Landlords 1904, a property trading board game based on The Landlord’s Game

[Wuzzy]

For about 5 weeks, I’ve worked on Landlords 1904, a more or less faithful adaptation of the ancient board game The Landlord’s Game (the predecessor of Monopoly). It’s at version 0.1.0 now, an early prototype.

• Check out the game here: Landlords 1904 code repository
• Read the game rules
• Report bugs here: issues
• Version 0.1.0

Screenshot

landlords_1904_v010.jpg (129.27 KiB) Viewed 2465 times

(I know, it’s ugly)

Gameplay

It’s the year 1904. You play as one of 2 to 4 landlords with the goal to be the richest landlord in town. You roll dice, walk around the board, then depending on where you landed, something happens: You may buy a property or start an auction, have to pay rent, draw a chance card, speculate, go to jail, etc.

The game ends after any player collected their wages a number of times. Players cannot go bankrupt in this game; if you can’t pay your bills you instead go into the poorhouse.

One unique feature is the Single Tax. If Single Tax rule is enabled, players can vote to introduce the Single Tax which completely transforms the game: The Public starts to seize control over the properties on the board, later it builds colleges and raises wages.

How to Play

In the console, run

Code: Select all

love .

in the game’s directory to launch the game.

The game can be played either against the computer or against real people at the same computer. However, the second option is less “true” to the original as trading and borrowing work differently and auctions are skipped entirely because I haven’t figured out a good UI for that yet. The whole UI is basically just a dummy anyway and needs replacement.

Oh, and it’s very important you read the RULES.md text file if you want to have any idea what is going on. There is no tutorial or anything.

Development

While I made this game, it turned out the rules of The Landlord’s Game are surprisingly complex; there were many special cases I had to cover. But it was interesting to do. The game rules should work now.

The graphics UI are admittedly terrible, as those are just prototypes. I mainly cared about the game logic. Maybe I do proper graphics in a future update.

I took great lengths to ensure the game logic code in this game is completely “pure”, so it doesn’t depend on graphics, input, etc. This should make it easy for me to replace the graphics.

This is my first ever LÖVE project and this is an exception. You may know me from the Luanti community.

The game is 100% free software (code: GPLv3+, media: CC BY 3.0).

The future?

Ideas for version 1.0.0 are:

• Making proper graphics and UI
• Network support
• Proper UI/controls for when multiple people play at the same computer
• Find the REAL contents of the chance and luxury cards of The Landlord’s Game (because for now, I wrote my own as a replacement)
• Tutorial and/or in-game manual/help

But I don’t even know if I pick up this project again; my main goal (recreating the game rules) has been achieved.