REPORT ON PROJECT WORK

MONOPOLY GAME

Aram Simonian December 2011

1 Introduction
The aim of this project work is to create a Vensim [1] model of the Monopoly board game in order to find general dynamics of the game as well as suitability of different strategies. First of all, I had to familiarize myself with the game and its rules, so I borrowed the game from one of my friends and played it several times. The rules of the game are also available online, e.g. at [2] and there are some online flash versions of the monopoly game, too. Examples of such online games are [3] and [4], from which the latter does not follow the original Monopoly rules very precisely, though. The principle of the game is to move ones token around the game plan according to the roll of two dices. As the player moves around the board, he can (or rather should) purchase available properties which his token lands on. Once the property has its owner, the owner collects a rent every time another player steps on the property. The properties are divided into several groups with different purchase prices and rent distinguished by different colors. When the player manages to own all properties from one color, he is allowed to build houses or hotels on these properties, which drastically increases the rent collected from the other players. There are several possible variants of the game scenario, e.g. with a time limit after which everyone counts his/her wealth and the most wealthy player wins, or until the end scenario, which lasts until theres only one player in the game and all the others have bankrupted. Beside the ordinary properties there are also Utilities and Railroads which have slightly different rent principles, but this is not that much important for my model. The rules are not very complicated, but there is quite significant chance factor that often remarkably influences the game, which can break even the best strategy into pieces. The chance factor in the game is caused by the influence of the dice roll and special Chance and Community Chest cards. However, my goal is not to exactly model the game with all its details, which would be probably even impossible with the Vensim software, but to get a general overview.

2 Boundaries of the model

Firstly, I had to select the boundaries of the model and decide, what is really important in the game, in other words what should be modeled and what can be neglected with minor impact on results. Attempting to make a too precise model of the game could be contra productive, as the model would get very complicated and I wouldnt be able to identify all the dependencies properly. Therefore I introduce some simplifications that allow me to focus on the general idea of the game.

2.1 Wealth differentiation

Every player in the game is assessed according to the wealth that he is able to accumulate. The wealth can be basically differentiated into three domains, which are the Cash, Properties (Lots, Railroads, and Utilities) and Houses (also including hotels). There are specific wealth flows between particular domains of wealth, so these are to be modeled separately. Beside the player-owned wealth, there are also bank resources representing the available Properties, Houses and Cash reserves. However, the bank resources are limited, so it is important to include these limits into the model, too. As I have found out later when playing the game, there is so much cash in the bank, that the cash can be considered to be unlimited without any problems. Each players wealth

together with the banks wealth describe the immediate state of the game, so these features have to be the stock variables in the model. The challenge of modeling is to find and identify the feedback loops that cause changes to these variables and change the state of the game every round.

2.2 Simplifications
In the real game the properties differ in price and rents. My original idea was to use four classes of properties according to the height of their price and rent (and also location on the game board), but this would make the model complicated in my opinion, so I finally decided to neglect those differences and use average property price and rent for all properties. This means that I also neglected the Railroads and Utilities and merged them with the ordinary Lots. Also the purchase price of the houses and hotels vary according to the property on which the house is about to be built, but when I use average property price, I have to use average house price as well. In addition, a hotel simply represents an equivalent of five houses, so I do not model houses and hotels separately, but I have merged them together into one stock and have increased the number of available houses in the game about the equivalent of the excluded hotels. In the real game a player can purchase houses only when he completes a monopoly (all lots from one color), but with the introduced concept of average property it is not possible to determine whether a player has achieved a monopoly or not. According to my experience with the game, the players are trading the purchased properties one with each other, so owning more than five properties gives a high probability of owning a monopoly. Therefore I assume in the model that if a player owns more than five properties, he can build houses on them. Here another impreciseness occur, that in the model the player can virtually build a house on any property owned (not only on monopoly properties), but this is compensated by computation of average rent collected by a particular player, which will be described in part 4. Another issue is mortgaging of the owned properties. The mortgage allows players to borrow some money from bank, but it also lowers their incomes as they cannot collect rents on the mortgaged properties. In my experience, the mortgages occur mainly in two cases. Firstly, in the beginning of the game, when the players are purchasing a lot of properties and want to purchase another one even though they dont have enough cash. And secondly, in the end of the game, when the loosing players try to survive, have to pay high rent dont have enough cash and dont want to sell properties or houses. Because Vensim is not a time-discrete event simulator, it is nearly impossible to implement something like selling or buying one whole property at a time, so my model in fact allows buying properties part-by-part and missing cash is not that much limiting factor for the purchase of the properties any more. If the player gets into trouble in the end of the game, the mortgaging of properties hardly ever helps due to reinforcing feedback loops described in part 3. It can rather extend the game about a few rounds. Regarding the aim and scope of the model, I have left the mortgaging out, because in my opinion it would only bring complications to the model (there cannot be any houses on the mortgaged property etc.). Instead of mortgaging, players sell the houses/properties to the bank. The trade of properties between players is assumed to happed in background and is not modeled, because when the players are reasonable, the trades have at least approximately the same outcome for both trading sides and just enable the players to achieve monopoly.

