The jargon for this is a "comeback mechanic" - game designers have to be cautious with them though, as if the final round can flip the results too easily what was the point of all the other rounds?

In "Power Grid" (a power plant building game) the turn order is recalculated every round based on how well the player is doing, with the players doing worst getting more chances to bid in power plant auctions and being first to buy on the fuel market.

In "Flamme Rouge" (a cycling-themed game) a 'drafting' mechanic means the leading player has to add 'exhaustion' cards to their hand, much like riders in real races try to slipstream behind the race leaders.

In "Suburbia" (a city building game) victory points are 'population' but as you move up the population tracker, you cross red lines that reduce your income and reputation.

In 'Trans-America' (a railroad-building game) points are scored by connecting cities, and it's easy for a naive player to connect 4 cities before a lucky expert player connects 5 and ends the round. This creates the impression of a close game as the best and worst players will be within 20% of each other.

And of course, the other option is: A scoring system so baffling and opaque, nobody can work out who's in the lead until the calculators come out at the end.

A countervailing pattern I've seen (in games with 3+ players) is that, if one player pulls into a lead, then the other players will start piling on them. Board games like Avalon Hill Civilization, Family Business, Root, etc. -- basically any game where you can choose one of your rivals to attack.

Munchkin takes this to the extreme, where someone will perpetually be on the edge of winning and there are a variety of colorful ways to set them back. It's random and chaotic by design.

Monopoly doesn't really involve such a mechanic. You can refuse to trade with someone who is pulling ahead, but by that time it is more likely to be too late.

Yes, it is even pretty much a design principle for newer board games [1]. It started to become popular with games like Settlers of Catan.

[1] https://boardgamedesigncourse.com/making-a-comeback/

Dominion is a great example of this. For most games (depending on which cards are played there may be differing victory conditions) the way you win the game is by obtaining Province cards and adding them to your deck. These are worth a lot of points, but have no actual utility in the game (where most of the cards you are adding to your deck let you do things like draw more cards or gain resources). So as you get closer to winning, the composition of your deck becomes worse and worse, and you become less and less likely to be able to purchase more Provinces.

There are certainly games that have negative feedback loops for leading players. Some Ludo variants make it progressively harder for players to make valid moves the more pieces they brought home, for example by forcing the player to move to an empty home field with an exact dice roll.

Generally, I'd say that if you have a game that regularly ends in close finishes it's likely either very random or it contains negative feedback loops.

Heaps of board games have some kind of disadvantages for being in front (eg power grid makes you bid first at auction and buy scarce resources last).

"Imperial" - the best boardgame of all, in my opinion[1]- largely circumvents having a comeback mechanism by making the game scores being a dynamic result of all player interactions until the very end. You typically only know for sure whos about to win in the last round but (very importantly) it does not feel random at all (there is virtually no luck, no dice, no card decks)

In short, its a light wargame in which the players control the nations - but they are not the nations. They are investors who buy bonds in the nations and the player with most investments controls (governs) that nation. Controls shift during the game and war is _not_ the objective. Profiting from your nation(s) is.

Do check it out. The game is well reviewe and still critically underrated

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24181/imperial

> Is there a board game where one's advantage doesn't compound, though?

The thing is, it's not usually such a zero-sum game as it is in Monopoly.

In better designed games, there's more opportunity cost associated when you start optimizing for something. Individual players can pursue their own, different strategies. A player who optimizes for "strategy A" might be weak to "strategy B." Getting the resources for "strategy B" might become easier, since there's less competition for them.

The trick to Monopoly is that there is no alternate strategy. Opting to (or being unable to) buy land doesn't open up some other path through which you can win - it just means you're going to lose.

I used to play the MAD (magazine) board game as a kid. It's pretty good. Pretty crazy, not surprisingly. A lil like Monopoly except the pick-up cards involve doing weird things, or telling every player to pass their money to the player on their right or left, which happens so often that you never are winning for too long.

Yes. As others have pointed out, it’s more and more common these days - or at least more common to have a situation where the players aren’t entirely sure who is ahead.

Examples include: * Innovation * Wingspan * 7 Wonders * Brass: Birmingham (and the original Brass, too)

All really fun games, too.

Chutes and Ladders

That's because when it was corporatized, they intentionally took out the message. The Landlord's Game became Monopoly. The Poor House became Jail. References to wages and necessity taxes were removed. The anti-monopolist rules were removed entirely.

To be fair, the history of capitalist owners of Monopoly have had reason to "dull" the original design. The Landlord's Game included two rule sets and encouraged players to play both then compare/contrast. The second Georgist rule set hasn't been included in the official rulebook in decades, but was a key part of the original design. (It's intentionally dull to play the other rules, but it was the stark contrast that was a key part of its attempt to be a teaching tool.)

There's also been another force "dulling" Monopoly's game design over time: most people don't learn Monopoly from the rules, they learn Monopoly from playing with others. There are a lot of viral (mimetic) multi-generation "house rules" that people learn from their families/peers/educators. There's also a couple of key clear rules that remain in the rulebook that people don't follow for a number of reasons, including essentially culturally "we forgot them".

(There's some interesting meta-commentary on Capitalism and its attempts at "fairness" band aids in the house rule dialects that have accumulated over time. There's some interesting meta-commentary on Capitalism regulations, banking, and/or dumb luck in the rules that have been "forgotten".)

In some ways, some of the almost willful cultural ignorance of the message of Monopoly is its own ironic statement on the systemic problems of Capitalism and how much people complicit in that system want to wish things fair or ignore their complicity and try to just cope with the problems and their fallout. I wouldn't necessarily call that "universally misunderstood", that's a pretty deep understanding, even if accidental. It's generally surprisingly easy to have conversations about it and "wake" people to Monopoly's origins and what it says about the game (and why they love/hate it) because even if they never thought "huh there are interesting parallels to real world Capitalism here" they can definitely see the parallels in hindsight if you want to talk about it.

Perhaps this was different in the past, back when your entertainment for the evening was just to sit around with a few people, read the rules thoroughly, and concentrate. Perhaps even play it several times.

For the current age I think it takes way too much patience. I think movies have changed like that too, the attention economy demands that you get to the point immediately. Heck, I can't even read articles that don't address their headline within the first three paragraphs.

They've actually done that in a psychology study. As in real life, the people with the advantage start inventing reasons why they deserved that advantage, and that it's really fair.

My memory might be inaccurate.

Probably because luck based games are incredibly easy to setup and play for new players. I assume a lot of Chutes/Snakes & Ladders have sold as well.

Well to be honest there is different versions of socialism with different meanings. Some do put personal wealth as more important, or at least indirectly. If it is part of the market socialism side then wealth is used the same way to promote self-interest.

In market socialism the the difference from capitalism is stricter controls on business ownership (i.e. businesses must be coops or something along those lines).

Socialism tries in increase wealth of individuals, just like capitalism does. The difference is that different flavours of socialism want to increase it across the board, where capitalism wants an individuals wealth to be very well protected, especially when the numbers get high, so that wealth may accumulate in few.

I find it fascinating that the original Monopoly game was desgined to teach us the difference and how Georgism (taxing bad behavior) may be used by "the people/democracy" to ensure capitalism is not the outcome.

Also very telling that the game was thn ripped off, and got popular as Monopoly, where the only set of rules are the capitalistic ones.