Monopoly strategies

I know I will live to regret giving away all my Monopoly strategy secrets (maybe not all of them! heheheh) because my sister Michelle will use every advantage to beat me.

Here are some methods I have learned over hundreds and hundreds of Monopoly games. Yeah, we played it a lot. So sue me, we were both entrepreneurially-minded children since both of our parents ran their own companies. Plus there were only 2 channels on TV.

Here goes, they're worth their weight in gold (or orange $500 bills):

Buy railroads and utilities - they are cash cows, especially once you get more than one.
Light Blue (Connecticut) is a good set to own early in the game because it's cheap to develop.

Light Purple (St. Charles) and Red (Illinois) are really good because Light Purple is cheap to develop and both sets have cards that send people to one of the locations in the set.

Orange (New York) is effective for much the same reason as Light Purple. People get sent to jail and when they get out, they are likely to land on Orange.

The Green (Pennsylvania) and Dark Blue (Boardwalk) are expensive to develop but can put someone out of the game.

Don't go to 4 houses or hotels unless you have a lot of extra money or cannot develop any other sets.

3 houses is your best value for cost to develop versus rent revenue.

Those are land ownership strategies. Other strategies include:
- being able to trade well to complete sets -- think more than one trade away if playing with more than one other person. You may be able to put together a 3-way deal that hopefully benefits you at least as much as the others, if not moreso.
- Mortgaging to buy houses to take advantage if your opponent's coming up to your properties. If your opponent just passed your houses and you are getting near theirs, don't buy houses. Wait until the chance of them landing on you is higher, as they get closer.

Sometimes the dice rolls work for you, sometimes they don't. By following some of these strategies that I developed by playing many, many games of Monopoly growing up -- we only had 2 TV stations to watch when I was a kid and we lived out in the boonies with only my sister and I around -- you can reduce the effect of luck in the dice rolls. Have fun!