the distribution of what the sets are, then what we've sometimes done and what we did in the last game where we had two people make a trade and then there was a four-way deal happening, everyone agreed what certain set, what the distribution was going to be. And what we decided to do was whoever had the highest value properties, because everyone starts off with the same amount of money, right? So money can't come into play, but it's properties that matter as a monopoly, right? Money as well, but properties is huge. So whoever had the most valuable set of properties, they decided to take whatever set that was on the table. Right. Now, as you can tell, this part of the game can be quite tricky. Okay. So bad blood can't come into play. Sometimes bad blood carries over from previous games. Okay. So I won't go into how the deals can be made and stuff like this. I'll leave that up to you if you just do decide to play this game, but certain things have more worth than others. Okay. Let's just leave it at that. After all deals are done, and sometimes there are no deals, sometimes one person's holding, for example, this whole person's locking up five different sets, five different monopolies, right? If they don't want a deal, the odds of a deal going through between everybody is very low. Sometimes two people can make a deal, and that'll force that person to start making a deal if they don't want to make a deal yet. But basically, a deal doesn't have to be made. Monopolies don't have to be had, right? Some people can decide to lock up the thing and say, let's roll to see what happens, right? Maybe they want to see if they can get their hands on one of these, right? Because if someone on the board right now has any doubles of these, if they can get their hands, if they're lucky enough to land on these things, be the first person to land on them and buy them, then they have a monopoly. They really don't have to make a deal, right? They can lock up some sets and try to build on whatever they acquired, right? So after all the dealing is done, we roll the dice again. The person who ended up getting the first card dealt to them, that's not a huge advantage, right? But that person doesn't get to go first. We roll the dice again and usually the highest, they get to go first and then we'll go clockwise. And going first in this game is very important. Okay, if you can do it. Point number six, and that's the fifth point I have, right? We're all to see who goes first. Point number six, let me read it to you. You must go completely around once. Go once around the board to be able to build on your properties, okay? Going directly to jail does not count as one rotation. Any movement due to chance, community chest or community chest cars counts as movement around the board. So the name of the game is this. Once you decide who's going first, we start rolling. When you're moving around the board, if you have a set, you can't build on that set until you've gone around once and landing on goal counts as going around once. So if you've landed on goal, then before the beginning of your next turn you can build and that's the way we play. You can't build in the middle of someone else's turn. You can't build at the end of your turn. You have to be able, you have to build at the beginning of your turn, right? So if you're going to build houses or hotels, hotels or whatever it is, any buildings on your property, you have to do it at the beginning of your turn. So if you've gone around once and landed on goal, before you roll, you're allowed to build, okay? No one can build until they've gone around once. If they're going around and they land in chance and community chest or land in go to jail, they go to jail. They haven't gone around goal. They have to start from here again and go around goal. Going to jail on the first round puts you at a huge disadvantage. If you get a chance card or community chest that says advanced to go or advanced to St. Charles or something else and that gets you going around goal once, you're at a huge advantage because you can build before anyone else. Okay, keep that in mind. That's very, very important. And one thing we do for our game, I don't know if this is in the actual rules, but if you end up in your turn, if you're rolling, if you roll three doubles in a row, you go directly to jail, right? So on the first double, you go to where you're going, you do what you need to do, right? If you roll again, you get a double, you go to where you're going, you do what you need to do. On the third roll, if you get a double, you go directly to jail. That's speeding, right? You don't land in the third spot, do what you need to do and then go to jail. You go directly to jail. Okay, keep that in mind as well. So that was 0.6, 0.7. I know a lot of people don't do this, but we do because we like to speed up the game to a certain degree. We like to get as many games as we can in the night, right? So point number seven, any taxes or fines collected through chance or community cards and interest paid on un-mortgaging property, which is 10%, right? So shoreline, if it was mortgaged, if I mortgaged it, if I