Monopoly City Streets

Monopoly City Streets is obviously launched by Hasbro, the current owner of the Monopoly brand. The aim of the game is to beat every other player when the global game ends on 31 January 2010.  The player with the most wealth in cash and properties wins the game.  The basic concept is login, collect rent, buy streets, build properties, and of course, rinse and repeat.

When the game first launched, massive lag was experienced on their remote servers. Many interested players with a weaker connection in a very bad initial position – when they were finally able to connect to the game, the desired street was already developed.  

Unfortunately, we, among many other players worldwide, were affected.  Once we successfully connected to the game, all streets in Hong Kong were literally unavailable.  We couldn’t complain as Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world (Read the last paragraph below if interested.

Started slowly, we were able to start quickly to our business in an M1,000,000 road somewhere in the US.  Back in the days, all expensive streets were M1,000,000 each, and they have 100% daily return for Green House, the cheapest housing.  Users will have to log in every day to collect the returns.

And according to the official blog, to combat the cheaters (they referred as “compromised data”), fix the bugs and to smash their sloooow servers, they have reset the game.  That meant all investments and moneys were confiscated.  Once we log in back, our streets in Europe were fully occupied.  This is certainly not encouraging.  We quitted after the reset.

 Here’s our tips on strategy:

• Buy the expensive streets, an M1,000,000 street has 100% return on Green House, an M800,000 one has 80% only.

• Build the building with highest return rate for maximizing income.  Don’t build those expensive ones, they have really poor return.  Recommended buildings are M50,000 and M75,000 (100% standard return), and M300,000 and M500,000 (95% standard return)

• Build more than one bonus building in each of your expensive streets.  Protected streets cannot be demolished, but the protective buildings can be demolished.  Players will take more cards to deal with these streets, thus making them hesitate to harass you.

• If you need more chance cards (thus more bonus buildings), build those cheap and small Green Houses.  Chance cards may pop out randomly when you are building.  Quantity of buildings, instead of money, mattered here.

• If you can’t build the big houses on a street any more, squeeze in Green Houses.  Green House can fit in between some big buildings with ease.

• If you don’t have the time, don’t play – as money doubles each day (plus the daily login bonus of M1,000,000, the build time and play time doubles each day.  After playing for a week you should have around 0.1 to 0.2 billion M in the bank.  This might mean more than 2 hours to play time each day.  Remember, it might sound fascinating to own a street, even in the virtual world, but after all, you're wasting your time.

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End of content about the game, now a little fact on the population problem:

Guinness World Records has the Mong Kok district in Hong Kong as most densely populated in the world (Wiki reference) – more than 130,000 people are living in one square kilometer.  Oh, did we mention that the figure is already “reduced” due to reclamation of lands?

And sorry, we cannot imagine how much the rich people are paying for a square feet (30 x 30cm) in a prison-like 80-storey apartment in this overcrowded city.  $10,000, in US dollars, not Hong Kong dollars.