Some people claim they play games such as Monopoly, Scrabble and others just to have fun, not to win…but let’s be honest, playing games is more fun when we win.

British science writer Tom Whipple interviewed numerous probability ­experts and pored through published research to uncover winning strategies for games ranging from Monopoly to Rock, Paper, Scissors. Here are his secrets for success with seven popular games…

Monopoly. Players purchase properties and try to bankrupt opponents in this famous board game. Smart strategy: Buy the orange properties—that’s New York Avenue, Tennessee Avenue and St. James Place on the traditional American Monopoly board. Build hotels on these properties as soon as possible. If another player snaps up one or more of the ­oranges before you get a chance, try to trade for them. Why orange? Monopoly players end up on the “Jail” square more than they land on any other space on the board…and when they make their first roll after leaving that square, they land on an orange property 39% of the time. No other color property is landed on as often, so owning orange generates lots of rent—and saves you from paying rent when you land there. (It’s worth owning at least one of the oranges even if you cannot complete the set. That at least prevents your opponents from exploiting this orange advantage.)

Also: The light-blue properties—­Oriental Avenue, Vermont Avenue and Connecticut Avenue—offer a good return on investment, too. Players don’t land here as often as on orange, but the light-blue properties are inexpensive to purchase relative to the rents they generate.

Risk. Players compete in dice-rolling “battles” to capture territory in this classic global-conquest board game. Smart strategy: Attack when you face an army equal in size to your own—as long as each army numbers five or more pieces. You already may know that the odds are on your side when your army outnumbers your opponent’s, but most players don’t realize that Risk usually favors the aggressor when armies are evenly matched, too, according to research by a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. The math gets complex, but it boils down to this—as long as each of the evenly matched armies is at least five pieces in size, the attacking side will win more often than not. The larger the armies, the larger the attacker’s advantage—when there are 10 pieces on each side, the attacker has an impressive 57% to 43% edge. The defender has the advantage if there are four or fewer army pieces on each side of the battle, however.

Also: Try to control Australia and/or South America. These continents are the most difficult for opponents to attack.

Scrabble. Players earn points by using letter tiles to spell intersecting words on a game board. Smart strategy: Learn as many of the allowable two-letter words as possible—there are more than 100. Reason: Playing long words might be more impressive in Scrabble, but games often are won because a player knows a two-letter word that lets him/her play a high-value tile on a triple-letter score in a tight space. If you don’t want to memorize dozens of two-letter words, at least remember “QI”—a word referring to a life force in Chinese philosophy. It is especially useful because it lets you play Q, earning at least 10 points, even when you don’t have a U. (Three-letter words containing a Q but no U include QIS and QAT.)

Operation. Players carefully remove “ailments” from Cavity Sam, the game’s pretend patient, without setting off a buzzer by brushing their “surgical tweezers” against the sides of tiny openings. Smart strategy: Hold the tweezers between your thumb and ring finger, with your forefinger resting on top for added support, rather than between your thumb and forefinger the way most players do. This helps steady the tweezers—some real-world surgeons use the technique.

Brace your elbow against the table or the side of your body. When feasible, brace the heel of your hand or your little finger against the table, too. Practice the movement you need to make in the air once or twice before attempting it on Cavity Sam just as a golfer practices his putting motion.

Connect 4. Players drop colored discs into vertical slots in this well-known game—the first to get four of his color in a line up, down, across or diagonally wins. Smart strategy: Set yourself up with three in a line in a spot where the fourth—­winning—disc would have to be played at a height that hasn’t yet been reached in a column that’s still largely or entirely empty. Your opponent probably will notice your three in a row and avoid playing in this column so you cannot get your fourth disc to the height where you need it. (And if you try to fill this column yourself, your opponent likely will block your winning move.) But if you manage to fend off your opponent’s attempts to win, the rest of the columns eventually will fill up, and you and your opponent will have to play discs in this remaining column. Whether you win then comes down to whether you or your opponent gets to play in the space that completes your four. That might seem like dumb luck, but it isn’t—what most players don’t realize is that the player who played the first disc of the game always plays in the odd-number rows in this last remaining column, counting up from the bottom, while the player who went second always plays in the even rows. Remember who played first, and arrange your three in a line accordingly.

Jenga. Players try to remove wood blocks from a tower of blocks without knocking over the tower. Smart strategy: Put your elbow on the table at the base of the tower and use your forearm to brace the tower as you remove a block. Jenga’s rules specify that you can use only one hand…but they do not ban also using the arm that’s connected to that hand in this way. The best proof that this is legal: Leslie Scott, the woman who invented Jenga, uses this strategy herself. But proceed with caution—while bracing the tower with your forearm might win you some games, it won’t win you any friends—many players believe it’s against the spirit of the game even if it isn’t against the rules. If you’d prefer a less controversial strategy, consider trying to nudge one block into a position where it better supports the tower before trying to remove a different block.

Rock, Paper, Scissors. Two players simultaneously select one of the three options listed in the game’s name, with rock beating scissors…scissors beating paper…and paper beating rock. Smart strategy: Choose paper. Scissors is the least-selected option—played just 29.6% of the time, according to The World RPS Society—so paper wins or ties slightly more than 70% of the time.

Related Articles