What will be on the chopping board next? The boot? The top hat?
Apparently voters could choose between a cat, a robot, diamond ring, helicopter and guitar. I myself would have voted, if I had known there was a vote and been bothered to exercise my franchise, for the diamond ring. Or the helicopter. Both those seem more in keeping with the spirit of the game than a fluffy cat.
Don't even talk to me about the Scotty dog. I never played the dog. I played the iron. Or the boot or the top hat or the wheelbarrow. And you can be sure that, whenever I play Monopoly again (which, judging by my games record, won't be for years and years) I will shun that parvenu cat.
That is wrong.
ReplyDeleteHave you been introduced to the world of indie/euro board gaming yet? Once you play Settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Ticket to Ride, etc, you won't care about Monopoly anymore.
ReplyDeleteI was always the shoe.
ReplyDeleteI second the vote for Settlers of Catan. We love it. We've played it so much we have some of our own rules.
Power Grid is also a great game that scratches the Monopoly itch (economics, bidding, etc.)
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ReplyDeleteI was always the iron. Shoot!!!
The Iron was one of my favorites. The shoe was the only one I didn't like because I thought it was kind of ugly.
ReplyDeleteBut really, a cat is all wrong for a game like Monopoly. A cat; would disdain the money grubbing mindset and would probably just loll about on top of the Chance cards, sunning itself.
It will only last for as long as PETA doesn't start campaigning against them for treating a pet like a household commodity.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the Target's vintage edition games in the wooden boxes will retain the iron. I'm tempted to rush out and buy one.
ReplyDeleteThis is the worst thing since blue M&Ms.
ReplyDeleteQuick! Go get a game with an iron! I'll play next time I come up.
ReplyDeleteMom
"A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views."
ReplyDeleteStill, though, I always thought the iron looked a little cheap in comparison with the others. It was so...skinny, and had that funny handle. Not that that's a good reason to get rid of it completely. I don't think there needs to be both a cat and a dog.
"Scruples" is a great game I recently discovered, having made a trip to Goodwill before a board game party. Lots of defending moral decisions and calling other people out on their sincerity, just like real life. (Well, my life, anyway.)
Pfui on all newcomers. When I played Monopoly, the pieces were all wooden and resembled chess pawns in various colors. I forget how old I was when these "traditional" pieces first appeared.
ReplyDeleteI got very curious so I went and put together a rough timeline of the pieces:
ReplyDeletebefore 1935 no tokens (instructions said to use things like buttons)
1935-1936 wooden pawns
1937-1942 flatiron, purse, lantern, car, thimble, shoe, top hat, rocking horse, battleship, cannon
1943-1947 wooden pawns
1951?-1998 flatiron, dog, wheelbarrow, car, thimble, shoe, top hat, horse&rider
1999 flatiron, dog, wheelbarrow, car, thimble, shoe, top hat, horse&rider, sack of money
(But I've come across conflictng sources about when the dog was first added, and there seems to be some confusion due to nonclassical versions of the game with different tokens. Hasbro also says there was an elephant somewhere in there, but they don't say when.) They changed more through the years than I had thought. If we still had the battleship piece, my sister and I would almost certainly have fought over who got to play Monopoly with a battleship Every Single Time.
Fun Fact: Hasbro licensed the movie rights for Ouija, Battleship, and Monopoly a few years back. The Ouija and Battleship movies have already come out. Ridley Scott is working on the Monopoly one right now, so we can all look forward to a future thriller about real estate.
IMDB doesn't have much about the Monopoly movie, but it does list it as being a comedy. I would think that you could actually do a pretty decent "ripped from the headlines" movie about the real estate bust using Monopoly as a jumping-off point, but then I thought that surely Battleship would make an awesome classic sea warfare movie, and we all know how they botched that.
ReplyDeleteI'd forgotten the thimble! One of the sources I saw today (but I can't remember which now) said that the idea of little items as tokens started when the game developer's niece suggested using the charms on her bracelet as playing pieces. That's a pretty spunky niece right there -- seems like most girls I knew who had charm bracelets wore things like hearts and stars and flowers, not irons and thimbles and cannons.
+JMJ+
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell, my family's Monopoly set was marketed only in Asia. Everything was the same as the US version except the tokens.
We had little plastic "men" that were basically spheres on top of plateaued cones. (I apologise for my terrible geometry vocabulary.) They came in red, blue, yellow, green, white, and black. I always chose black.
My parents' Monopoly set had the battleship and a cannon; both those pieces were identical to the ones used in Conflict (anybody remember that game?
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