Since the dawn of my obsession with board games, which goes back to when I was a child and designing my own board games and card games, I have been trying very hard to kill a certain game.
This game plagues houses and homes, family gatherings and boring nights in with friends.
You know this game. You've played this game. Often you played it because of the will of the group or because you were just that bored or because it had been so long since you played it that you forgot how much it sucks.
Yes, that inescapable family classic: Monopoly.
Ugh.
I've been searching for a Monopoly-killer for some time now. A game that will make Monopoly obsolete in such a way that whenever I have new people play it they will say "Hunh. There's no reason to ever play Monopoly again."
Well, I think I've found it.
Chinatown is not only more versatile, requires more skill, is more fun, more interesting, but it's just a cooler game. Monopoly has it's best feature included as a sidenote - namely that you can trade and make deals with other players. It's a long, plodding game that has too many meaningless notes of random chance.
Chinatown makes this sidenote the meat of the game. In Chinatown, after each player has drawn lots and shop tiles, they enter a trading phase in which anything goes. Yes, anything. You can trades shops, lots on the board on which tiles are placed, or any combination thereof. Shops next to other shops of the same type collect more money during the scoring phase of each round.
That's the game. No rolling a dice and counting. No getting screwed because you randomly landed on some tax space. No, no. This is all about the choices you make with what you have, doing all you can in the face of cutthroat opponents who are looking to get one over and pull into first place themselves. Because at the end of the last round, the person who has the most money wins. Period.
Because each game has a set number of rounds, the game won't go on forever (although some trading rounds may vary in length), unlike Monopoly which can crawl on for hours like a dying man shot in the gut.
Buy If:
You want to kill Monopoly as badly as I do or you're looking for a fun game that is easy to teach but hard to fully master.
Don't Buy If:
Any sort of money game turns you off. I'm inclined to believe that this would be the exception, but at it's heart it's still about buying property (although now it's always from other players instead of mostly from the bank, a change which is not to be underestimated) and makin' 'dem fat stacks.
Conclusion:
Chinatown is a fun, tight little game that is far and away, no comparison, better than Monopoly. It keeps the best part of Monopoly and discards the unneeded and uninteresting parts, leaving a compact game that is built for speed and maximum enjoyability.