Custom Monopoly Rules Online: Set Up Your Own Table

You can play Monopoly online with custom rules by opening a Custom table on Monopoly Online. Before the first roll the host sets a dozen things: starting money, the turn timer, when GO salary stops, when the rent tax starts, how long a mortgage lasts, how building works, the third die and two Showdown extras. Everyone reads the changes on the table card before joining, and nothing moves once the dice do.

What you can change on a Custom table

Every setting has a range the game enforces, so a table can't be created with rules that break halfway through. You start from the Classic or Speed values and touch only what you want.

Two of these are tied together. The rent tax can never start before the salary stops, so dragging one past the other moves both, and the editor does that for you instead of letting you build a table it would refuse.

How to create one

Custom tables open at level 5, which is 3,600 XP from a fresh account. Guests can't host them; making an account keeps the level and XP a guest already has, so nothing is lost by signing up later.

1. Open the lobby and pick Custom under the game mode.
2. Choose Classic or Speed as the base.
3. Change what you like. Each setting has a small question mark that explains it in one line, and anything you moved away from the base gets a dot, with a counter and a reset button at the top.
4. Pick 2 to 5 seats and create the table. Empty seats can go to bots.

Under the editor sits a preview: the exact line other players will read on your table card, like "Starting money: 30,000 · Third die: On". If that line says something you didn't mean, fix it before anyone joins.

Which house rules carry over, and which we left out

Most of the house rules people play at home are really one of three wishes: a shorter game, more money, or freer building. All three fit on a Custom table.

A time limit becomes the economy clock. Stop the GO salary at minute 20 and start the rent tax at minute 25, and the money supply dries up early: the tax starts at 50% of every rent payment and climbs 10 points every five minutes, up to 99%, so the money drains out of the game fast. Want the opposite? Push the salary out to minute 120 and the tax to 150, and a four-player game has room to breathe.

More money is the starting cash slider. Building wherever you like is two switches: turn off even building, then turn off the one-build-per-set limit, and a player with cash can put four branches on a single property in one turn.

Some favourites are missing on purpose. There is no Free Parking jackpot, because every coin it hands out keeps a losing player alive, and our game length data says that's exactly what turns a 90-minute game into a three-hour one. Loans between players and no-rent truces aren't there either. Dealing the whole board at the start exists only in Showdown, which always has three players; at two or five seats the split comes out uneven, and a setting we offer has to work at every table size.

Three rulesets worth trying

The lunch break. Start from Speed, set the turn timer to 30 seconds, end the salary at minute 15, start the tax at minute 20 and let the third die join from round 4. By minute 45 the tax takes 99% of every rent, so nobody is still trading for position an hour in.

The builder's table. Start from Classic, raise the starting money to 30,000, switch off even building and the per-set limit. It's a game about where to stack branches, and the first complete colour group decides more than it ever does at 15,000.

Showdown for any table size. Start from Speed, turn on auctioning your own mortgage and the field destruction card, and set buildings to sell back at 75%. You get the Showdown pressure without needing exactly three players. The game modes guide explains what each of those cards does in Showdown itself.

What a Custom game counts for

Custom games are unranked. They don't move your rating, don't count toward achievements or quests, and pay half the usual XP under a separate daily cap. The reason is simple: a table with 50,000 starting cash and a 30-second clock is a different game, and the leaderboard only compares like with like.

Bots still play, on the same rules as everyone else. Their cash reserves scale with the table's starting money, so at 50,000 a bot keeps a cash cushion 3.33 times the one it keeps at 15,000 instead of playing as if it were broke. If you'd rather test a ruleset alone first, fill the other seats with bots; our notes on playing against the computer cover how they think.

One surprise for anyone coming from the box: the default sell-back here is 100%, not the 50% of the printed rules. Set it to 50% if you want the cardboard version's pain back.

Open the lobby, pick Custom, and read the preview line before you press Create. That line is the whole contract with the people who join.