Monopoly Skins: How to Get the Exact Brand Skin You Want

Monopoly skins on Monopoly Online are company logos you wear on your board squares, and nobody can buy them. You earn reward cases by playing. Then you turn what you pulled into what you want in three ways: Craft ten copies into one of the next rarity, trade with other players, or stake up to ten skins on the Upgrader for one exact skin.

Players have opened 5,246 cases so far, and not one of them let its owner pick the brand. Here's how to get from a pile of random logos to the one you actually want on your Technology square.

What a Monopoly skin is

A skin is the logo that sits on a square when you own that company in a game. Our board uses real companies instead of streets (why we built it that way), and every company on it comes in three rarities: common, rare and legendary. You put skins on from your inventory, one per square, and when you buy that company in a game, your logo is the one everybody at the table sees. Skins are cosmetic only. A legendary Apple charges the same rent as a plain one.

Some copies are stars. A star copy counts how often human players land on its square and how much rent it collects, and it earns a bronze frame at 100 landings, silver at 500 and gold at 2,000. Only finished games count, and at most 25 landings per game, so a gold frame means real hours at the table.

How to get cases

Cases come from playing and from nothing else. There's no shop, and no case is ever sold for money. You get one:

• at every 15th level that isn't a rank level (15, 45, 60, 75 and on);
• at every new rank, with a premium case on the bigger ones;
• from the daily streak: play a game a day, and day 3 of the five-day cycle gives a standard case while day 5 gives a premium one;
• from three hard achievements: 250 games played, 50 wins, and 500,000 rent collected over your career;
• at the end of a rated season, depending on your league.

Quests pay XP only, which still moves you towards the next level case. Guests earn cases too but have to register before opening them, so a guest account that's played for a week is often sitting on a case it can't look inside.

What's inside a case

Every new case is either one industry or a cosmetics case, and the card tells you which before you open it. An industry case gives a skin from that group only: an Airlines case is always an airline, a Supermarkets case is always a supermarket. There are ten industries, from Supermarkets to Technology. A cosmetics case gives a frame, a banner, a token, dice or a name colour instead.

Your collection doesn't change what drops. We tried tilting cases towards the brands a player was missing and took it out again, because collectors who wanted one industry kept getting pushed away from it. The rarity odds inside a case aren't published, and the game doesn't show them either.

Craft: ten into one

Craft is the certain path. Pick ten copies of the same rarity and they become one copy of the next rarity: ten commons make a rare, ten rares make a legendary. The ten are used up. Brands and cosmetics craft separately, so ten common frames give a rare cosmetic, never a skin.

What you put in steers what comes out. Each input votes for its industry, so ten Airlines commons always come back as an Airlines rare; mix industries and the result lands in one of them, weighted by how many copies you gave each. A star survives only when all ten inputs are stars. Craft guarantees the rarity. It won't let you name the brand.

Trading skins with other players

Trading is how you get a specific brand without luck, as long as someone has it. You offer skins or cosmetics from your inventory, ask for theirs, and the swap goes through once the other player accepts. It's the same haggling you do over properties during a game, and our Monopoly trading guide covers how to make an offer the other side says yes to.

Two kinds of item can't be traded. Anything earned from an achievement stays with the player who earned it. The standard case from the daily streak gives a skin that's locked for 7 days, which keeps people from farming streaks on spare accounts and passing the results along.

The Upgrader: pick the exact skin

The Upgrader is the only place where you choose the brand, the rarity and even a star before anything is rolled. You put up to ten of your skins on a wheel, pick a target, and the wheel shows your chance before you spin. The stake is spent either way. Win and the target lands in your inventory; miss and you walk away with nothing.

The chance is plain arithmetic: your stake's worth divided by the target's worth. A common is worth 10, a rare 100, a legendary 1,000. A star target counts 20 times its rarity, and a star you stake counts three times. Then each brand gets a market factor, recounted every hour from how many players own it, running from x0.5 for brands almost everyone has up to x2 for brands only a few people hold, so the wheel prices a skin by how hard it is to find.

Two limits sit on top. The chance never goes above 75%, and the wheel refuses anything under 1%. The target also has to be worth more than the stake, so ten plain commons can't go for a single neutral rare.

Craft or Upgrader: which one to use

Use Craft when you want a higher rarity and don't care which brand, and the Upgrader when the brand is the whole point. Ten commons in Craft give a rare for sure, from the industry you fed it. The same ten commons on the wheel buy a 50% shot at a star common of the exact brand you picked, which Craft can never give you.

The 75% cap is the one trap. Below it the wheel is fair in worth: a 30% shot at a skin worth 100 costs you exactly 30. Above it, the extra skins burn for nothing, and eight neutral commons aimed at a neutral rare are worth 80% on paper but roll at 75%. Stake up to three quarters of the target's worth and stop. Spare copies of brands everyone owns count half on the wheel, which makes them the cheapest thing to stake, while your few copies of scarce brands count double, so think twice before you spend those.

Every skin starts with a case, and every case starts with a game. Pick a table in the lobby, or browse the full company list and decide which logo you're going after first.