I am also not modeling the jail. Going to jail in the beginning of the game can cause problems to the player because he might not manage to buy that many properties as his opponents, which will cause him problems in further phases of the game. On the other hand, in the late phases of the game, it can be even useful to go to jail, because one doesnt have to pay any rents, but can collect the rents from owned properties. Going to jail is purely a question of luck, so I decided not to include it into the model, even though the implementation would not be too complicated. It would just mean stopping players expenses, property and house acquisition for the rounds spent in jail. Including jail into the model would for example enable me to study influence of going to jail in different phases of the game, but thats not my point. Community Chest and Chance cards have been omitted, too. There are some which can help the player to get some cash, as well as the ones that force the player to pay something, so they cancel out overall. Furthermore the cards of type go to have no sense if I am not modeling every concrete property separately. As shown later in parts 3 and 4, my model uses the same structure for every player. There are lots of dependencies and flows between particular players. With growing numbers of players the number of such dependencies grows and because Vensim does not provide any kind of subsystem creation as known for example from Simulink, the maintenance of the model gets really lengthy with higher number of players (every change has to be made for every player separately). It would be good to have the possibility to change number of players participating in the game, but Vensim is not the right simulation tool then. As a result, I have assumed that the number of players in the game is four. It is at once many enough to show the dynamics of the game and little enough to preserve some reasonable complexity of the model.

3 Finding fundamental feedback loops

In previous part I decided what to model and what to omit, so the next step was to think further about the dependencies of all the included variables. In fact there is a strong interaction between the players, but in the first step I extracted the dependencies for one player. Simplified causal diagram for one player with marked important reinforcing and balancing loops is shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1 Simplified causal loop diagram for one player

Monopoly is a kind of a path dependent system [5], which means that if the player starts to win (or lose), his situation gets even better (or worse) thanks to the reinforcing feedback loops and for the other players it is nearly impossible to change anything about that. Here it is obvious that the reinforcing loops can work both ways positive and negative, which is very important.

3.1 Loops description

R1 The more cash the player has, the more properties he can afford to buy (either from bank or other players), which increases his incomes from every round, because other players will step on his properties more often. This loop also causes a non-minimal phase behavior, which is typical for investment. At first, there is a drop of cash when purchasing the property, but the investment returns back later in a form of higher incomes. R2 Similar to the R1 with the only difference that the houses increase the rent collected and not the frequency of collection. In fact buying houses is also influenced by the number of properties owned (the more properties, the more houses can be purchased), but the causal diagram could become unclear so I left this arrow out. R3 The more properties the player owns, the more often he lands on his own properties where he doesnt have to pay rent, which decreases his expenses and allows him to buy even more properties. R4 If the player collects high rents from others, they cannot invest as they would like to, which decreases expenses of the player, who has more extra cash and can invest even more massively. B1, B2 Two balancing loops based on the fact that the player has to spend money on property and house acquisition.

