Get rich cheating in our (educational) tax dodgers version of monopoly

The holiday season is upon us, which for the millions of dust-covered board games that have spent the year hibernating in cupboards and cabinets means making the annual pilgrimage to the family dinner table to collect the biscuit crumbs and greasy finger stains they need to sustain themselves for another a year.

In honour of the annual cardboard migration, we’ve created the ‘Tax Dodgers Rules’ that you can play with using your own copy of a monopoly game. Cheat your way to extreme wealth and (hopefully) learn about how the rich and powerful abuse tax and hide their wealth from the rule of law. You can buy secrecy layers to hide your money from the players you owe money to and avoid paying tax. And you can establish beneficial ownership registers to expose your opponents’ secrecy layers. But be careful, there’s only so much wealth you can hoard for yourself before society collapses – and all players lose.

Of course, our suggestion is just to have some fun, and is nothing to do with the game Monopoly itself. The publishers of Monopoly have in no way endorsed this. Mind you, we’d like to think that Lizzie Magie – the original game designer, when it was first called The Landlord’s Game – might well have appreciated what we’re doing here. Magie was a feminist and a Georgist (a follower of Henry George, who had some interesting ideas about tax), and the point of the game was to make the case for land value taxes.

Here are the rules below (you can download these as a PDF – or as a word doc with working links). You can also download the printable ‘Tax cards’ here, which you’ll need for the game. Have fun!

Download the rules as a PDF.
Download the printable ‘Tax cards’.

Enjoy!