@frimmel:
That is exactly the biggest problem with Monopoly. No one actually plays by the rules particularly the one about auctioning off landed on but unbought properties.
Monopoly is in distinguished company from that point of view. The Kriegsspiel wargaming system devised by Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz for the Prussian Army – which unlike his father’s original version was intended to be a serious military training tool, and was played on actual military maps – was criticized by many officers as being too rigid and clumsy, and apparently its rules weren’t always followed to the letter when it was played. Some officers also questioned the realism of its dice roll result tables, and argued that as a training tool it needed to have more flexibility in order to provide a greater range of lessons. After von Reiswitz died, his original rigid system was tossed out the window and replaced by what could be called the ultimate house-rule: the idea of putting most of the decision-making power into the hands of the umpire. Under the old rigid system, the umpire was basically just somebody who computed combat results based on the game’s prescribed statistical tables; in the new “free” system, the umpire “went from being a calculator to God” as one writer once put it.