want to un-mortgage it, I don't pay just $100, I pay $110. The $100 goes to the bank and the $10 goes in the middle of the board, okay? And whoever lands in parking gets whatever money is in the board, okay, in the middle of the board. So any taxes that are being collected, any fines that are being paid, any extra mortgage tax, interest that you have to pay the bank, okay, goes in the middle of the board and whoever lands in free parking gets that. And then there's nothing in there and it builds up again, right? Point number eight, when in bankruptcy, you cannot wheel and deal. You must pay your creditor or forfeit everything to the person you owe money to. All property must be mortgaged before the handover, okay? This is important. And we brought this rule into the game because what was happening was people were, you know, over-leveraging, right? They were, you know, rolling the dice, trying their like, landing in property that they couldn't pay anything. And then they would auction off a property that somebody wanted and try to get money for that. So what we've done is you can wheel and deal anytime during the game. We get to it, but you can't hold up the game. If it's your turn to roll the dice, you can't put the dice down and say, I want to make a deal, I want to propose a deal. Your proposals of deals must be done when it's not your turn to roll the dice, okay? There is pauses between people rolling, you know, it's a social game, you talk, but we specifically brought on that rule as well because some people were holding up the game, right? So as far as the bankrupt season is concerned, let's say I've, you know, let's say I've only got shoreline that's not mortgaged. Everything else is mortgaged and I have $50 cash, right? If I land somewhere, let's say somebody's got three of the railroads, right? Actually, that's not going to work. Let's say someone's got, you know, built hotels or something and I land somewhere that I have to pay $200 in fines, right? One property on Boardwalk, one house on Boardwalk is $200, right? So let's say somebody's built one house on Boardwalk, one house on Park Place and I land there and it's a $200 fine, right? I've got $50 cash. Now I can't make a deal with anyone because I need to make a payment. I have $50 cash. Shoreline, I mortgage this as $100, right? So that gives me $150. The payment is $200. I'm bankrupt. I have to hand over everything and if anything's not on mortgage, it has to become mortgage, you mortgage everything and I pass it on to whoever I owe the money to, right? Even if you have enough money to pay, right, and you don't want to mortgage anything or if you don't, you know, you have houses or hotels on your property that you don't want to sell at half price, right? Because if you have houses built or hotels built, if you need the money, you need to take them down. You don't get full value for those. You get half value. If I want to take houses or hotels down, I don't want to do that if I owe someone money. I still can't make a deal with anyone, okay? Until I make my debt payment, right? That means I'm forced to sell my houses and hotels at half price. Very important rule. It keeps things honest, okay? And that's point number. Which one is it? Taxpayers. If a bankruptcy occurs, money owing, that's it. That's point number eight, right? So keep that in mind. You should leave yourself unless you're doing, you know, Hail Mary, right? Luck of the draw. Sometimes you need to do that. You should keep some kind of flow to be able to pay at least a minimum you need to pay without having to go into bankruptcy or sell your houses and hotels at half price, okay? And there's no, by the way, in the deal making, there's no deal making to allow people to land free on your property, okay? So for example, if I'm going into a danger zone where there's hotels and houses built and I don't have enough, you know, I want to build some hotels and houses and I don't have enough fun to pay the rent that I might land on them, I can't go to someone and say, hey, I'll let you land on my property once for free if you give me $300. It doesn't work that way, okay? You can't pre-sell any rental that you might be collecting later, okay? Point number nine, if a bankruptcy occurs due to money owing to the bank, then the bank acquires all the property. If mortgage, they will now, they will now be un-mortgage and they will be available for purchase during regular play. So let's assume, you know, I landed somewhere, the maximum I could do was mortgage everything and, you know, to the last dollar, I had to give my money to someone else, right? So right now, I would have all these properties mortgaged and I would no cash. Now, before it gets to my turn, I could go, you know what, I don't want to go bankrupt. I could sell my mortgage property to someone. I could make a deal to someone to get some kind of float happening, right? But if no one wants to buy my property, I can't generate any funds and I go to my next turn having to roll the dice and even if I pick up, I believe it's a chance that has, you know, the $15 tax or it might be community just that has the $15 tax you