Many people feel that Monopoly is a long, boring game, and their only interest in it is as a target for disparaging remarks.

There are a few people who post here who believe Monopoly can be a good game if people approach it seriously. Negotiating deals is the heart of the game, so the game will fall apart if people refuse to make deals, or if some people make stupid deals (perhaps deliberately in order to throw the win to someone just to get the game over with, as somebody else suggested).

I'm in an odd sort of middle camp. I have fond memories of the game from (a) playing it with my family and later (b) playing it with two friends as teenagers. Now that I've been exposed to a wider variety of games, I'm interested in trying it again to see if I still feel it's a good game. Alas, most of the other people in my gaming group fall in the first category and can't be bothered to try it. The one time in the past 20 years that I insisted on playing it (probably at my birthday party or something, so I could choose a game without regard to what other people wanted), everyone else decided that as long as we were trying it, what the heck they'd all give it a try, and we ended up with 8 players. That's far too many, since it means nobody came anywhere near having a monopoly, and there were no 2-player or even 3-player deals that would give a monopoly to each player involved in the deal, so nobody would trade. After a bit of flailing, 2-3 players broke the ice by making a die-roll-based deal: they pooled their deeds to form 1-2 monopolies, and then rolled dice to see who got to end up with the monopolies. Seeing nothing better to do, some of the other players made similar deals, and the game staggered to a conclusion.

I'd still be interested in trying it sometime with a saner number of players.

As for weird, there are a couple variant rules I've heard of that I'd be interested in trying. Many variants just throw money into the game (the most infamous being the "Free Parking" rule, where all fines and whatnot paid to the bank end up in a pot that gets paid out to anyone who lands on Free Parking), and those are bad. The two I'd like to try both encourage better money management. One of them is that if you own all but one of a set (e.g., 2 of the 3 greens, or 3 of the 4 railroads), and someone else lands on and buys the last deed in the set, you have the option of immediately paying them DOUBLE the face value of the deed and taking the property. You must have the cash on hand; you cannot mortgage or trade to raise the money. I've never tried this rule, but it sounds like it would force people to make trades, because eventually whoever got the first of the "light blues" will be able to obtain that monopoly, and if the other players don't find monopolies of their own they will lose for sure. The other variant rule is even simpler: all deeds cost double the amount shown. (I don't think the mortgage value doubles, though.) This would mean that players won't be able to "buy everything they land on", which is a pretty common approach otherwise. Instead, a lot of properties would go up for auction. (Note: Many players don't realise it, but if you land on something unowned and choose not to buy it, you don't just pass the dice. The property is immediately auctioned off to the highest bidder.)