Phil Orbanesisformer VP of Parker Brothers, Chief Judge for the US and World Monopoly Championships, and author of The Monopoly Companion.
When did you first play Monopoly?
I was eight. I was born and raised in Cape May County, NJ. My aunts and uncles invited me to play for the first time, and I recognized the names of the streets on the game board. It just seemed very natural to me, because Atlantic City was really the only major city that I knew as a kid growing up. Playing it for the first time was also eye-opening because I was able to hold my own against my favorite aunts and uncles, who were, you know, 10, 15 years older than me.
Did that experience get you hooked on board games?
Probably because of Monopoly, I started inventing my own games as a kid and eventually started my own little game company in college. I sold it to a New York-based firm before I graduated.
One of the high points of my career was being sort of the resident expert and Monopoly historian during the 12 years that I was at Parker Brothers, from 1979 to 1990. It was during that era that I became the chief judge at US and World Championships—and I still serve to this day.
Is winning more a matter of chance, risk assessment, damage control—
—or more skill? Well, I think the classic answer was given by my friend Chris Campbell, who also worked with me at Parker Brothers, and Chris’s answer is that Monopoly is 75% skill and 75% luck. What he means is that in any given case, either luck or skill can predominate. Now, if luck predominates, great skill at times can overcome it. If skill predominates, then the player who really understands the math of the game in particular and who’s the better negotiator, well, he’s the person with the better skill level, and he’s bound to win. Monopoly’s very much like real life: there’s a component of risk and uncertainty in it, and you need to do the best you can with what luck gives you.
It sounds like negotiation is a fairly important skill to winning a game of Monopoly.
I like to think that the essence of winning Monopoly boils down to the two N’s—Negotiation and Numbers. Negotiation is the skill to get what you need from your opponents without alienating them in the process. I like to think of a good negotiator in Monopoly as a player that the opponents wouldn’t mind losing to. The other N, Numbers, means that you know inside-out all the rates of return on investments for one, two, three, four houses or a hotel on every property, you know the odds of rolling each number of the dice and where you’re likely to land, you know the distribution of gains and losses in the two card decks, you really know the mathematical heartbeat of the game without guessing at it.
What are some of your strategies?
One of the great strategies of the game is to acquire the red or the orange group of properties above any others. They are the best in terms of landing percentages because they lie the ideal distance in front of Jail.
The second strategy, which again goes back to really understanding the numbers, is to develop your group as quickly as possible to the three-house level. If you look at any property deed, you’ll notice a terrific jump in rent between two houses on the property and three. So two houses usually gets you a nice rent but three can be a killer rent. The goal for most players is to get one of the better groups, meaning a group that is reasonably priced to develop, and then immediately develop it up to three houses.
I guess that would be more advantageous than a hotel, because buying a hotel would then release those houses back onto the market?
Well, that’s another strategy—the housing shortage. That’s based on controlling as many houses as possible and not going on to hotels, the reason being there’s a fixed number of houses and hotels in the game: 32 houses and 12 hotels. If you have a group and you have 12 houses on it, you’re already controlling nearly 40% of the housing supply. Another basic strategy is early in the game buy everything you land on. You’ll need trading material to get a group, more often than not.
Let’s talk about aberrations. Have you ever seen extremely unlikely outcomes?
A classic example is back in 1980, at the US Championship in New York City. The crowd favorite was a ten-year-old boy named Angelo Repole from Staten Island, who was the Eastern Regional champion. He was up against the reigning US champion, Dana Terman from Washington, DC. Late in the game, it looked like the ten-year-old was going to win hands-down because he was in Jail—perfect place to be late in the game—he couldn’t get caught on Dana’s Boardwalk-Park Place. Angelo had hotels on the purples, and Dana was coming around to them, and Dana had no cash. So if Dana landed on any one of those hotels, he would have been forced to tear down his houses on Boardwalk and Park Place, and that would have secured the victory for Angelo. And we at Parker Brothers were pretty excited about that possibility, because it meant we’d have the youngest player ever going to the World Championship.
