Mental Floss

The Quick 9: 9 Board Game Odds

By Stacy Conradt

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We're kind of board game freaks in my house. Well, I am, and I sort of force it on everyone else. The thing is"¦ I'm not that good at board games. Maybe discovering some of these odds will help me (and you).

1.

The space you're least-likely to land on while playing Monopoly is

Mediterranean Avenue.

Thanks to the readers who pointed out my previous error - it turns out that the strip of properties after Jail are down there with some of the least-landed on properties on the board because your chances of going to Jail make you skip those properties more often than you would skip the properties on the rest of the board. And of

those

properties on the strip, Park Place is the least-landed on. Mediterranean is still the least-landed on overall. Sorry for the confusion!

2. You can win Candyland in four turns - you just need to draw these cards: Queen Frostine, double purple, double purple, purple. If you don't stack the deck, this only occurs once in every 25,000 games.

3. In Connect Four, the person who gets the most of their pieces in the middle row has better odds of winning.

4. Mrs. Peacock has a slight advantage when it comes to Clue - her playing piece is not only one space closer to a room than any other piece, that room is also one with a secret passage.

5. Don't kid yourself about The Game of Life - it's almost totally luck. Although you can choose to go to college and decide if you want insurance or not, it really doesn't have much to do with the outcome of the game.

6. You can get a Yahtzee in three rolls once in about every 22 tries. The odds of doing it in your first turn is about once in every 1,296 tries.

7. Although Chutes and Ladders can be won in just seven turns, it takes the average person 39.6 attempts.

8. The most landed-on Monopoly property, not including Jail, is Illinois Avenue.

9. In Jenga, assuming each player has perfectly steady hands which means the tower will fall only when it's structurally unsound, starting with a tower of n ≥ 4 layers, the first player can win if and only if n is not divisible by 3. Got that?

Do you guys know of any tips or tricks that might help my batting average on game night?