Turning Monopoly: Pokemon edition into a decent Pokemon game

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Blade
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Turning Monopoly: Pokemon edition into a decent Pokemon game

Post by Blade »

Due to my wife's passion for the 1st generation of pokémon games, I've got the Pokemon "Kanto Edition" of Monopoly in my game stash.

It's the usual Monopoly game, with properties replaced with Pokémons arranged by gyms, train stations are pokeballs and utility companies are legendary pokémons. Event cards are also replaced with Pokemon themed descriptions. There are optional rules that weren't even in the box but that I found on the Internet where you can use "pokémon powers" when you roll a double. The only slightly interesting thing is the double 6 that allows you to challenge another player to a duel, if you roll higher than he does you get one of his pokémon.

So all in all it's still the same shitty game. What I'd like to do would be to create some houserules that would turn it into an actual pokémon game. My goals are as follows:

- The game should feel more like a pokémon game than a monopoly game
- The game should, as far as possible, use only stuff from the original game box. I can imagine having additional dice or some tokens but I'm not planning to add new cards or an extra board.
- The game has to be fun to play
- While I'm fine with adding some complexity and strategy, I'd rather keep it "light"

So here are my ideas for now:
- The goal of the game is to be the very best like no-one ever was. All players are young pokémon trainers starting on their journey. During the course of the game, they acquire new pokémons and possibly badges until the end-game tournament
- The game is centered on pokémon battle. They're solved by rolling two dice and adding level modifiers, highest roll wins. When a pokémon's type is very effective against its opponent, the opponent only rolls one die.
- The player's token is his starter pokémon.
- Pokémon on the first side of the board start with level 0 then each new side gets +1.
- When a players lands on an unclaimed pokémon, he can try to capture it by beating it in a pokémon battle.
- When a player lands on a claimed pokémon in a disputed gym (a gym that isn't fully owned by one player), he can challenge its trainer. If he wins, he takes control of the pokémon. If he loses, he pays the "rent" price of that pokémon.
- When a player has captured all pokémons of a gym, he becomes the master of that gym. He automatically gets the badge of that gym.
- Each gym badge gives +1 to all pokémon fights
- When a player lands on a claimed pokémon in a gym that belongs to another player, he can try to get the gym's badge. For this, he has to fight each pokémon with his own team of up to three pokémon. If he fails, or if he chooses not to fight, he has to pay the "rent" of the pokémon tile.
- Houses and hotels (pokemarts and pokecenters in this edition) are used to represent the training of a pokémon. They can be bought at any time (even when not owning the gym) and give +1 to the pokémon in battle.
- When a pokémon is defeated in combat, the card is turned face-down (as in mortgage) and the pokémon won't be able to fight until healed (paying the mortgage price I guess). The starter is always available for battle.
- When rolling a double, the player can choose to play again or to use the special power of his starter pokémon (to be defined)
- I'm still not sure what to do with pokéballs and legendary pokémons
- At some point in the game (not sure exactly when would be best) the tournament starts. All players pick a team of three pokemons and face the others. The winner of the tournament wins the game and is now a pokémon master.

That's just an early draft, if you've got any suggestion I'd be happy to read them.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Will these turns be shorter than in regular monopoly? Everyone's got smartphones now, keeping people occupied between turns is a big part of modern board game design
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Post by Username17 »

Monopoly is of course a terrible game, and it gets much worse the more ways there are to inject funds into the system. People 'like' getting extra money for random shit like landing on Free Parking or whatever, but the game already takes way too many turns to resolve, and every increase in the amount of cash available to the players increases the number of rounds the game takes. Similarly, the more generous the game is about sellbacks on houses and buying your way out of mortgaging and shit, the deeper peoples' virtual reserves are and the more turns things take to reach a conclusion.

The bottom line is that no matter where you start your turn, the chances of landing on Boardwalk or Park Place rather than passing Go is never worse than 5 in 18. Your overall chances of slipping by the big blues and getting $200 is about three in four. And it takes an average of about 6 turns to go around the board, so even when you're in the situation where Boardwalk will end the game, you're still looking at like 24 more fucking turns. It's unacceptable. And that's even without people playing with optional rules that feed enough money into the system such that landing on Boardwalk won't even end the damn game.