have to pay the bank and I don't have that $15. I go bankrupt, all the property goes to the bank and it becomes automatically un-mortgaged and it's available for people to buy just like regular play, okay? That's very important as well. Point number 10, the person that is rolling the dice cannot hold up the game to make a deal. Players should be trying to make deals before it is their turn to roll the dice, right? And that goes back to the point that I made that if it's my turn to roll the dice, right? I can't put the dice down and say, okay, hold up every one. I want to make a deal, right? Because what happens if my deal is only with one other person? That means if there's five of us playing, there's three people on the table right now that are going to sit idly by. They don't have any deals to make, so I'm holding up the game, right? Even if there's a deal being made between four of us and one person is left out, that person can say, no, roll the dice. You can't make a deal without that person sitting out, right? So there is no making deals when you're holding up the game, right? If everybody agrees, if all five people say, okay, you can make a deal, let's make a deal, blah, blah, blah, then you can go ahead. If one person says no, then I have to roll the dice and play my game and then once it's not my turn to roll the dice, then I can make a deal, right? I can propose to make a deal with whoever it was I was trying to make a deal with or more than one person I was trying to make a deal with, okay? That's pretty important because you really, you know, we've had situations where people are desperate, so they try to hold up the game a little bit and again this thing can get a little intense dispersion of the game because it is quite rapid and usually one thing we don't do is, you know, if I roll the dice, the other person doesn't automatically pick up the dice and roll right away, right? Not, you know, not leaving just two seconds between them. You should shake the dice a little bit, give a little transition from one person to another. Sometimes we've had a little, you know, running it on a little time. If there's deals being made, we put a sort of a time frame on it. Sometimes we say, you know, you have to announce that you're going to roll the dice, that way everyone takes a look to see what's happening, okay? So keep that in mind. This is, it is still a social game, so you don't really want to, these rules are flexible, but one of the ones we've found that really improves the game is if it's my turn to roll the dice, I can't put the dice down and say I want to make a deal with this one person or these two people because it leaves a couple of people out of the game. It stops the flow of the game, right? Point number 11, no rolling dice if there's payment in progress on the board, right? Let's say someone before me rolled the dice, they landed somewhere and have to pay someone else, right? I can't take this and roll the dice, right? That payment, the transactions must be finished because that, you know, when I roll the dice, if I land somewhere, maybe I'm landing in the property of one of the people making a deal, then they won't notice, if that's an important deal, they may not notice, they might not have enough time to realize that I've landed in the property and they can't collect the rent, right? So you want to give people ample time to be able to, you know, play the game properly. You don't want to scam anyone. We don't want this game to be, you know, get into a shouting match, right? Everything you want to keep social, okay? Point number 12, there has got to be enough time between turns to allow people to react, which is what we just talked about. This may be based on time, five to ten seconds, announcements that someone is rolling the dice, a few shakes of the dice or whatever it is, right? You go like this, give it a little shake. And what happens is, what we've been telling everybody is, you hear this, someone's about to roll, you hear that, someone's rolled, take a look on the table, no matter what you're doing, take a look on the table, figure out what the moment is where people have gone, right? You know, really appreciate where someone has gone. If they're coming close to your property and it's your turn to roll, you may want to build there, right? If everybody's already passed your property and there's no chance for community cars to get them closer to your property, right? Maybe you want to hold off on rolling because you might be going somewhere to a dangerous zone, right? So listen for the sound of dice rolling. Someone's rolled, someone's about to move, they may be landing in your property, do you want to collect your rent, right? The game might be changing, they may be landing somewhere else where they're going to go bankrupt, right? They might have landed in free parking and collecting a lot of loot, right? They may be going to jail, they may be getting a chance card and that's going to give them a movement that might take them to your property, okay? Point number 13. Once you hear the dice roll, it is your responsibility to keep track of what has occurred, really. Keep