In the beginning of the game when everyone buys properties, the levels of cash drop, because the balancing loops are dominant. In further phases of the game when there are no more available properties and the offer of houses is also limited, the balancing loops are weakened and the reinforcing loops prevail. (If the reinforcing loops wouldnt prevail, the game could end up in equilibrium and there would be no winner.)

4 Model structure and specifications

The model is not very complicated, but it has quite complex structure due to player interactions. At first I tried to model everything at one place, but it turned out that the model would be very confusing. I therefore divided the model into five views with use of shadow variables. The first view contains the constants, lookups and level variables common for all players, whereas the other four views contain the player-specific variables and structures for respective players. As the players models are using the same structure, also the variables are named the same and differ only in the player index number.

4.1 Common part of the model

The common part of the model is shown in Figure 4-1. It describes the bank limited resources (available properties and houses) and defines constants that are reused for all players. Ill briefly describe common constants and variables. Still playing is number of players that have not bankrupted yet and is used for rent 4

collection computation. Buying strategy-* are lookup variables that are used to determine the players behavior depending on the cash he has. Average rent, property and house price, Total properties and houses were determined from the original game. House-rent dependence is a lookup describing the multiplicative coefficient of rent collected on players properties in dependence on average number of houses per property.
Available houses= INTEG (Players selling houses-Players buying houses,Total houses) Available properties= INTEG (Players selling properties-Players buying properties,Total properties) Average house price=125 Average number of rounds to pass through start=4 Average property price=200 Average rent=20 "Buying strategy - aggressive"([(-1000,0)-(1000,10)],(-1000,0),(0,0),(0,1),(1000,1)) "Buying strategy - careful"([(0,0)-(1,1)],(0,0),(0.107034,0.0921053),(0.223242,0.219298), (0.293578,0.346491),(0.409786,0.596491),(0.522936,0.828947),(0.602446,0.929825), (0.706422,0.982456),(1,1),(1000,1)) "Buying strategy - less aggressive"([(0,0)-(1,1)],(0,0),(0.0611621,0),(0.1,0.5),(0.12844,0.741228), (0.155963,0.842105),(0.192661,0.899123),(0.247706,0.929825),(0.492355,0.964912),(1,1),(1000,1)) "House - rent dependence"([(0,0)-(10,60)],(0,1),(1,5),(2,15),(3,37.5),(4,46.25),(5,55)) Income from pass through start="Pass-through-start cash"/Average number of rounds to pass through start Initial cash=1500 Min properties for house=5 "Pass-through-start cash"=200 Players buying houses=Buying houses1+Buying houses2+Buying houses3+Buying houses4 Players buying properties=Buying properties1+Buying properties2+Buying properties3+Buying properties4 Players selling houses=Selling houses1+Selling houses2+Selling houses3+Selling houses4 Players selling properties=Selling properties1+Selling properties2+Selling properties3+Selling properties4 Still playing=IF THEN ELSE(Portfolio1 > 0, 1 , 0)+IF THEN ELSE(Portfolio2 > 0, 1 , 0)+ +IF THEN ELSE(Portfolio3 > 0, 1 , 0)+IF THEN ELSE(Portfolio4 > 0, 1 , 0) Total houses=82 Total properties=28

Figure 4-1 Common part of the model (bank resources, constants, lookups)

4.2 Player-specific part of the model

Splitting model into several views brings better legibility, but on the other hand some of the dependencies may not be that obvious because of the use of shadow variables. As the views for particular players differ only in the strategy lookup variable, I only present one sample view in Figure 4-2 with its specifications below.