The big question is what you want the proliferation phase and the elimination phase to look like. In typical monopoly with four players it's about 4 trips around the board for all the properties to be purchased. It's then two or three times that many go arounds of the board to get to a conclusion. You can imagine rules changes to make that faster or slower, but good god that baseline is 4 players spending 6 turns each to go around the board 12 to 16 times, which upwards of 288 turns. It makes me want to kill myself just thinking about it, and rules that make those turns take any significant amounts of time are clearly impossible. At one minute turns, that's like five fucking hours of this unbounded hell.

Now personally, I think the decision to build multiple pokecenters on individual pokemon is weird and backwards. But that ship has sailed and the only thing to do is to try to figure out ways to force the game to a more rapid conclusion. That is: to get to the part where people have gym badges and can start upgrading Pokémon more quickly and also too to get from the part where players have gym badges to the part where players are eliminated more quickly. You can do a lot by eliminating dead turns. So like, if you land on one of your own Pokémon and there are unclaimed Pokémon in the gym you should just be able to buy it. But that only speeds up the proliferation from about 4 go-rounds to about 3. The real issue is how you get the beat downs down to about 3 go-rounds so the game is over in an acceptable amount of time.

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Post by Koumei »

The real issue is how you get the beat downs down to about 3 go-rounds so the game is over in an acceptable amount of time.
At some point in the game (not sure exactly when would be best) the tournament starts. All players pick a team of three pokemons and face the others. The winner of the tournament wins the game and is now a pokémon master.
Bam. Let's smash these two things together to solve each other. As soon as everything is bought up, it instantly becomes Time For Tournament. Some players might go out of their way to slow things down, not buying stuff so they have more time to upgrade pokemon, but that's adding some kind of choice at all, and that's also not necessarily a good idea for them.

You could also easily limit the extent to how much you can level your pokemon up, such as "you're not levelling them, you're evolving them" (the problem being Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur can thus gain a massive 2 upgrades each, whereas Pikachu, Meowth and Eevee get one upgrade and can get fucked. OTOH Raichu is + against Blastoise and Charizard and - against nothing playable, and Eevee gets to pick its best option for the game, which is probably going to be Jolteon, giving it the same benefit as above. Even aside from all of this, you have an array of pokemon you captured along the way and you really could stuff your starter in a PC box and just use three captured mons).

I'd suggest less "give money to another player" and more "give money to the bank" (ie throw it away) as penalties for losing things. The more money gets taken out of the system, the quicker the game plays. So if a pokemon gets knocked out, it is flipped until you pay its value to the bank. Ideally you'd want there to be a single PokeCentre square and getting wiped out sends you there, where you have to pay to revive your whole team (or lose all your money, whichever happens first). But I get that that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, then been smashed to pieces by a raging Gyarados. It's now a haunted wreck.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

Not Pokemon specific, but my son and I were playing the Smash Bros. Nintendo Monopoly, and as we always do were spitballing ideas to make regular games more complicated. In this case he came up with the idea of making Monopoly an RPG. Looks like that's an idea that many people have already had. The existing ideas I saw are pretty ass, though. "Teh hat is a monk lol" and whatnot.

The couple of ideas we had were getting XP for a very simplistic leveling system when you landed on Go, your own properties, or by Community Chest cards. We were also thinking of having each piece/class have a few abilities that would do things like bumping a roll up so you don't land on your opponent's Hotel space, or a thief ability that lets you send an opponent to jail instead of you.

We didn't get into balance issues or turn bloat at all, but I'm thinking this could definitely have legs given enough attention. And of course will be interested to see what this thread comes up with for the Pokopoly idea.
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Post by Mord »

Koumei wrote:
The real issue is how you get the beat downs down to about 3 go-rounds so the game is over in an acceptable amount of time.
At some point in the game (not sure exactly when would be best) the tournament starts. All players pick a team of three pokemons and face the others. The winner of the tournament wins the game and is now a pokémon master.
Bam. Let's smash these two things together to solve each other. As soon as everything is bought up, it instantly becomes Time For Tournament. Some players might go out of their way to slow things down, not buying stuff so they have more time to upgrade pokemon, but that's adding some kind of choice at all, and that's also not necessarily a good idea for them.
100% agree. The only decent way to play classic Monopoly is to use the variant rule where the game ends when the first player is bankrupted, with the winner being whoever has the most money at that time. Player elimination is a bad thing per se for board games, no exceptions.
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Post by Shrapnel »

I think I'm like the only person on earth that likes Monopoly as-is. Do I just have poor taste or something? Is there something wrong with wanting to waste 10 hours playing a board game? (The answer is yes.)

