Forget the fake cash: A British version of the classic Monopoly board game released this month substitutes a Visa-imprinted debit card for the stacks of yellow, blue and purple play money long hoarded by children worldwide.
"We started looking at what Monopoly would look like if we designed it today," said Chris Weatherhead, a Britain.-based spokesman for Hasbro Inc., which makes the best-selling board game. "We noticed consumers are using debit cards, carrying around cash a lot less."
British players might not be the only ones switching to plastic. Officials at Pawtucket-based Hasbro say they're considering a similar change for American versions.
First offered in 1935, Monopoly offered players a form of financial escapism during the country's worst financial depression. Players become pretend real estate magnates who compete for fictitious property named after real places in Atlantic City, N.J. A British version released that same year featured London neighborhoods.
In the new British version of Monopoly Here & Now, players type amounts into a palm-sized scanner and swipe their debit cards to seal the deal.
But the game had been modernized in many other ways. Cards that once rewarded players for winning a beauty contest now compensate them for winning a reality TV show. (We're guessing the card doesn't say "You're not fired!" as that might invite lawsuits from The Donald.) Completing a full circuit around the board is worth two million English pounds, not 200.
"Quite a nice bonus," Weatherhead said.
Yea, but with real-estate prices the way they are now, Park Place has to be selling for at least a million bucks.
Not-so-bad ideas
- Could he be a gal's ideal man? He fits in a car's glove box, appears at a flick of a switch and when a woman has finished using him, she can just pull the plug and he deflates.
- A company that sells software to correct irritating Internet spelling mistakes has reissued its latest news release to correct some snafus.
TextTrust, which says it focuses on "eliminating the negative text impressions on Web sites," re-released a news release this week to correct a mistake that listed the most common spelling errors on "the 16 million we [sic] pages it has spell checked over the past year."It said commonly misspelled words included independent, accommodation and definitely, which were spelled independant, accomodation and definately."It's very embarrassing," said Pat Brink, PR consultant for the Toronto-based company. "I made the mistake, not TextTrust — they do a much better job. It's certainly egg on the face of this public relations person."The release quoted TextTrust as saying that it used both human editors and special spell-checking software to scour Web sites for spelling mistakes. "TextTrust wants to make sure that organizations never again receive the 'I found a spelling error on your web site' e-mail," it said. We think it's high time they apply that same due diligence inside that glass house they're headquartered in.