First, let it be said that I love Monopoly. I love buying property and building it up, I love that there’s real skill involved, I love how every game’s different, I love that it’s about more than just the role of the dice.

One of the things people always talk about it how it’s strange that some spaces seem to get landed on more than others. St. Charles Place gets tons of business, but Boardwalk hardly seems to get any. Tonight I was motivated enough to see if anyone had ever done a frequency count, and found some interesting results.

It turns out that Illinois is the most frequently landed on space (other than In Jail, which is fairly obvious because you get there by actually going to jail just as often as you do by landing on it), and the Chance between Oriental Ave and Vermont Ave comes up the least often. Park Place is pretty low, too- only 33 out of 41. Very interesting that numbers 41-37 are all Chance or Community Chest- probably because the cards often direct you to another space, so you don’t actually “land” on the original space. Mediterranean Ave. is the least frequently landed upon property- also the cheapest.

Another interesting observation: I noticed that for the yellow spaces, the most expensive property (Marvin Gardens) is ranked signifigantly lower than the other two. It’s 22, the others are 14 and 16. I wonder if this holds true for any of the other colors- I forget which are the most expensive and my board is at school, so I can’t check. I must remember this chart for the next time I play.

Apparently there were some articles about this in Scientific American a few years back. Unfortunately, you have to pay to download them. Alas.