Figure 4-2 Player-specific part of the model

Average rent paid by4=IF THEN ELSE(Others owned properties4 > 0, (Average rent paid to1*Owned properties1+Average rent paid to2*Owned properties2+ Average rent paid to3*Owned properties3)/Others owned properties4, 0) Average rent paid to4=IF THEN ELSE(Portfolio4 > 0, Average rent*"House - rent dependence"(House per property4), 0) Buying houses4=MAX(0, MIN(Extra cash4/Average house price, MIN(Owned properties4*5-Owned houses4, IF THEN ELSE(Owned properties4<Min properties for house, 0, MIN(Available houses /4, (Owned properties4-4)*Willingness to buy houses4))))) Buying properties4=MAX(0, MIN((Cash4-Paid to others4)/Average property price, MAX(0, Available properties/Total properties*Willingness to buy properties4))) Cash4= INTEG ( Incomes4-Expenses4,Initial cash) Expenses4=MIN(Cash4+Income from pass through start+Paid by others4,To be paid4) Extra cash4=Cash4-Paid to others4-Property cost4 House cost4=Buying houses4*Average house price House per property4=IF THEN ELSE(Owned properties4 <= 0, 0, Owned houses4/Owned properties4)

Income from selling houses4=0.5*Average house price*Selling houses4 Income from selling properties4=0.5*Average property price*Selling properties4 Incomes4=Income from pass through start+Paid by others4 Others owned properties4=Owned properties1+Owned properties2+Owned properties3 Owned houses4= INTEG (Buying houses4-Selling houses4,0) Owned properties4= INTEG (Buying properties4-Selling properties4,0) Paid by others4=MAX(0, Owned properties4/Total properties*Average rent paid to4* (Still playing-1))*Visiting chance4 Paid to 4=Paid to others1+Paid to others2+Paid to others3 Paid to others4=Average rent paid by4*Others owned properties4/Total properties Portfolio4=Cash4+Owned houses4*Average house price+Owned properties4*Average property price Property cost4=Buying properties4*Average property price Selling houses4=MAX(0, MIN(Owned houses4, 2*(To be paid4-Expenses4)/Average house price)) Selling properties4=MIN(Owned properties4, 2* (To be paid4-Expenses4-Income from selling houses4)/Average property price) To be paid4=Property cost4+Paid to others4+House cost4 Visiting chance4=RANDOM NORMAL( 0.5 , 1.5 , 1 , 0.3 , 4 ) Willingness to buy houses4="Buying strategy - less aggressive"(Extra cash4/Initial cash) Willingness to buy properties4="Buying strategy - less aggressive"((Cash4-Paid to others4)/ Initial cash)

The player-specific part is more complicated than the common part, so Ill give a description of the purpose of the variables. The core of the model is formed by the level variables representing the wealth of the player. The Cash is changed by money flows Incomes and Expenses. The Incomes consist of several parts. Firstly, the money the player gets every time he passes through start, secondly the money he collects every round from rents paid by the other players and finally also the money from selling owned houses and properties. However, the last named had to be removed from the equation for Incomes because of reasons described in section 6. The money Paid by others are proportional to the fraction of properties the player owns (in fact probability that the others step on some of his properties), average number of Houses per property, which determines the height of Average rent paid to the player and the number of players that are still playing (have not bankrupted yet). Obviously, when there are four players in the game, the player can collect three times more money per round that he would collect if there were only two players under the same circumstances. In addition, Ive added a random factor called Visiting chance to differentiate the players with the same strategies. Of course, in the real game, two players with exactly the same strategies wont be doing same due to their good or bad luck. This is being modeled by the Visiting chance, which is a random variable with normal distribution (mean value is 1) and acts as a multiplicative factor for the money collected on rents every round (Paid by others). The players with the same strategies would achieve exactly the same results without the random variable, which is undesirable. As well, a random factor could be added to the expenses, but it is unnecessary. The Expenses consist of investments into properties and houses and the money Paid to others, which represent the rents that the player pays every round when stepping on opponents properties. The money Paid to others is proportional to the fraction of the properties owned by the other players (Others owned properties) and the Average rent paid by the player, which is determined as a weighted average of average rents collected by the other players, where fractions of owned properties of respective users are used as weights. To ensure that the Cash doesnt go negative, the Expenses have to be limited. There occurred some problems with this limitation that I successfully solved and are described in section 6.

