Bye Bye A.C.!
Something a bit more lighthearted. From The Record:
Monopoly outgrows A.C.
Monopoly outgrows A.C.
Goodbye, Boardwalk. Hello, Broadway!
On Tuesday, Hasbro, the maker of Monopoly, revealed its latest version of its most popular board game – a more contemporary edition that abandons the Atlantic City streets featured on the game's board since 1935 in favor of more-recognizable landmarks from 22 cities across the country.
After an Internet vote that drew more than 3 million ballots from consumers, New York's Times Square earned the coveted Boardwalk spot and will cost – reflecting the changes since the game's first edition – a cool $4 million. (In a twist sure to roil some New Yorkers, Park Place has been replaced by Boston's Fenway Park.)
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The inflated prices are one of several changes that Hasbro believes will make the new version more relevant to today's consumers. Players can go to jail, or perhaps a white-collar, minimum-security prison, for infractions such as insider trading.
Game pieces now include a box of McDonald's fries, a Motorola cellphone and a cup of Starbucks coffee (monopoly, indeed). Some of the classic pieces have given way to more modern interpretations: The Scottish terrier is now a Labradoodle. The open-cockpit race car becomes an environmentally friendly Toyota Prius. And a speedy jet replaces the plodding battleship. None of the companies paid for inclusion in the new edition, Hasbro officials said.
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Not everyone was quite as excited about the changes, however. In Atlantic City, the Convention and Visitors Authority's executive director, Jeffrey Vasser, sent a letter this spring asking Hasbro to reconsider, and thousands of residents signed a protest petition. The game's use of Atlantic City points to the city's popularity in the 1930s, when it was sometimes called "The World's Playground."
On Tuesday, Vasser said assurances that the original game would survive, along with the new Community Chest card that gives out $1 million for winning at Atlantic City casinos, have muted the complaints; many residents, he said, had mistakenly believed the new game would replace the old one.
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The game's predecessor was invented by Elizabeth Magie, Orbanes said, who intended it to warn against the excesses of unrestrained capitalism. Ironically, once a man named Charles Darrow popularized the game now known as Monopoly using Atlantic City properties, it became a celebration of materialism.
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CFOs see 33 pct chance of US recession in 12 months-survey
The level of pessimism about the U.S. economy is the highest in five years...
The proportion of executives saying they are more optimistic about the economy -- 19.8 percent -- is down from 24 percent in the previous survey and down from 42 percent six months ago.
I heard they've also replaced the traditional Monopoly Money with Monopoly Visa Cards.
I suppose the Monopoly HELOC isn't too far behind.
The little green houses have been greatly expanded and modernized. Most are now McMansions...the problem they have is that the plastic houses don't fit into the little square on the board, so players are forced to take over adjacent properties.
The upside, is if you get a utility, you automatically win on earnings.
Pat
Zero-lot line monopoly!
Man, things just get better and better.........
Yikes.
SAS
"I surely hope they included Eminent Domain in the game."
Now thats one funny comment.
lol,
SAS
Yes, I believe it's there, the ED card, but only playable against a player if he has less than $25 in the bank and owns only one home, which has been in his family the entire game.
Went to the bank today. They had newly decorated with all these tinsel dollar signs along the windows and little eggs in a nest on the counters.
I remarked to the teller that it was an unusual decor scheme.
He said they were trying to encourage people to start saving (get it? nest eggs?).
I said, if Americans start saving they'll kill the economy.
He looked startled and then said "You're probably right!"
We talked about the American propensity to charge everything and never bother to consider the interest they paid on those things.
He said that when he was in his 20's he finally figured the interest hazard out when a 1200 dollar stereo ended up costing him 2300 by the time it was paid off.
Since then he's never made the mistake of charging and goes with cash.
Then he told me that, other than the screw up with not understanding interest, he'd actually been pretty good about money in general since he was a kid.
He attributed his understanding of money to this:
When he was little, his mother used to give him and his siblings her old, outdated chekbooks to play Monopoly with.
They could write checks for the properties they bought and also set up a bank for borrowing, which also had to be repaid at the end of the game.
I thought it was a pretty clever escalation of the game and said so.
The only thing they had left out was the fact that when you borrow you've got to pay interest on what you borrow!
So 10 years later he ended up with a 1200 dollar stereo for 2300 bucks.
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