Monopoly City Streets
September 13th, 2009
I don’t really like playing games of any kind, on or offline, but I love Google Maps so this one caught my attention. Monopoly City Streets is an online, multiplayer version of Monopoly that is played on Google Maps, and it’s a joint project of Google and Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly. Instead of the traditional Monopoly gameboard, you can buy and sell property almost anywhere in the world through Google Maps. The preview site describe it this way: “A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.”
I immediately set up an account and bought Columbus Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived from the age of 10 to 19, and put a house on the spot where my mother’s house was. And then I went and the street where I live now, and several other places where I have lived. I was able to buy almost every street I have lived on (Boulevard East in West New York, New Jersey being the exception) but in all cases I was surprised by how many streets nearby were already owned and covered with a random assortment of buildings, mostly ugly skyscrapers and towers.
The game had a rocky launch on September 9, with the servers quickly becoming overloaded and inaccessible. When these problems were resolved, many users complained about the unfairness the limited access had created, and it was announced that the game would be reset, probably some time this week. Things seem to be stable now, and of course there are already many fan resources for the game on Twitter, Facebook, Ning, YouTube, etc.
Monopoly City Streets was designed as a promotion for Hasbro’s new board game, Monopoly City Edition, and is scheduled to end on January 31, 2010.
