As others have mentioned, house rules often ruin any fun.

It is, by name, a game about being cutthroat towards other players and emphasizes that you optimize in the long-term purely for personal gain. This actually doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Even the ones that seem to be more selfish often end up losing because they only optimize for short-term games and make it where nobody will trade with them.

Point is that a lot of those house rules slow down the main driver for the game: forcing people to go bankrupt. The house rules often put money back into the economy, which prolongs bankruptcy. To a large degree, the faster you can speed up bankruptcy, the more fun it is.

One of my personal favorite additions to the game was the Speed Die included in some versions. In a pretty elegant way, it greatly speeds up both the property acquisition and bankruptcy phases of the game.

Also as others are pointing out, the fun a of a board game is 90% dictated by the people you are playing with. That's not to say Monopoly is inherently or intuitively conducive to keeping the experience enjoyable, but it also can't completely prevent you from having fun. As evidenced by plenty of people, myself included, having immense enjoyment from it with the right group.

If they had fun, they had fun, and it's great.

I don't like Monopoly, you may not like it, but please, let OP like it if he wants. What's even the point of your remark ? It's great that they had a great experience, and that's what's important !

Apparently almost everyone is playing with the same "house rules" that make the game awful. Free parking is not a rule and just makes the game go longer. Not automatically putting up unpurchased properties for auction is also a big rule to miss.

I've played monopoly strictly by the rules and it ends up being equally terrible as any house rules imo.

Perhaps even worse, once you get someone who drops in with the hyper optimized bleed-everyone-to-death-with-no-hotels strategy. (Or worse, 2+ people with this strategy, because they it becomes a neverending game of trying to block all monopolies)

I'll agree though, playing without the auction rule is super slow and boring.

Maybe stock rules with infinite houses, I haven't tried that before.

Sometimes it's not about the game, it's about the people you're playing with and the conversation you have over the game.

Yes, but Monopoly is probably worse (or not helpful) in that respect as well.

Monopoly is great for fostering interaction!

I mean, if your experience is anything like my family/friends, it certainly lets you know who in your circle is a cut-throat bastard who cheats at everything and deserves everything terrible that happens to them.

Ha, kids like to pretend to be rich, it has a forced progression and not too much randomness, auctions are fun (when you don't have to worry about actual money).

Is there a specific element you don't like? For me money just isn't that fun (the original point of the game, I gather) so ... but it's still not a terrible game.

Principally it was the request of one of the kids, was easy to play via webcam, and all participants had a set (different sets, but we called properties by colour+number pair, eg Orange One; and normalised the currency before we started).

The kids want to play Risk next, but I've not worked out how to make that work smoothly. Probably very similar again: , and each person having their own dice (to improve the tactile aspect).

The people who like Monopoly really love it and everyone else would rather play pretty much anything else.

30 seconds per turn per player. Max.

Optimal is 10 seconds.

Keeps the energy high and you can finish a game in 15 minutes.

Speed monopoly! Played with those fun chess timers that you get to smack at the end of your turn.