Socialism: The Game isn't half as much fun.
I was looking for the link to the "Communopoly" board from Cracked where there are 3 gulags, 2 community chests (no chance under communism), and the only property was the leader house. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the link via google image search (although there are a few similar ones out there), so this inadequate verbal description must suffice.
At least it's not as rasist as
Blacks & Whites.
The article's author thinks the game is entirely about chance? Not at all. No wonder he always got beat. There is a ton of strategy that should go into the game. Sure, a bad roll can hurt you, but there's alot more to the game than that.
Monopoly is pretty much entirely chance based.
And most of the rest is getting some gullible fool at the table who will actually trade stuff.
As to the pieces, weren't they just extras from other games that were lying around in the Parker Brothers warehouse when the first boards were produced?
It is an American-style game and your actions are largely dictated by the roll of the dice. You cannot plan to buy X property unless you land on it (and even the most likely roll, 7, only shows up with ~16.7% probability), and the trading mechanic is not very strong given that other players of equivalent skill are going to know the values of the properties and trade away railroads and oranges easily. Unless, of course, you are playing with newbies, but that's like playing Poker with someone who always falls for the bluff and has an obvious tell.
Not to mention it has way too much cash at the game start, and the auction mechanic is drastically underutilized.
For good examples of property-acquisition type games that have much less of a random element (and far more corresponding strategy than complete a set of colored properties and waiting for people to land on them and pay out cash), look at games like
Power Grid,
Factory Manager,
Puerto Rico, and
Ticket to Ride, where the random element is contained and all players take actions based on the same outcome.
Power Grid even has an auction mechanic so despite a random power plant coming onto the market after any purchase, all the remaining players have a chance to bid on it. Hell, even
St. Petersburg falls into that category now that I think about it (and frankly, I'd rather play
St. Petersburg over
Monopoly any day).
Dominion has far more strategy as well, although that's moving more towards the deck-building card games than property-acquisition type games.
Paris Connection, despite its random draw of stocks at the beginning which you should trade away by the end, is the complete opposite end of the spectrum from
Monopoly.
Pretty sure thats wrong. The oranges are second best to the railroads.
I think you are talking about investment recuperation--the railroads pay themselves off the quickest. The oranges are the best by some other metric, I think it's payout if landed on divided by the cost of houses or something else. And given the situations Valka outlined that make the oranges likely places for people to land, combined with their $100 houses over the more expensive ones down-board, the oranges win at this metric.
But there is now an electronic version where all that is taken care of. In one game I managed to get a chance card where I was able to swap one property for Mayfar. I had the other one and naturally I won the game. 
("You are Banned. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200") 
