five or more works with player order auctions.
are you just passing the time, or do you really want a challenge?
A Monopoly™ game that truly challenges the players' strategies and negotiating abilities requires at least five players. With at least five players, any two players who are perceived as working together risk creating an alliance against them of two or even more players. With five or more players, the opportunities to negotiate are significantly increased over a game with fewer players. Also, the time between any one player's moves will be lengthy enough that it should be sufficient to generate useful negotiations.
As indicated previously, a reason many games are limited to four or fewer players is that the importance of luck in a standard rules game means that anyone who is unable to move until four or more other players have already had at least one opportunity to purchase property, leaves the latter players at a significant disadvantage.
Thus the importance of the player order auction. As described elsewhere, player order may be auctioned; indeed, in a game of five or more players, committed to determining the most skilled player, rather than the luckiest, multiple player order auctions are an absolute necessity.
An auction is held, of course, prior to the first roll. The players may auction off each position in the order separately, or they may choose to allow bids on any of the positions, keeping track of which bid is highest for each position, until the bidding stops. Once the bidding has ended, and to diminish the advantage of gaining an earlier turn over a later one, the player going first will pay the player going last the difference between their two bids. The same would be true of the player that goes second and the player that goes next to last, and so on through the playing order.
Following the auction, each player will take his or her turn in order. Once the players have each taken one turn, another player order auction will be held. While multiple player order auctions may seem tedious or disruptive, in an Ultimate Monopoly™ game, they will be limited to five sets of moves. After each player has moved five times, enough of the properties should have been purchased that the importance of player oder will have been significantly reduced.
The playing order established by the fifth player order auction will remain the playing order for the remainder of the game. At the point, the players will likely choose to seat themselves in the order they will play.