The Owned properties represent the number of properties the player managed to acquire. Buying properties depends on the fraction of properties that are still available for purchase (in fact probability that the player steps on a property without owner) and on the Willingness to buy properties. The willingness is driven by the spare cash that the player can invest into properties and his buying strategy. Therefore the Willingness to buy properties (together with the Willingness to buy houses) implements the strategy of the player. That is reasonable because the player can influence the game only by decisions of a kind what to buy, whether to buy or when to buy. In real game the players decisions not only depend on the spare cash he has, but also on other factors like the situation of the other players, actual position on the game board etc. However, the model behaves well even with this simplified decision making. Selling properties is considered to be the last possibility to cover expenses, which means that if the player does not have enough cash, he first sells houses and he doesnt sell properties until he runs out of houses. The reason is obvious selling properties increases probability of stepping on others properties, which would even increase the expenses. In my model the properties are considered to be sold only to bank for half of purchase price. In real game, the players would rather sell the properties one to another, but in the model I could not decide to which player the property should be sold, so I omitted this possibility even though it can slightly bias the results. The Selling properties is limited to the number of Owned properties so that the value of the stock could not get below zero. Next, Ill describe the Owned houses and related variables. Buying houses can start when the player owns at least five properties as described in section 2.2. The buying rate is driven by number of owned properties and Willingness to buy houses, which depends on the extra cash that the player can invest after paying rents to the others and after property investments and on the Buying strategy. The same Buying strategy is used for both house and property acquisition. It would be possible to use separate strategies, but people playing the game think of acquisitions as of spending money, not important whether spending them on properties or houses, so the way of thinking is very similar in both cases. In addition, people tend to first buy properties and invest into houses later, that is well described by the model. I use a constraint on the Owned houses number, which drops the Buying houses to zero if the House per property reaches 5 houses (equivalent of hotel). Selling houses takes place whenever the player doesnt have enough cash to pay required rents in the actual round. It is limited, so that the Owned houses could not go negative. Finally, there is the Portfolio variable for each player. It describes the total wealth the player has accumulated in cash and value of owned properties and houses. It is used to determine how many players are still playing (players with 0 portfolio are considered bankrupted). Beside that it is also useful when one wants to observe the overall development of the state of the game.

5 Strategies
There are many strategies how to play the game which can be more or less successful under different circumstances. However, the strong influence of chance can enable anyone to win in the Monopoly game. It would be possible to think of many sophisticated strategies, but implementing any kind of game theory decision making in Vensim, testing and documenting would be very difficult and time demanding, so I decided to base the strategy on the amount of cash the user has available. I also assume that the player has the same

strategy throughout the whole game. In fact, there is put different emphasis on property and house acquisition in different phases of the game. In the beginning it is really important to get as many properties as possible (here also the luck plays significant role), because the one who doesnt manage to buy enough properties, is most likely to have highest expenses on rents in the further phases. After the first phase it is essential to achieve a monopoly and start the house construction to increase collected rents because otherwise the opponents will do so and they will exploit the players resources earlier than he is able to make any kind of investment. On the other hand, it is reasonable to keep in mind possible expenses and maintain some cash reserve, because when one runs out of money, he has to start selling houses and properties, which is wastage of resources, because under pressure the player cannot sell the possessions for the market price, but only for a much lower price. (In my model the possessions are sold to bank for 50% of market price.) I decided to model three different strategies, from which one is reasonable and the two others represent rather extreme cases (extremely aggressive on one hand and careful on the other hand). While experimenting with different strategies during the model development as well as during the games played, it turned out that trying to accumulate too big cash reserves does not make any sense, because if the other players invest, one will lose his cash reserves in some time whatever their height is. Therefore it is optimal to be on the edge of having enough money to pay the rents to others, but invest the whole rest of cash into properties or houses. The lookup graphs for the three different strategies are shown in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1 Lookup variables for different strategies (Cash/Initial cash ratio on the horizontal axis, Willingness to buy on the vertical axis)

The Aggressive strategy simply buys everything available until it runs out of money. This is effective until the moment when it runs out of money because then the possessions are sold to bank and the player is losing 50% of his investments. On the other hand, the Careful strategy creates unnecessarily high cash reserves and hesitates to invest when the cash level drops. Finally, the Less aggressive strategy stops investments only when the cash drops really significantly.

