As if Skyrim doesn’t take enough time already, this Monopoly version is sure to add a few more hours to your game play. Of course, fighting in dungeons is definitely a lot more exciting than monopolizing the lands of the Nords.

Link Via Geekosystem

There are tons of fun Monopoly editions, but this Doctor Who version game might be the best one yet. After all, if anything can alleviate the boredom of Monopoly, it’s the ability to travel through space and time.

Link – Via BuzzFeed

Photo: Beth PH/Flickr

The elusive urban artist Banksy (supposedly) created this art piece of Rich Uncle Pennybags down on his luck for the Occupy London protesters. Link

We’ve seen tons of fun Monopoly boards before, but this Princess Bride one is certainly delightful. Be sure to “do as she wishes” and collect $200.

Link Via Flavorwire

Here we are, at the intersection of video game and board game. Elisabeth Redel made a Monopoly game for her boyfriend fashioned after the video game Fallout! The streets are locations from the game instead of Atlantic City. Even the cards are Fallout-oriented. See more pictures at Geeks Are Sexy. Link

Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician, computer scientist, and codebreaker, helped win World War II before being prosecuted and driven to suicide for his sexual orientation. The Bletchley Trust acquired some of his personal papers, including this hand-drawn Monopoly board that he made while sequestered from the rest of the world due to his top secret work. Link | Photo: Cory Doctorow

The comedy troupe Half Day Today, which made the very funny trailer for an Oregon Trail movie, now envisions the board game Monopoly as a fast-paced thriller similar to The Devil’s Advocate. It just might work as a real movie.

via Nerd Bastards | Troupe Website

+1 for originality. This tattoo mashes up Cthulhu and Rich Uncle Pennybags, the mascot from the board game Monopoly.

Link

What better game than Monopoly to teach the young uns about the wonderful world of capitalism? Well, you’d be surprised to learn that the board game was actually created to teach people the evils of capitalism!

The earliest recognizable version of what we know as Monopoly was patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904. The Landlord’s Game, as she called it, featured a board with the familiar circuit of increasingly pricey neighborhoods interspersed with railroads and utilities. At three of the corners were Go to Jail, Public Park (the ancestral version of Free Parking), and the Jail itself.

The fourth corner, however, wasn’t labeled “Go” but instead bore a drawing of the globe encircled by the lofty words “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Translation: you got a hundred bucks. Nonetheless you realize: someone here has an agenda.

The story goes that Magie intended her game to be a teaching tool about the injustices of capitalism. She was a fan of the theories of political economist Henry George, who thought landlords were parasites and advocated a "single tax" on them to replace all other taxes.

The incomparable Cecil Adams explains: Link – via GeekPress

Created with Chris Olivieri

What would the web look like as a board game? Can you name the memes?

Today, it’s not land that we look to obtain, it’s content. Content is currency. What more easily transferable currency is there than Memes. I think you get where we’re going with this… Introducing: MEMEOPOLY.

Link

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Toronto-based Taiwanese Artist An Te Liu made this house. It’s 2009 work called Title Deed and is located in Willowdale, Ontario.

Link (Google Translate) via Make | Artist’s Website | Photo by the artist

It’s the game that brings the internet into the real world!

This is the best thing since BUMP for the iPhone which allowed you to instantly add friends to Facebook – it’s Social Media Monopoly. Pete Cashmore, Kevin Rose, Tom, Amber MacArthur, Crystal Gibson and Ariana Huffington are fighting for social media dominance. Race around the board picking up smartphones and computers but make sure you don’t get sent to MySpace or you’ll risk losing everything, including your reputation.

Print out the full-size version plus the Mashable and Technorati cards and use your regular Monopoly game money, and you’re good to go. Link -via Nag on the Lake

Waddington PLC, the printing company best known for its games including Monopoly, was involved in a most unusual venture during the Second World War: printing maps on silk, rayon and tissue paper for military use and smuggling some of them to prisoners of war.

[...]

During WWII hundreds of thousands of maps were produced by the British on thin cloth and tissue paper. The idea was that a serviceman captured or shot down behind enemy lines should have a map to help him find his way to safety if he escaped or, better still, evade capture in the first place. A map like this could be concealed in a small place (a cigarette packet or the hollow heel of a flying boot), did not rustle suspiciously if the captive was searched and, in the case of maps on cloth or mulberry leaf paper, could survive wear and tear and even immersion in water. The scheme was soon extended to cover those who had already been captured, although a certain amount of ingenuity was required to get the maps into the POW camps.

Link – via holeinthedonut

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by baweibel.

The best part of this clip may be the teasers for Roseanne, Coach and Thirtysomething at the end.

Link

Andy Mangold, a twenty-year-old designer from West Chester Pennsylvainia, decided to repackage the classic Monopoly board game by Parker Brothers.

