I was in a meeting the other day and heard a coworker chatting up Settlers of Catan. It seems there was a recent NPR commentary about how Settlers was a better game than Monopoly for teaching kids about economics. Key quote: In Monopoly, getting rich and succeeding in business only comes from exploiting unlucky suckers who randomly enter your life....only Marxists look at the world of capitalism the way the game of Monopoly does—as an unrelentingly gloomy system of exploitation where the rich eventually wear everyone else down. Transcript at the guy's blog.

The piece has raised some entertaining comments at the Cafe Hayek link as well as here. Of course there are several valid reasons not to play Monopoly that have nothing to do with its economic model (and I sorta like the game). Do people even play Monopoly any more? It has been years, literally, since I played it. My gamer friends hate it because it's a predictable, unbalanced roll-move game. My nongamer friends hate it because it starts fights and/or takes too long (usually because of house rules designed to keep people from going bankrupt and getting into said fights). I get the idea that it's now a game to be purchased (there are all those special editions; I have the very nice Simpsons version) instead of played.

Not that Settlers is the perfect game, either. One of my gaming groups likes SoC a great deal. The other almost unanimously despises the Catan universe.