Anyway, a variant houserule that I've often used is to set a limit on how much cash is earned, and whoever reaches that limit first wins.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Shrapnel wrote:Do I just have poor taste or something?
Weren't you into PTA? :wink:
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Post by jt »

Shrapnel wrote:I think I'm like the only person on earth that likes Monopoly as-is. Do I just have poor taste or something? Is there something wrong with wanting to waste 10 hours playing a board game?
Are you playing by the actual rules? The game should take about two hours. There's a commonly missed rule that, if you land on an unowned property and don't buy it, it goes up for auction. Missing this makes the game take way, way longer.

It's a much better game by the intended rules, though still pretty bad.
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Post by TiaC »

When talking about how to improve a version of monopoly, I think Mario Kart Monopoly is an interesting game to look at. There are a few big changes. First, only one of the dice is numbered, the other is a powerup die that either boosts you or hits the other players. To account for the reduced movement, the board is a bit smaller. Whenever someone passes go, there's a race. Everyone can pay an entry fee, then all racing players roll, and the highest wins, taking the race's prize. After 12? races, the game is over.

There's a lot more choice, due to powerups, and the game has a clearly defined end. However, it still feels like monopoly.
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Post by Koumei »

That would still require printing out stickers to put on one of the dice (or writing up a table that the second die references or whatever), which is the main thing struck out as a no-go. I'd be all for people being able to use any pokemon toy that remotely fits (so no "pillow sized pikachu plushies", but you can get your scannable toy things that Nintendo consoles can work with, or buy the pokeball gatcha things until you have a good starter) but that's all "added extra stuff" that isn't allowed.
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Post by Blade »

Thanks for the inputs. I'd like to make it clear that for now nothing is set in stone, what I posted were just what came to mind after giving it some thought but I'm really open to changes.

I don't really mind if the collection part takes time, since the "elimination" part will be solved quickly with the tournament. Thanks to the duel opportunities, the collection part should be more engaging and interesting. If it still takes too long, there's the possibility to use the optional rules of later monopoly editions where you have an additional dice that give you a change to move to the next neutral tile.

Allowing players to challenge a pokémon from the same gym when they land on a pokémon they already own could be an option. I was also thinking of letting the player level-up that pokémon for a reduced price.
I was thinking of allowing challenges when two players are on the same tile, this could also help speed up the game and make it easier for players to take control of gyms.

Building pokestores on pokémons is weird, for me they're just tokens to remember the level of a pokémon. I don't want the game to be about building pokéstores and pokécenters.

Having a pokécenter tile is something I've been thinking about. Could be the "free park" tile (we just put one of the pokécenter token on it). It could let you heal all your pokémons for free when you land on it, heal when one of your pokémon for free when you pass by it and/or you could be teleported there when you've got no pokémons ready for battle.
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Post by Krusk »

jt wrote:
Shrapnel wrote:I think I'm like the only person on earth that likes Monopoly as-is. Do I just have poor taste or something? Is there something wrong with wanting to waste 10 hours playing a board game?
Are you playing by the actual rules? The game should take about two hours. There's a commonly missed rule that, if you land on an unowned property and don't buy it, it goes up for auction. Missing this makes the game take way, way longer.

It's a much better game by the intended rules, though still pretty bad.
I don't mind monopoly as is. If you actually play with the auctions and without gov't handouts (random free money for nothing, like free parking or other common house rules), it can go by much faster. I play 4-5 times a year with family, and its usually takes about an hour. Its also funny that the faster the game goes, the more fun it is.

One other mandatory rule is that you have to actually try to win. Fuck the person who goes easy on letting their SO skip paying rent just to keep him in the game. That shit extends it forever. Be ruthless.
Last edited by Krusk on Mon Oct 21, 2019 6:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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