To Buy or Not To Buy: The Golden Goose (Golden Egg) Room and the Midas (Golden Touch) Room

To buy or not to buy, that is the question. (Apologies to Shakespeare there).

The ultimate quest in the Monopoly Hotels game is to collect gold, because of the perceived scarcity of gold, which you seem to need oodles of in order to buy the high-producing rooms.

If nothing else about the game had changed and the Golden Egg room were available for 450 gold bars, I absolutely would buy at least one Golden Egg room and I may have considering saving up for a long time to purchase a Golden Touch room.

Today, though, the Monopoly Hotels landscape has changed.

A Golden Touch rooms cost M$250,000,000 and pays out one gold bar and 391,667 experience points every 23 hours, while a Golden Egg room is available right now (for a Limited Time, says the blurb) for 450 gold bars, and pays out 1 gold and 25,000 experience points every 6 hours.

It would seem to be a good bet to at least pick up a Golden Egg room as soon as I can save up 450 gold bars, because then I'd be guaranteed 3 to 4 gold bars every day if I just collect the rent on schedule every 6 hours.

This would have been perfect last week, when it felt like it could take forever to earn just ONE gold bar.

BUT ...

Since the latest update to the game, there are not just the new gold-yielding rooms, but there are also now other, fairly easy and consistent ways to earn gold in the game.

I can earn large sums of gold by purchasing all of each colour of hotel (200 gold bars each for collecting all 3 orange hotels, or all 3 yellow hotels or all 3 green hotels). 

Considering the Golden Touch room (a.k.a. the Midas room), I probably will use the M$ to purchase additional hotels instead, which will make it easier to save up gold (as I said just now, purchasing all hotels of a particular colour now pays you in gold!).

So, for me, no Midas rooms. M$250,000,000 will purchase me a few Microphone rooms in those pricey hotels, too, instead of splurging it all on a Golden Touch room.

I can also earn gold by completing a few other stickers that don't require me to spend gold. 

Like, for example, this one (A Fistful of M$), which earned me 10 gold bars.

But the best part of the latest upgrade to the game is that now, the Community Chest cards give you gold if you roll doubles. Not just double 1s, but ANY set of doubles. 

The laws of probability would imply that you roll double 1s once every 36 attempts, so, rolling any doubles basically implies a 1-in-6 chance of earning gold. Okay, you may wind up rolling double 1s a few times, so earning only one gold bar each time, but you may also wind up rolling double 6s, which earns you 6 gold bars.

So ... even if I get only ONE gold-yielding double-roll on a Community Chest card each day, that's a pretty good return for zero investment of gold (yes, I'd have to play the game at least long enough to roll one double on a Community Chest each day - but my gaming style means that I already do that).

For me, this means that spending the 450 gold bars to purchase the Golden Egg room would simply guarantee me a slightly better gold take-home every day over what I could get simply by collecting gold from the Community Chest cards.

True, that would mean I could get DOUBLE the gold over the day if I collected from the Community Chest cards AND the Golden Egg room.

BUT, I have to give up 450 of the previously-extremely-hard-to-come-by gold bars, so I'm feeling stingy. I really, really, really want one of those Flute rooms.

Last week, a Flute room was a pipe dream, because gold was so hard to come by, and the room costs 1,998 gold bars.

This week? I can easily see saving up the 1,998 gold bars over time, even without the Golden Egg room. It would be faster with a Golden Egg room, though.

So, let's do the analysis.

If I have 450 gold bars today and choose to save it rather than purchase a Golden Egg room, and my average from Community Chest cards is 3 gold bars a day (fairly doable - some days I will only get 1 gold bar from the Community Chest, and some I will get up to 6 gold bars), it will take me 516 days to earn enough gold to buy a Flute Room at full price. 

That assumes I complete no other stickers.

516 days. That's ... more than 17 months, almost a year and a half. 

Yikes.

If, instead, I choose to buy a Golden Egg room, then I have to start saving again from scratch.

The Golden Egg room would take at least 150 days (assuming I can only collect about 3 gold bars a day - sleep being a regrettable necessity) to pay for itself, i.e., to earn 450 gold bars at 3 gold bars per day.

Ignoring that, my total average take home per day would be 6 gold bars, assuming a daily average of 3 gold bars from the Golden Egg room and 3 from the Community Chest. 

At that rate, it would take me ... 333 days to save up enough gold to buy a Flute room.

Oh.

Now I see why doing math is so important. :P

At first glance, I was completing rejecting the Golden Egg rooms as being not worth the expense.

Even *with* the Golden Egg room, it seems like it will take a loooong time (almost a year) to save up enough to buy a Flute room. But that is still a lot less than it will take without the Golden Egg room. About 33% faster.

Okay, I guess if I can save up the 450 gold bars to buy a Golden Egg room before the price goes up to whatever the final price is, I may just go ahead and buy one!

Of course, if gold rooms go half price again any time soon, this entire analysis would be moot.

So, let me figure out the math for that.

At half price, the Flute room costs 999 gold bars.

I again will assume I start with 450 gold bars saved.

No Golden Egg room would mean needing an additional 549 gold bars, which, assuming I collect 3 gold bars a day from the Community Chest, will take me ... 183 days, which is just over 6 months.

If I start out by buying a Golden Egg room, then collecting the 999 gold bars (again assuming 3 gold bars each day from the Community Chest and 3 from the room) will take me 166 days, which is about 5 and a half months.

It seems the bottom line is that it does make sense to buy a Golden Egg room, even if the gold rooms go to half price.

So that's going to be my first purchase when I have saved up 450 gold bars, I guess. It will help that I will also be collecting gold from the stickers (I think I am close to collecting 25 gold bars for catching the burglar (or "jailbird" as per EA) 100 times ... I should have my Golden Egg room by next week for sure.

Note: The Golden Goose / Golden Egg Room has been retired as of September 28th, 2012- you can no longer purchase this room in the Monopoly Hotels game - this is now a collector's item room: if you have it, you have it, and if you don't, you're just out of luck.