Original Release: Scopely, 2023, Android/iOS
Review by: C. M0use
If there’s any purpose to this review, it’s an advisory to those who have been blasted by the absolute tsunami of advertising this game puts out and think they might be getting some kind of mobile version of Monopoly if they download it. You are not, this is not Monopoly. It’s the skin of Monopoly draped over some of the most clever and successful repackaging of slot machine mechanics and addiction triggers ever, at least going by its financial success.
This faux-Monopoly is barely even a game and yet, as of this writing in 2026, has raked in $6 billion over its lifetime at a current clip of about $200 million per month, which almost entirely comes from in-game purchases by players. The reason you can’t escape ads for it, and the ads have some fairly substantial celebrities in them and crossovers with every big property under the sun, is that about $1 billion of that money, or about a sixth of what it has taken in lifetime, has been turned right back around to commercials and new player acquisition.
Real-world casinos that are struggling to get people to their gaming floors should be taking notes. But what is Monopoly Go actually doing? Well, all it really did was pay Hasbro $44 million a year to put the skinsuit of Monopoly over a collection of dice-centered mechanics that can be traced all the way back to some early 2010s Facebook games, but really coalesced with 2016’s Coin Master and direct 2017 evolution of the concept Board Kings. 2020’s Dice Dreams did most of the direct labor for Monopoly Go, though, it’s almost a direct copy of that game’s mechanics to a pretty shameless degree. Don’t feel too bad for Dice Dreams, though, it’s still made almost $1 billion on its own while also totally sucking.
It’s tough to pin down exactly why you can make big money with this formula with an original IP, but it becomes INSANE money when painted over with Monopoly. People do just go “berko”, as my Australian buds would put it, for the Monopoly brand in general, I mean look at that annual game that McDonalds has been wheeling out for 30 years now. It is a way to crack the door with normies who would otherwise ignore ads for some weird cave hippo thing slingshotting itself into buildings or whatever after rolling dice. But why do people stick with it after seeing it’s not even really a game, let alone shovel money into it like the furnace is going out?
The gameplay loop is effectively a disguised slot machine. You get a limited amount of “dice” for free, which you roll to move around the board. You simply roll around and collect cash for landing in various places, occasionally losing a little when you hit the tax squares or Go To Jail. You’re not playing against anybody else, at least in the traditional Monopoly sense, so what’s the cash for? Well, each board is a level set in a real-world city. The goal of the board is to build out six landmarks from that city, each of which has six stages of increasing cash spend.
The thing that seems to tip this over the edge into massive success is that there is some indirect competition in the building aspect. When you land on the railroad squares, you go into a bonus game. This is either a seasonal cooperative event, or more likely one of the two competitive mainstays – Bank Heist and Shutdown. Bank Heist selects another random player to steal cash directly from, which you’re guaranteed to get when the event lands, it’s just a question of how much (determined by playing a simplified variant of Concentration commonly seen in slot machine bonus rounds long before this game, the Quick Hit games were probably the first to popularize this). Shutdown has you attack one of their buildings-in-progress, which sets it back a level forcing them to spend more to upgrade, but also gives you a cash reward. However, if the player you’re attacking has a stock of “shields” on hand they will burn one to block your atack, sparing their building and limiting you to a much smaller reward.
The shield thing is one of the diabolical clever mechanics for spiking player engagement, as you replenish your stock by being in-game circling the board. So the longer you’re offline (or bereft of dice rolls), the more likely your shield stock will wear down and you’ll be exposed. That was present all the way back in some of the early Facebook games that led to this, however. As to what specifically makes Monopoly Go such normie catnip, besides simply the brand, I’m still not entirely sure. None of this really involves “gameplay” of any sort in the traditional sense. You and other players are paired at random for the competitive events, there isn’t like a guild or alliance aspect where you can target each other and go to war. There is a tad of mathematical strategy in that you gain a small expected boost to your earnings over time by employing the “6 7 8” strategy, or taking advantage of the fact that one of these three numbers comes up in 44% of all rolls, to deploy your maximum dice multiplier (burn more dice on the roll to get bigger rewards) when a railroad or something else lucrative like Chance or properties with hotels built out are 6 to 8 spaces from where you are. However, that requires you to actually manually play the laborious repetitive game turn-by-turn instead of leaving it on auto-spin while you do something more productive or fun, so the price of that small edge may actually be the melting of holes in your brain over time.
One benefit that can be derived from the game’s GDP-of-an-island-nation advertising budget is that it is a fixture on GPT offerwall sites, so you can get paid for playing it. However, be cautious here. It’s often near the top of offer totals, but most of the big money comes from “rush goals” that absolutely require spending some money up front to secure enough dice to get there in time. Not two hours into the game I had a stock of over 100 dice wiped out by a glitch, met with first time-wasting incompetence and then excuse-making indifference by an India-based chat agent pretending not to be an India-based chat agent. Fortunately I was just testing the game out at that point and hadn’t invested anything yet, so I cashed out relatively cheap with just two hours or so wasted exploring it, but after seeing that I absolutely would not advise giving these people any real money. Boy is it nice to run unregulated grey market casinos though, you can just make the player’s coin-in disappear randomly and there are no consequences!
Videos
If you bother to turn the sound on the map music sounds vaguely like something from the original Monkey Islands, the composer isn’t credited but if it was Michael Land, hey man get your bag you deserve it brotha