Monopoly vs. Settlers

Russell Roberts of Cafe Hayek has a great short analysis of the loopy economics of the board game Monopoly, which he delivered as an NPR commentary yesterday. And better still, he references Settlers of Catan, a game much-beloved of libertarians that a roommate (now an econ prof out in California) introduced me to back in college. One of the things I always liked about the game was that the existence of a trading mechanism encouraged players to play all sorts of coalition strategies, with tit-for-tat style mechanisms for punishing defectors, that create a much richer sort of play than the relatively simple rules might suggest.