Out of curiosity, are cliches such as the Monopoly Man, “get out of jail free card”, “do not pass Go, do not collect $200” recognizable in the UK, Ireland, Australia or other places? Is the game widely played by families and are the street names renamed to make local versions?
Monopoly is a very well known game in the UK, I would say it’s very popular. The street names and Railway stations are named after London ones.
Thanks, I was actually reading a detective novel set in the UK where one of the cops was using Monopoly cliches in speech, which made me curious about how realistic that was. In Canada they sold both Canadian and American versions of the game, but everyone played the American version which was considered the real deal.
Here in Australia the UK version is the one we use, though our monopoly money (like our real money) is in dollars, not pounds.
That’s funny, because in the US the game no longer uses dollars. The money uses a symbol of an M with two lines through it, and the rules use the symbol exclusively without ever referring to a name for the currency.
Very popular in Germany, and a cultural cliche for a long time, as exemplified by Klaus Lage’s hit from 1984, Monopoli. He uses “Die Herrn von der Schlossallee” (The lords of the Schlossallee), “Schlossallee” being the most expensive street on the German version, as a metaphor for Big Money keeping the regular guy down.
For the record: I hate, hate that game, always have since my childhood. Most boring board game ever.
I’d be interested in knowing when they changed, and why.
I found a Monopoly set in grandfather’s house that must have dated from the 1930s and it was not significantly different from today’s. Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road are the cheap end of town, Mayfair and Park Lane are the pricey end.
Pretty popular in Argentina under the name “Estanciero” (Rancher), instead of locations in a city you buy parts of provinces (our equivalent to US states). Tucuman was the best one because it was expensive and small.
There is an official Russian version of Monopoly, authorized by Parker Brothers.
I think every household in Australia had a set in the 60s,70s and 80s - it was dragged out on the classic ‘Cold, wet Sunday afternoon’, you played for an hour or so and then realised it wasn’t a very entertaining game at all.
So you chucked it back into the cupboard and left it until you had forgotten how uninteresting it was - generally a year or so until next winter. I don’t think I have ever played a game to a finish - it generally just petered out as people lost interest.
All the cliches - ‘Go to Jail, Do Not Pass Go’, ‘Second Prize in a Beauty Contest’ etc are all staples in the culture.
As a side note, my wife is from China and one of the things she was surprised about when she moved to Canada is the sheer number of kids’ board games that revolve around making money. I never really thought about it until she pointed it out (e.g. Payday, Full House, Big Deal, Monopoly, Game of Life, etc.).
When I was a kid in NZ, when there were only three board games, they included Scrabble, Cluedo*, and Monopoly.
(Checkers/Draughts and Chess are not board games. And nobody played Ludo anymore.)
Now there are hundreds of tabletop games coming out every year. It’s craa-aa-aazy.
*called Clue in America for some reason
Looks like my memory was playing tricks; I looked up images of Australian Monopoly money and it does not include a $ symbol. I suppose we just called it “dollars” because that’s what you call money here.
ETA: I’m sure the board and cards used $ symbols, though. Do not collect $200 etc.
Wikipedia says the game is licensed in 103 countries and printed in 37 languages and it has lists of licensed and localized editions of Monopoly for every continent, bar Antarctica. If you click through to the relevant pages and click show, it has pictures of lots of the different boards.
Also, here’s an unofficial version from Saddam-era Iraq in 1986, set in Baghdad.
Reasonably popular here, with local street & station names and currency in Rands.
Also, I now see there’s a market for an Antarctic version of Monopoly… I think there’s enough research stations and airports that that could actually work…what to use instead of houses and hotels, though?
Googling around, I was surprised to learn there is a Thai version. I don’t think it’s all that popular here though. Or maybe I’ve just not been paying attention. But in this photo, I see you can land on Bangkok or the southern province of Krabi.
So, apart from Canada (which obviously has a lot of commerce with America) - did players of the various regional versions actually know it was a ‘regional variation’ growing up?
Speaking from Aus - as referenced above, we used the UK version always. I had no clue there was a US version until well into the Internet Age. It really blew me away to discover it was the original. In my heart of hearts I still think of the London place names as being “real”
Since the first set my family played on was British, and subsequent sets I encountered were local, I was at least aware that there were localized versions.
But I thought it was a British-themed game - I grew up associating things like top hats and Scotty dogs with England, not the US. Only really encountered the history of robber barons later.
Not here, most people think that “Estanciero” is an original game.