How to play Landlord

Landlord

Go round the board, buy what you land on, and charge everybody else for standing on it. The last player still solvent wins. The site rolls for you and works out every payment, so the only decisions you ever make are the ones worth thinking about.

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The board and the money

Forty squares in a ring, running from a spring at the top of a valley down to the harbour.
Twenty-two of them are streets, in eight sets of two or three. Four are ferries and two are works, the Mill and the Lock. The rest are the four corners, the two tax squares and the card squares.
Everybody starts with 150. Money in this game is a plain number: there is no currency, nothing to pay in, and nothing it converts to.
Pass Start and the bank pays you 20.
The two tax squares take 20 and 10.
Two decks of twelve cards each, Fortune and Post. They move you, pay you, charge you, or hand you a card that gets you out of jail. No card ever takes money from another player, so the only person who can ever owe anything on your turn is you.

A turn

The site rolls two dice for you and moves you. There is no button for it, because there is no decision in it.
Everything that follows from where you land is settled for you too: the rent, the tax, the card, the salary. You are asked only when there is a choice.
Roll a double and you go again. Three doubles in a row and you go to jail instead of moving.
In jail you have three ways out: pay the fine of 5, use a get-out card if you hold one, or roll for a double. You get three tries; fail the third and you pay the fine and move anyway.
Being in jail does not stop you collecting rent, building, mortgaging or trading. It only stops you moving.
When you have finished buying, building and trading, you end your turn.

Buying and the auction

Land on a street, ferry or works that nobody owns and you may buy it at its printed price, from 10 for the first street up to 46 for the last.
If you decline it, it goes to auction at once. Every other player gets one chance to bid, in order, starting on your left.
A bid must beat the one before it, and the first bid can be as low as 1. You cannot bid more than you have.
The highest bid takes the square at what was bid, which can be far less than the price. A square nobody bids for stays unsold.
You do not bid in the auction for a square you declined, and you cannot simply pass on a square without either buying it or declining it.

Rent, sets and houses

Land on somebody else's street and you pay its rent. Land on your own and you pay nothing.
A street on its own charges its base rent. Own the whole set and every street in it charges double, before you build anything at all.
Once you own a whole set you can build. A house multiplies that street's base rent by four, then twelve, twenty-five and thirty-five, and a hotel by forty-five.
Houses go up evenly across a set: you cannot put a second house on one street until every street in that set has one. The same rule runs backwards when you sell.
A ferry charges 3, and 6, 12 or 24 if its owner holds two, three or all four.
The works charge three times the roll that brought you there, or eight times it if one owner holds both.
A mortgaged square charges nothing at all.

Mortgages and debt

Mortgage a square to the bank for half its price. You keep it, but it collects no rent until you lift the mortgage.
Lifting a mortgage costs what you borrowed plus a tenth.
You cannot mortgage a street with houses on it, and you cannot build on a set while any street in it is mortgaged.
Sell houses back to the bank for half what they cost.
Owe more than you have and the game stops and asks you to raise it, by selling houses and mortgaging squares. Nothing else is allowed until the debt is paid.
If selling and mortgaging everything would still not cover it, you are bankrupt. Your money and your squares go to whoever you owed, or back to the bank if you owed the bank, and you are out.

Trades

On your turn you may offer a trade to one other player: squares and money, either way round.
An offer has to move at least one square. Money alone is not a trade, which is what stops a player buying their way out of a debt.
Money can be on one side of an offer or the other, never both.
You get two offers a turn, and a refusal uses one of them up.
Only the player you offered it to is waited on, so a trade never holds up the rest of the table.
You cannot trade a street with houses on it. Sell the houses first.

How a game ends

The game ends when one player is left solvent. There is no lap limit and no points target.
Everyone else is placed in the order they went bankrupt, the last to go out placed above the first.
A game between two players can therefore be short, and a game between four can be very long. A match that stops making progress is ended by the move deadline you chose when the table was made, not by the rules.
A player who resigns or runs out of time is out exactly as a bankrupt player is, and the game goes on without them.

Worth knowing before you start

Two, three or four players. The bot fills the empty seats and plays at one of three strengths, drawn per game from the seed.
The name is after the Landlord's Game, published by Lizzie Magie in 1904, which is in the public domain. The board here, its squares, its two decks and all of its prices are our own.
Building, selling, mortgaging and trading cost you no time at all: the clock only moves when the table is waiting for a decision somebody else can see.
Every price, rent and fine on the board comes from a formula rather than a table somebody typed, so no square is quietly better value than its neighbour by accident.
The dice come from the game's seed, which is published when the game ends, so a finished game can be rolled again and checked turn by turn.
Nothing here is played for money, nothing on the board is a stake, and the site takes none.

The board, the square names, the two decks and every price are our own, and the name is after Lizzie Magie's 1904 Landlord's Game, which is in the public domain. Money in this game is a plain number with no currency attached: it buys nothing outside the board, it converts to nothing, and no square hides a prize. Nothing here is played for money and the site takes none.

Landlord terms

A set: The two or three streets of one colour. Own all of them and their rent doubles, and only then can you build.
A house: A building on a street you own, which multiplies its rent. Four go on a street before a hotel does.
A hotel: The fifth and last building on a street, worth forty-five times the base rent.
A mortgage: Half a square's price, borrowed from the bank against it. The square collects no rent until you pay it back with a tenth on top.
Net worth: Your money, plus what your squares and buildings are worth. It is shown throughout so you can see who is actually ahead.
Bankrupt: Owing more than everything you have could raise. Your money and squares pass to whoever you owed and you are out of the game.

Playing it here

Against a person or the bot. The bot needs no account and starts at once. To play a person, be rated and keep your games, you need an account: an email address and a password.
At your own pace. Every move has a deadline you both see, from one minute to a week. A game can take an evening or it can take a fortnight.
Nothing to buy and nothing to win. No stakes, no prizes, no boosts, no undo. The only thing on offer is a place on a leaderboard, and only if you want one.
Every game can be checked. Anything decided by chance comes from the game's seed, and the seed is published the moment the game ends, so any finished game can be replayed and verified by anyone. See fair play.