Monopoly. Gambling or Trading game?
So one thing I enjoy is games and exploring the core concepts and skills they test when taken to high levels. One thing that nearly all games have in common is the concept of trading.
Now trading in a traditional sense could be two parties coming to a mutually agreeable set of terms to net benefit of both parties. In most competitive games however, trading isn't mutually agreeable. In Chess say, both players start with the set of pieces. Each turn a player is trading positional advantage for material advantage, or vice versa. Sometimes a player may initiate a trade by taking a piece. The opposing player may even the trade up by taking a piece back of equal value. The most common example of this is in Chess, where it's rare to not trade Queens. You don't want to give up your queen without getting a significant material or positional advantage out of it.
So onto Monopoly, it has a trading element core to the rules of the game. Players can make trades for property, cash at any time. The main reason to do this, is to gain a cash advantage or material advantage over your opponent. Now, a lot of people when they play monopoly use a flow of logic when it comes to trades along this line. "I don't want to trade with you, because you're making this trade to get an advantage over me, no matter how much you are seemingly offering me". So if there's no trading, then monopoly is really a game of chance, you're hoping that your dice rolls are favourable on average, and the opponents are unfavourable on average.
Where it gets interesting, is that monopoly is what I'd call a 'solved' game. A number of people have calculated the probabilities of landing on any given square, the average number of rolls for a certain investment in a set of properties to pay off. The limitations on human players would to be to remember and evaluate all the tables of data to know the likelihood of winning from a given board position. So taking it to the next level, let's suppose that we have perfect players that know all the probabilities for any given game state to calculate a winner. Trading properties then becomes simply betting. Investing heavily into mayfair and boardwalk has a low probability of paying off, so most people wouldn't make it, but it essentially becomes an agreement between players that in the next x dice rolls Player A thinks they wont land on it, and Player B thinks they will.
http://www.amnesta.net/other/monopoly/
http://www.tkcs-collins.com/truman/monopoly/monopoly.shtml
I think it's interesting that many games and sports rely on limitations in various skills or abilities to make them fun. Monopoly can be fun because most people are incapable of correctly evaluating the probability of any given player winning from a certain position, but even taken to the extreme, it's betting on dice rolls.