6 Simulation issues
In this section I would like to describe some difficulties I encountered during the modeling as well as the solutions of the problems. Some of the problems were caused by bad modeling concept, whereas others were caused by the simulation software and its solver. 9

6.1 Stocks value limitation

When I ran first simulations of the working version of the model, it kept being unstable. The reason was that I did not limit the stocks to non-negative values. It is essential for the stability of the model that none of the stocks (Cash, Owned properties, etc.) can go negative. As Vensim does not allow direct limiting of the value of level variables to a certain range, I had to limit the flows connected to the stocks using MIN, MAX and IF THEN ELSE functions.

6.2 Cash leakage

With limitation of flows, the model was not unstable any more, but another problem emerged. None of the players ever bankrupted because their Cash level never reached zero, even though they paid less money than they should have paid. Such situation is should only happen when the player is already bankrupting, because otherwise there is a money leakage. It took me a longer time to find the source of this error. Finally I found out that it was caused by the Expenses flow limitation to a maximum of Cash value. The problem is that the solver adds value of positive inflow (Incomes) at the end of iteration, so the value of Cash at the end of every round was equal to Incomes. Therefore the limit of Expenses has to be set to (Cash+Incomes). However, usage of Incomes in equation for Expenses creates an algebraic loop which disables running the simulation. Finally I excluded Income from selling houses and properties from the equation for Incomes, so they are used just for observing the cash flows in the model now (properties and houses are still sold to cover the missing cash, but the incomes from the sale are not included into Incomes, because they are considered to be immediately spent for the rents coverage).

6.3 Time step

The model is using time step 1, which I think is the closest to discrete character of the game. Because there are sometimes minor oscillations due to the time step 1, I also tried decreasing the time step. The oscillations disappeared, but the problem of cash leakage emerged again and again the problem was caused by the solver in combination with the limitation of Expenses. If the time step is smaller than 1, only a respective part of the limit was subtracted from the cash. In the next iteration, however, the limit is re-computed and again only part of it is subtracted etc. As a result, there is an exponential transient with base 1/TIMESTEP instead of bankruptcy and during this transient, the cash is leaking. Therefore I decided to preserve the time step 1, even though some small oscillations can occur. Furthermore, such oscillations can likely occur in the real game as well, because in a real game the players have to purchase whole property at once, which means they are saving cash for that, then they purchase the property (cash drops), then they start to save cash again etc.

6.4 Bankrupt players exclusion

The average income from rents per round for a player depends amongst other factors also on the number of opponents that are still playing. In the very first version of the model I omitted this dependence, which caused a situation when there were two players left and both of them were making more and more money and none of them bankrupted. This problem was caused by the fact that I did not exclude the bankrupt players from the simulation, so that they were virtually still paying rents. This money coming from nowhere caused

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the unlimited growth. This problem was fixed by adding variable Still playing to the model, which indicates how many players have not bankrupt yet according to the values of their portfolios.

