IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ART. The Transportationist recommended a Tim Harford column on the popularity of board games. It's a good column. The column includes a picture of the Ticket to Ride game, which won a German prize in 2004.

Financial Times photo by Charlie Bibby.

That picture reminded me of a board game I had seen on display at the California State Railroad Museum.


The Streamlined Train Game is simpler, with a spinner, or perhaps a die roll determining the movement of each player's pawn. Ticket to Ride has relatively simple instructions, but it appears to include elements of the somewhat more complicated Rail Baron (now out of print?). But games evolve from earlier games. Here's Mr Harford on a game called Settlers of Catan.

Settlers of Catan superficially resembles Monopoly. The board is assembled from hexagonal tiles, but the components include wood houses that look much like Monopoly buildings. The idea is ­similar, too: players use resources (money in Monopoly; timber, wool and other commodities in Settlers) to build property; the property then collects further resources, and the process of expansion continues.

Yet after Monopoly, Settlers was a revelation. Monopoly ends in the slow strangulation of the weaker players and usually feels stale long before the official end, assuming it isn’t abandoned along the way. Settlers didn’t take long – perhaps an hour – and even as it was coming to an end, every player was still involved. In Monopoly, many choices can be made on autopilot; in Settlers, there is scope for skill throughout a game: the decisions always matter and are always interesting. Settlers has its own elegant economy, in which the supply and demand for five different commodities are determined by tactics, luck and the stage of the game. Players ­constantly haggle, wheedle and plead. It’s convivial experience, a game of incessant banter. In the course of an evening, I was hooked.

Monopoly evolved from an earlier game that unintentionally simulated something very different.

[As designer Lizzie Magie] she developed her concept, she unwittingly created a model of competitive capitalism that illustrates the difficulty of creating a monopoly.

The slow strangulation of the weaker players is a feature; that's why there are models of economic hysteresis.

That the game does not have to have an end raises the possibility that many games will not end. So, also, can it be with business competition, whether as taught in the textbook or as observed in industries without strong scale economies or network externalities. With sufficiently many players, the pattern of initial ownership of railroads, utilities, and properties can be one in which no player acquires a monopoly in the first few trips around the board, and no proposed trades of properties (Boardwalk for Kentucky, Mediterranean, and $100) are mutually satisfactory. The resulting infinite loop is loosely a competitive equilibrium, although the game loses realism in that no housing gets built.

Monopoly's title even suggests a possibly successful strategy, if you are in the position of building houses.

There is, however, less play value in a parlor game that takes a long time and in which players are eliminated sequentially. (Participants in Risk or Diplomacy parties sometimes have to hang around to heckle the remaining players.) Settlers apparently allows all players to keep playing, perhaps leaving even the ones with no chance of winning in a position to determine who can.