You win at Monopoly by knowing the rules and being a jerk

Played some Monopoly last night. Actually it was 'Transformers Monopoly' - but that's alright. It's Monopoly.

I lucked out early on - picked up the dark purple color-group - Mediterranean and Baltic. I quickly placed four houses on each - more on this in a bit.

As play progressed, I went ahead and gave up some properties in trade to allow others to get color-group matches - I had one other one, the orange - New York, St. James, and Tennessee.

As house purchases took off, I bought as many as I could for my oranges. Someone had the magenta, and another person had the green. Magenta had three houses on most, green had 1 each.

This is where the rules come in.

There are only 32 houses in a Monopoly set. This is intentional and part of the game.

Someone picked up Boardwalk and Park Place, erm, 'Earth' and 'Cybertron', but there were no houses left.

The owner wanted to buy houses. I told them they couldn't. They said why. I said because there are none. They said let's use something else. I said nope it's in the rules.

That player eventually ran out of money.

I built up a nice little stash of about $2000, the other two remaining players each had about $1200 or so, give or take a few hundred.

This is where the rules come into play.

I sold a house off of my purple back to the bank - $25 bucks to me.
I announced that there is a house available to buy.
Someone quickly offerred to buy it. So did the other person.

Auction time!!

Rules say if more than one person wants to buy a house, it goes to auction.

The house was purchased for Pennsylvania Avenue for $600.00.

I sold another house off of my purple back to the bank - $25 bucks to me.
I announced there was a house available to buy.
Someone quickly offerred to buy it. So did the other person.

The house was purchased for Virginia Avenue for $450.00.

So the other players have more houses now - but are low in cash.

The magenta color-group player put up hotels - and would you look at that, houses are availble for sale on the cheap.

As with all Monopoly games, this one ended with a player throwing their money at me and saying 'forget it, I quit, you win.'