that in mind. Some people complain when we've played this game that no one told them, you know, someone had landed in their property or no one told them that this or that or this or whatever, right? It's no one's responsibility to keep you updated to what's going on on the game. You hear the dice roll, look on the table, track people. Point number 14, this is important, okay? If you rat someone out, you must pay half their rent, okay? Sometimes it happens by accident. Someone goes, oh, whose property is that? Something like this. If that happens every round, that person is going to have to pay half their rent, okay? So number 14, if you rat someone else, someone out, you must pay half their rent, i.e., it is the responsibility of the owner of a property to request rent for that property, not anyone else, right? Because sometimes people want to cause a little damage to another player because by causing a little damage, they might be selling houses or hotels somewhere else that the other person might be going into, right? The danger zone they might be going into, right? And if you decide to do that, they may take a hit, but you all, you're also taking a hit if you're ratting someone else, someone else, right? Point number 15, dice tills are acceptable as a role just like craps. However, if the majority of the players agree that it is too close to call, i.e., the tilt is too much, they must request a re-roll. And this basically happens with money on the table in general, right? So if there's money on the table, sometimes the stack gets a little high, right? If no one's landed in free parking for a while, if the dice lands sideways, right? That's acceptable as long as you know if the money was removed, this thing's going to drop to whatever it is. Sometimes the cards aren't put back properly, and the dice lands sideways. Sometimes it's too much, right? Sometimes it's like this. I'm not sure if you can see that, but that angle is almost halfway between. And if the majority say that has to be a re-roll, it's a re-roll, okay? The other thing we do is, the dice have to land on the board. If they land off the board, on the table, no roll. If they're partially off the table, no roll. The dice have to be completely on the table. On the cards is allowed. On the money, it's allowed. On property, cards is allowed if someone's left them on the table, but off the board is not allowed. Number 16, dice must land on the board to be counted. And that's the way we play. You don't have to play that way. Sometimes we've had the board, you know, the cover of the board sitting by the side and everybody rolls on the board, or I saw it contained. It works fine, but sometimes we've had, you know, people passing over the box, the cover for the box, and there's, you know, spillage and things get thrown out and stuff like that. So we've decided to keep it. The dice have to be on the board, okay? Number 17, rent can be collected in jail, okay? So that basically means if you've finished, if you've gone around the board once, going to jail on the first round puts you at a huge disadvantage. But if you've already gone around the board once, jail becomes a safe haven, okay? You can collect rent there. And the way we play for jail, you still roll your turn. If you get a double, you're automatically out. If you don't get a double, you're not out if you want to stay in jail. On the third roll, you still roll, if you get a double, you're out and you don't have to pay the fine. But if on the third roll, you don't get a double, you automatically have to come out and it's a $50 fine to come out, right? And if you're in bank, you know, you don't have the $50 to get out of jail, then you're bankrupt to the bank, okay? So you still have to pay the $50 to get out of jail if you don't get any doubles. And you can leave jail anytime you want. If you want to leave on the first round, you pay $50 and you roll the dice, you're out, okay? Point number 18, and this is the last point for the regular game. You can only build as many houses and hotels that the market can absorb, okay? As many as there are. There are 32 houses and there are 12 hotels. You can't build more than that. More than that cannot be on the table at one point, okay? If there are no houses or hotels available to be built, you cannot build unless you are dismantling buildings on another property you own, right? So if I want to build on the light blues and I have the purpose here, right? And there isn't enough houses or hotels for me to build here. If I want to build houses or hotels, then I can sell these ones. I do sell them at half price, make them available and buy them back again and build them there, okay? But if all the houses and hotels are used up, then I can't build any more houses or hotels. If all the houses are gone and there's only hotels available, then I would have to automatically kick it up to hotel level. I can't go halfway, right? And that sort of burns people that own expensive property, okay? One efficient, and I'll give you one strategy that people do. One efficient strategy is to build only houses, possibly preventing someone else from