But here’s where fate intervened. On his first roll in Jail, Angelo threw double-six. Well, double-six is the only double throw from Jail that will take you to Chance. And even before he landed on Chance, 12 spaces away, he knew he had lost the game. Because, like any good player, he had counted—and realized that 15 out of the 16 Chance cards had already been played, and that the only card in the deck of 16 that had not come up was the “Advance to Boardwalk.”
Are you serious?
The odds of this happening are 1 in 36, multiplied by 1 in 16, making it 1 in 576 or something like that. That’s what cost him the victory.
[Checking on cell phone calculator] That’s…you’re exactly right, 1 in 576.
So you can see it’s just a little bit less than 2/10ths of a percent chance that that would happen, and yet that’s what happened.
What have you done since leaving Parker Brothers?
For the last 15 years, I have run a company named Winning Moves Games—we’re a specialty game-maker in Danvers, MA—and we have an affiliation with Hasbro. We do special versions of Monopoly and Scrabble and Risk and whatnot. So I still have a sense of identity with my days at Parker Brothers, where these games were the top brands.
Have you developed any new games that you are particularly excited about?
We have a new strategy game called Cirkis. It’s a piece-placement game where players take turns placing colorful, geometric pieces on the board in an attempt to complete circles and stars. The way the grid is laid out, there are several circular shapes and star shapes on the board. Completing them earns you points, and you use the scoring tag to advance and show your progress. The player who scores 40 points first is the winner. It’s a very intense, very easy-to-learn but very engaging strategy game for two to four players. You can be practically any age and play it.
Here’s something I’ve always wondered: Mr. Monopoly. Mr. Moneybags. Rich Uncle Pennybags. What’s his official name?
When the character was first created in 1936—and by the way, the artist who created him modeled his appearance on the iconic appearance of the nation’s most famous financier of the early 20th century, J.P. Morgan—he originally had no name. In 1946, he became Rich Uncle Pennybags. And that name stuck until the 1990’s when Hasbro did some research and determined that most people referred to him as “the Monopoly Man,” and at that point they changed his name to Mr. Monopoly.
How has the game changed over time? I understand it had its start with a Georgist, who believed that no one had a right to own land. It was a way of illustrating the unfair practices of landlords.
The forerunner of Monopoly was entitled “The Landlord’s Game.” It was patented by Elizabeth Magie Phillips in Washington, DC, back in 1903, and she had a very strong political reason for developing her game. It was similar to Monopoly only in that it had 40 spaces at the perimeter of the game board—the idea of the “continuous path” that you followed round and round. She did have spaces on her board that were properties, and she did have railroads and she had a jail and “Go To Jail” and the equivalent of GO, which was called “Mother Earth.”
What it did not have were the rules allowing properties to be monopolized and developed. Those were actually created by college students a few years later.
Charles Darrow, an unemployed radiator repairman in Philadelphia, came across a handmade version that friends had, and he realized there was something great about this game. He gave it the look and the feel and the styling that we know today. And that look and feel and styling did not change at all from 1935, when Parker Brothers acquired it, until 2008 when a few tweaks were made to the game board to make it a universal board that’s the same now worldwide.
That “continuous path” can make for very long games. Like circumnavigating the Earth, you don’t come to the end, you just begin again.
There were three or four reasons why Parker Brothers initially said no to Monopoly, and one of them was just that: that the game did not have a clear ending. Most games in that era, the 1930’s, had a definite start state and a definite finish.
Not so with Monopoly. But over time, Monopoly grew out of being just a game for the purpose of winning; it became a social experience. And that meant that players actually wanted to see it last a long time so that you continued to socialize and just relax over the table.
One of the ways that’s accomplished is by placing under Free Parking all of the penalties that are being collected by the bank. So, instead of the bank keeping the $100 that you just paid because you drew a Community Chest card telling you to, that $100 is slipped under Free Parking and whoever lands there next gets your $100 plus any other money that’s been accumulating there. It’s fun, but also completely contrary to the purpose of the game, which is to bankrupt your opponents as quickly as possible.
