Credit: Dangerous Minds

The moment that you discover that Monopoly is one of the worst board games (and its shitty video games) ever made is the start of a slippery slope.

One that, before you know it, will have you dropping hundreds of pounds on Scythe expansion packs, arguing with strangers on boardgamegeek and waiting with bated breath for a reprint of Chinatown. That’s right, the PC master race can get to fuck, there’s a new breed of insufferable gamer in town, the kind that actually sees their friends in person. And actually has friends to begin with. So, really, it is still more of an improvement.

It’s true, there is a deep, dark rabbit hole of board gaming one can go down that goes far beyond the standards of childhood like Cluedo (or Clue for our colonial cousins), Guess Who and, yes, Monopoly. The latter of which has a strange place within the world of gaming as it’s simultaneously the most famous example of its medium, yet there’s a really convincing argument for it to be one of the worst. A frustration machine with nothing else to show for it. The only two things the game is based on are luck and greed.

There’s no skill or strategy, just the roll of the dice and how cold you’re willing to be to people who love you. Or are you willing to sit at a table with me and push a metal top hat around a board? Combine that with the fact that the game basically decides a winner hours before it actually ends, and you’ve got a machine that can only cause anger and strife. Which is entirely by design by the way, never ever forget that the whole point of Monopoly was to point out the cruelty inherent in being a landlord.

With all that in mind, perhaps it’s not surprising that Monopoly has a body count.

Who has killed because of Monopoly?

The first time that a game of Monopoly ended in murder (that we know of) was in 1987 – in this case, the actual killing blow didn’t come from anyone actually playing the game. Instead, this was a game that was being held in a house in Echo Park, Los Angeles, California… A game that was, in true Monopoly fashion, going a lot better for some rather than others, where one player had asked for some money from one of the other players, and a dispute had broken out, leading to a full-on fistfight.

This caught the attention of one of their neighbours, the 70-year-old Richard Bouge, who presumably thought that something much, much more dramatic was happening – he grabbed a rifle, frog-marched up to the house where the game was happening, and fired directly at the aggressor, it was only after the poor kid was dead that anyone told Bouge that this was a dispute over a board game. Shockingly enough, this is not the only time this has happened.

The most shocking of all came a few years later in 1991. A young couple, Jerry Lee Robertson and Cassie Robertson, were living with an older acquaintance, Gerald Thomas. The trio played the board game together, which ended in a massive fight. One that the young couple decided to finish after Thomas had gone to bed, when they crept into his room after he had fallen asleep and beat him to death with a claw hammer. The couple were arrested a month later.

The incidents go on. One poor kid was shot in the chest with a bow and arrow by an opponent after a dispute about the rules of the game in the same year. Turns out, when the most popular board game in the world is purpose-built to make people angry, bad things happen when it gets into the hands of unstable people.

Best to just stick with Operation.