building, okay? So for example, if there's 32 houses available and if you have two sets of monopolies, let's say you have the purples and the light blues, right? What you might want to do is not build hotels in these, but build four houses in each, right? If you do that, that's five properties, five times four, that's 20 houses. So if you've locked up 20 houses and the rest of the players only have 12 houses to play with, right? And this only works for a certain period of time, because once hotels come to play, you probably have to kick it up to hotel mode, right? If you're going to afford it. And those are the main rules that we have when we play Monopoly. There's a lot of different things happen. Sometimes people get angry, sometimes people get loud, sometimes people give up, okay? It can get heated. The last thing I'll point out is there's variants to this that we've played before. The first variant is from the table, right? Where we have the number of players, the money at start, money per person and all that jazz. What we've also done is change the amount of money float on the table, right? If you increase the funds, then people can build faster, right? And that tends to speed up the game. If you reduce the fund, that sort of slows down the game, right? Right now our happy place with our group, with four people, we get $8,000 to play with. And then you have to pay for your property and stuff like this. And with five people, we've had 8,500, with six people, we've got 9,000, okay? We're doing $9,000 so every person gets $1,500. But you can vary that. Decide with your group how you want to play, okay? The second variant is, you know, I talked about at the beginning, you can deal out sets instead of cards and that really speeds up the game. Sometimes people decide to trade sets as well, right? If there isn't too many people around, too many people playing the game. If there's three people playing the game, you know, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine with the rare rose. You really don't count waterworks and electric companies as a set, but they are, right? So you can start trading sets if you want. So you can deal out sets instead of cards. And the way we deal out sets, we just take one color from each one and just deal out that and whoever gets whatever color they got, they get that set, okay? The other variant that we've done, we haven't done this, I haven't done this for a long time, okay? The only time we played this variant was when I was holding games at my house, poker games, craps games, and monopoly games, right? And the reason we did that is we wanted to speed up the game a lot. And this speeds up the game a lot. And the variant is this, you can build at the start, okay? You don't have to go around once. No need to go around one full rotation before building phase. And the note I have here is obviously person going first will have a major advantage. With this variant, sometimes the games last only a few minutes. Really, sometimes the games last only a few minutes, right? We do everything else that's the same, you know, deal out them, you know, figure out how many people are playing, how much money is in play. We deal out the cards, pay for our cards. And as you can tell, as soon as all the deals are made, then we roll the dice again to see who goes first. That part becomes seriously important in this variant, where whoever gets to go first, you can build right off the bat. And just imagine if you had the light blues, the purples, or the oranges, right? If you could build first, huge advantage, huge advantage. And we did this, we did this for a fair bit back in the day, okay? So keep that in mind, okay? It, the game can change. The game varies a lot. Every game is very unique. I've played multiple games. We've played multiple games of Monopoly in this way. And it hasn't got boring yet. And for me, it's been 30 years, 25 plus years of doing this, almost 30 years of doing this, and still enjoy it very, very much. It's a fantastic game, okay? And it speeds it up. You can get more Monopoly games, more games in per night with the group that you're playing, okay? And that's, you know, one variant of one of the board games that we do. There are other, you know, for different board games, there are other variants specifically for axes and allies. That's the one we play a lot, the variant game that we play. We have tried some of the other board games as well, but none of them stuck. It's basically axes and allies and Monopoly that we've sort of, I don't want to say graduated, but we've kicked it up to a level that we're just playing variants now. Our variants sometimes we switch off the rules and it's a lot of fun. And if you're doing that, playing this game like this, I hope you enjoy. And if you enjoy it a lot, please leave a comment. If you have any additional rules to what I've laid out right now that you think might improve the game, might give it a little bit more spice, please leave a comment and we'll try it out with our group as well and see how it goes. Okay. That's about it. I hope you enjoy and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye for now.