7 Testing and validation

I have tested the behavior of final version of the model, as well as the working versions during development, because it is always much easier to find an error after a few changes in the model than look for errors in nearly finished model. I always inspected all the important variables in context and checked that I can understand and explain all changes that were going on. Like this I for example found out that there is a cash leakage because the players were paying less money than they should have paid and didnt bankrupt for several rounds even though they should. I also checked that the values of all variables belong to allowed ranges. I cannot properly validate the model, because I am missing reliable validation data. I have played the game several times not only to understand the main principles, but also to get some real data. I have even forced my friends to play according to the presented strategies, but these data are not representative because of the chance factor in the game. To get representative validation data, we would have to play at least tens of games, which would be very time demanding and also exhausting. If I had the time resources, the validation could be done in a following way: run many simulations with the same scenario and different seeds for the random variables, play many real games according to given scenario and then compare mean statistical data from both sources (e.g. Cash, Properties or Portfolio development throughout the game). With a small set of validation data the validation is not reliable. When everyone refused to play the game, I was thinking of the online versions of the game. The problem of these games is that I dont know the strategy of the opponents, so the data would be useless for me. Neither had I succeeded when looking for some online database of results.

8 Results
8.1 Scenario 1: 1-aggressive, 2-less aggressive, 3 and 4-careful players
The model does not fit the data from real game very much. The only thing that is fitted is the final ranking of the players, because the careful players dont acquire enough properties and the aggressive player destroys himself with too big investments. The development of portfolios is shown in Figure 8-1.

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Figure 8-1 Portfolio development (1..Aggressive, 2..Less aggressive, 3 and 4..Careful players)

Other statistics are shown in Figure 8-2 to give an overview on the simulation. I have no validation data for these, so the data plotted are just simulated data. The game ends in 50th round when the player1 bankrupts, but the simulation ran until the final time which was set to 60 rounds. There is obvious drop in player2s portfolio growth in the 50th round, because from this point onwards he doesnt collect rents from opponents.

Figure 8-2 Statistical simulation data for ALCC scenario

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8.2 Scenario 2: 1-less aggressive, 2,3 and 4-aggressive

I tried to verify this scenario in real games, too, so the portfolio data are compared to validation data.

Figure 8-3 Portfolio development (1..Less aggressive, 2,3 and 4..Aggressive players)

Again, the other statistical data are shown to give overview of the model behavior in Figure 8-4.

Figure 8-4 Statistical simulation data for LAAA scenario

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8.3 Chance influence

Because the system is path dependent, the random noise added through the Visiting chance variables can switch ranking of the players. The sensitivity to chance can be demonstrated e.g. on the CAAA scenario, where player1 is careful and all the others play aggressively. As shown in Figure 8-5 , just a change of seed of the careful players Visiting chance can remarkably change the results.

Figure 8-5 Chance influence (careful player doesnt have to be the first bankrupt)

9 Conclusion
I have familiarized myself with the Monopoly game quite closely and developed a model that behaves reasonably according to my limited experience with the game. The model is enclosed in the archive and it allows simulating any kind of scenario for four players simply by changing the shadowing lookup variables for property and house acquisition. It is also easy to define new buying strategies. I have described the dynamics and dependencies of the game but as I am not an expert monopoly player, I cannot be completely sure about the strategies, which I have estimated. The model has quite clear structure, but the structure is not suitable for higher number of players, because then the model becomes unsustainably large and its maintenance very laborious. From the three presented strategies, the Less aggressive gives the best results as expected. The other two strategies have obvious limits and their success depends on circumstances. However, the Aggressive strategy still gives better results than the Careful one. The model, even though working fine, may still be too simple. Further work would include proper validation of the model, where the main problem is to collect a representative set of validation data. According to the results of the proper validation, it may be better for example to separate Buying strategy lookups for properties and houses, add dependence of strategy on the phase of the game (strategy would change with time), add property mortgaging or player-to-player property trading, which are in my opinion the simplifications that could most influence the results.

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10 References
[ 1] [ 2] [ 3] [ 4] [ 5] John D. Sterman, Business Dynamics, Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. Monopoly Game online. [Online]. http://www.hubworld.com/monopoly/shows/family-game-night/games/monopoly Monopoly Game online. [Online]. http://board-games.uk.pogo.com/games/monopoly# Official Monopoly Rules Page. [Online]. http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm Vensim PLE Simulation Software. [Online]. http://www.vensim.com/venple.html

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