All of the boxes are made out of chocolate brown mat board and skinned in cream arches cover. The final package is just over 10″ x 10″ x 1.5″ and includes smaller containers for all of the various pieces and cards and a laser-cut holder for all of the houses and hotels.

Link

Monopoly

• For some reason, I always thought the Monopoly guy was Uncle Moneybags. Nope. But “proper” names for him include Rich Uncle Pennybags, Milburn Pennybags and Mr. Monopoly (his most recent name). Some sources say he’s loosely based on J.P. Morgan.
• Marvin Gardens is actually a misspelling of Marven Gardens, a housing area in Margate City, N.J. In fact, all of the properties on the “classic” Monopoly board are named after places or streets near or in Atlantic City, N.J.
• In the London version of the game, Trafalgar Square is a red property, Piccadilly is yellow, Regent, Oxford and Bond Streets are green and the blue properties are Mayfair and Park Lane. The railroads are replaced by Underground stops (King’s Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street Station and Liverpool Street Station).
• Neiman Marcus once sold an all-chocolate edition. The whole set, including dice, money, hotels and board, was edible.
• F.A.O. Schwarz in NYC sold a $100,000 version, which included 18-carat game pieces, a rosewood board, real money, street names written in gold leaf and various gems scattered across the board.
• The most expensive board even made is a set worth $2 million It’s made of 23-carat gold and has rubies and sapphires embedded in the top of each house and hotel.
• Various versions of Monopoly include Batman, ESPN, Family Guy, American Idol, Nintendo, Sephora, and, honestly, just about any other version you can possibly think of.

Clue

What we in North America know as Clue, the rest of the world knows as Cluedo. Would you believe that it was invented by a part-time clown? Totally true. Anthony E. Pratt invented the game in England and it was published for the first time in 1949 by a British company. Bought by Parker Brothers, the U.S. version came out the same year.

• The dead dude is known as Mr. Boddy in North America, but he’s Dr. Black everywhere else. Also, Mr. Green is apparently alias Reverend Green in some parts of the world.
• Also, some of the Clue characters have little-known first names. They are: Colonel Michael Mustard, Miss Josephine Scarlet, Professor Peter Plum, Reverend/Mr. John Green, Mrs. Blanche White and Mrs. Elizabeth Peacock.
• Characters used in other or deluxe versions of Clue include Miss Peach (not to be confused with Princess Peach), Lady Lavender, Prince Azure, Rusty Naylor and Captain Brown.
• The original nine weapons were axe, shillelagh, bomb, rope, dagger, pistol, syringe, poison and poker.

The Game of Life

Life has been around since 1861… not in the format we recognize today, of course. Milton Bradley himself invented “The Checkered Game of Life” when his lithography business started to go down the tubes (his major product was a portrait of clean-shaven Lincoln… when Lincoln grew the beard, Bradley went out of business).
He had actually been circulating the game on a smaller scale before his clean-shaven Lincoln lithograph took off, but he abandoned it once demand for his lithograph increased. After that plummeted, he focused more attention on marketing and ended up selling more than 40,000 games in 1861 alone – no small feat for that time period!

• Milton Bradley used a spinner to count the number of spaces people could move because dice were associated with gambing.
• In the original Checkered Game of Life, landing on the “Suicide” square put people out of the game completely. Obviously.
• Other squares on the original game board included Prison, Infancy, Ruin, Gambling, Disgrace, Honesty, Truth, Cupid, Industry and “Happy Old Age” (the goal of the game).
• One interesting variant (among many) is The Game of Redneck Life. Careers include Mullet Salon Operator and Monster Truck Announcer. The goal of the game is to get out with as many teeth as you can – through the various fights and brawls you get into over the course of the game, this can prove to be pretty challenging. I’m dead serious.

Scrabble

Scrabble came about in 1939 when architect Alfred Mosher Butts modified a game he had been working on earlier – Lexiko. At first he called it Criss-Crosswords and based the values of the letters on based on letter usages from the New York Times (and other reputable sources). In 1948, he allowed James Brunot to manufacture the game as long as he got a cut of each board sold… which wasn’t much, at first. They actually lost money the first year they produced it. Legend goes, though, that the President of Macy’s played the game while on vacation and, upon his return to work, was shocked that his store didn’t carry it. When they did start to carry it, sales skyrocketed.

• There are 96 two-letter words that are “legal” in Scrabble… including 10 that are spelled with vowels only. I’m so learning those.
• A typical Scrabble board has 225 squares.
• The highest known score for a single word in competition Scrabble is 392. In 1982, Dr. Saladin Khoshnaw achieved this score for the word “caziques,” which means “Indian chief.”
• The highest possible score a player can get in Scrabble on a first turn is for the word MUZJIKS (128 points).

I realize there’s tons of beloved board games I’ve missed, so maybe I’ll turn this into a series… a three-parter, or something. Sorry!, Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Risk, Trivial Pursuit. Lots of options. Have one you’d like to read about? Leave it in the comments and maybe I’ll add it to the list!