Now in a new edition of the game there’s the speed die you invented?
The speed die is now standard in all the basic Monopoly games sold around the world. We use the speed die to very good effect in the Championship.
The speed die came into being because I was challenged to come up with a solution to what many people feel is the major problem with Monopoly in the 21st century—and that’s how long it takes to play. Another reason for the length ties right into your theme of odds and probabilities, and that is that when you’re just at the mercy of two dice, very often many properties stay in the bank for an inordinate period of time, which means those color groups can’t be formed and there’s less trade. So you can spend an hour or more just trying to get the properties into play before anybody can start to comfortably make deals.
Well, the purpose of the speed die is to overcome that problem, and it does it by making sure that all the properties get landed on and purchased early in the game, and immediately thereafter all the big rents come into play so you bring about the conclusion of the game—bankrupting your opponents.
What are some of the more exotic editions you are aware of?
There are well over 200 so-called localized editions, you know, California Monopoly, I Love Lucy Monopoly, Star Wars Monopoly. Those are officially licensed by Parker Brothers. There are also any number of unofficial so-called “-opoly” games. But some of the ones I like best are the unofficial versions that were made behind the Iron Curtain before communism came crashing down in Eastern Europe. And the reason that I particularly have a fondness for them is that the Russians banned Monopoly behind the Iron Curtain. They felt that it was a screaming endorsement of capitalism, and they didn’t want their people to be associated with it. Well, that just made the people behind the Iron Curtain even more desirous to play Monopoly, so a lot of cottage industries developed where informal versions were made and sold on the black market.
And Nazi Germany did not particularly like Monopoly.
There’s truth to that. The reason for that was that the German licensee, in 1936, happened to name the most valuable space on the board after an island in a canal in Berlin where many wealthy people lived, including some of the most famous Nazi officials. The Nazis were trying to project themselves as being of the people, and not being taken by riches and things like that, so they didn’t like the fact that their favorite place to live was associated with the highest-priced space on the Monopoly board. And they actually encouraged the Hitler Youth to picket in front of shops that sold the game. So the manufacturer was never told to stop making it, but consumers were fearful of buying it.
The greatest irony of all is that, during the war, a good chunk of the inventory was in a warehouse that—by accident—the British Royal Air Force destroyed. Most of the early copies of Monopoly in Germany disappeared in that one bombing raid.
And other games, like chess, are so old that any early anecdotes must be lost in time.
My favorite Monopoly story is how Monopoly was used to help prisoners of war escape in World War II. This was a top secret project of MI9, the British Secret Service. MI9 was responsible for helping prisoners to escape. They began to arm every airman with a silk map of the area where they would be flying, so if they were shot down they would have a map, marked with some locations where partisans would help them get back to England.
The reasons why silk was the preferred material were manifold. First, it was very lightweight. Second, it folds very nicely without creases. Third, it’s waterproof. And fourth, if you take it out at night, it doesn’t rustle and give your location away. So silk escape maps became standard for British airmen.
The company that made the silk escape maps, John Waddington Ltd., happened to be the same printer that was making Monopoly, and very quickly the British Secret Service realized that they could use Monopoly to smuggle escape tools and currency to prisoners of war. Then the prisoners would have the means to get out of these camps. They had a very small number of artisans in a locked room, who would carve openings in the Monopoly game board before the label was put on, and press into the openings low-profile compasses, files, and of course the silk escape map.
Then the board would be finished and go into a game, where real currency had been hidden under the Monopoly currency, and those games were given to the Red Cross to deliver to specific prisoner-of-war camps—so that the maps inside matched up to the area of the camp. The Germans were not inspecting packages that came in through the Red Cross for prisoners because they had become dependent on food delivered by the Red Cross to meet the Geneva minimum standards of nutrition for prisoners of war.
Although the project was kept secret for 50 years, and no accurate records were kept on how many prisoners owed their escape to Monopoly, what we do know is that 35,000 prisoners escaped successfully and got back to England.