![]() Money can also be gained or lost through Chance and Community Chest cards and tax squares. Players collect rent from their opponents and aim to drive them into bankruptcy. In the game, players roll two dice to move around the game board, buying and trading properties and developing them with houses and hotels. Especially since we’re talking the granddaddy of board games.ĭespite the technical difficulty though, I found Monopoly City to be a fresh, conflict-free and really fun twist on the classic property trading game.Monopoly is a multiplayer economics-themed board game. ![]() A low-tech alternative would ensure a more secure gameplay. But I wish board game manufacturers would stop including gizmos like that that need batteries or could break. If you’re stuck without it, you can always do what we did and roll two dice then divide by 4. The device actually lets you know on your turn how many blocks you can purchase (1, 2, 3 or build a Railroad) and also acts as a timer for auctioning off unclaimed properties. The only downside of the game I found was that some of the action is controlled by an electronic doodad that wasn’t working. ![]() And some are quite fun: my favourite would be Taxi, which lets you add or subtract two spaces from your roll one time, useful for weaseling out of landing on someone’s expensive district! Other than the classic Go To Jail and Get Out of Jail Free cards, they are all brand new and geared towards the new rules. Kind of like the secret passages in Clue.įinally, there are only Chance cards, no Community Chest here. It’s not a property or anything but it’s a bit of fun: if you land on a space with a Railroad token, you can instantly travel to any other square on the board that also has a Railroad token. You can also, on your turn and if you’re lucky, put a little Railroad on your district. The catch is there’s only one of those so if another player lands on the parking they can steal it from you. Landing on Free Parking gives you a Rent Dodge card that lets you skip rent once like a Get Out of Jail Free card. The whole thing adds a new layer of strategy that’s a bit of fun without being that much of a game changer since the bad buildings can be removed for a fee. ![]() Or you can put up a good building such as a school on your own district to prevent others from giving you a bad building there. You can choose to give someone’s district a bad building such as a sewage plant, thereby rendering their residential blocks worthless for rent purposes. In addition to residential and industrial blocks, the board locations where the railroads would be in Monopoly actually give players the opportunity to build “bonus buildings” to either screw other players over or protect themselves from the same. Unlike the classic houses and hotels you can’t sell them off, but this is made up for by the fact you can mortgage an entire district for the total rent value of it. The only thing is that once you build them, they are there for good. The total number of blocks determines how much you charge in rent. Those can be residential (cheaper but can be neutralized by other players – more on that in a bit) or industrial (pricier but safer). Instead of houses and hotels you can buy and sell, each turn you are given the chance to build city blocks on your districts. Each district has its own space in the middle of the board and that’s where the City actually gets built. However, those properties are now called “districts”, although they do share the colours and locations of the classic Monopoly properties. The basic premise is the same: circle around the board purchasing property so that other players will pay you rent when they land on them. I shouldn’t have, though, because this version of Monopoly is much more streamlined, providing for a very focused gameplay. So when we broke out Monopoly City, I started getting nervous. The reason is that everyone has played the game with different rules since childhood and the resulting deep-seated habits and differences inevitably end up in heated arguments, ruining the fun. While Monopoly is one of my favourite games, I am always wary of playing it in person, usually preferring the electronic versions. ![]() I ended up discovering a fun new twist on a classic. It was something we had talked about before but hadn’t gotten around to. I had the great pleasure last night, loyal reader, of an invitation to a board game night with some colleagues. ![]()
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