Sometimes an old Classic fits better than the "New Hotness", Here-&-Now isn't for me.
Written: Oct 14 '06 (Updated Dec 22 '06)
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Pros: Colorful board graphics, clever token styles, unique take on a classic.
Cons: Production quality issues, play balance isn't there, no new features, properties mismatched and muddled.
The Bottom Line: Here-&-Now is just a new set of clothes for a distinguished gentleman. Believe me, Monopoly looks better in Brooks Brothers than a lime-green leisure suit. Stay with the classic!
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| openroad's Full Review: Monopoly Here and Now by Hasbro |
Publisher: Parker Brothers
Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 60-180 minutes
Difficulty: 6 (of 10)
Ages: 8
Street Price: $30
NOTE: All reference to Hasbro employees is purely fictional and not intended to imply an actual conversation between anyone employed by Hasbro Inc.
----- Monopoly: The beginning -----
Without a doubt the quintessential family game is Parker Brothers classic real estate domination masterpiece, Monopoly. The first time the name “Monopoly” was used in a board game can be traced to sometime in the early 1930s. By 1935 Parker Brothers had patented the game and produced 20,000 copies that first year. In the original Parker Brothers version all the properties in the game were named after locations in Atlantic City, NJ. These names have been used ever since and are known to just about everyone in America. Monopoly is one of the few games adults can pull out and play with their kids, friends, and grandparents, all this without explaining how to play.
Dozens of other specialized spin-off versions have started popping up over the last couple decades including Major League Baseball, NHL, Elvis, Garfield, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, John Deere, Muppets, Las Vegas, Disney, Snowboarding, Surfing, and of course Monopoly Junior for the little real estate moguls in training. In spite of these other versions the best game has always been the standard formula fine tuned by Charles Darrow and produced by Parker Brothers. The simplicity and tantalizing blend of luck and strategy that’s so apparent in the classic game seems to fade or totally disappear in the novelty versions. The reason I’m going into all this is to better explain why my rating of the Here and Now Edition stands at only three stars.
----- Right here, right now, there’s someplace I’d rather be -----
(Somewhere in a Hasbro boardroom…
Corporate Suit: “Hey guys, since we’ve run out of movie promotions for this year what do you say we design a new Monopoly game for the New Millennium!”
Agreeable Intern: “Yeah, Yeah, that’s a great idea… Madagascar Monopoly didn’t sell too well, maybe consumers are getting tired of movie spin offs. There’s also a slight chance people don’t feel like buying a 7th copy of Monopoly unless it’s special and unique.
Suit: “Since people are so used to having choices in these modern times, how about instead of using our highly paid game designers to create a board for this new game, lets leave it in the hands of the public!”
Intern: “Yeah, yeah, I was just going to say that!
Suit: “Lets run ads in People magazine, USA Today, tie in with a commercial spot on Lost, even run a radio announcement on that Rush Limburg show. We want to give everyone a chance to vote on this game. I know, lets call the folks over at McDonalds and get them involved by running another one of those silly game piece contests where no one wins anything other than a McTasty Griddlefry combo. Har har har!”
Intern: “Yeah, yeah, those are good ideas, but why couldn’t we just host the whole voting process online, save all that advertising money and let people choose what properties they want included and where they should go? And by the way, it’s Rush Limbaugh.”
Suit: “Oh yes, the internet… we mustn’t forget all the computer savvy people these days. I’ll tell my team to get right on it and lets push this game through! Great idea son, tell my secretary to put a request in to get you a complimentary copy of this new version before it’s released. Can’t say we don’t take care of our own can you son?”
… Thus began the saga of Monopoly: Here and Now Edition. Now players would be able to slide Starbucks cups ,Toyota Prius cars, LabraDoodles, and Motorola Razr phones around the board instead of those tired old tokens. Rest at ease players, the same corporate sponsors you see everyday will now be everywhere in your favorite game… take a McDonalds fry carton and slide it to Park Place… I mean Times Sqare! )
Now that I’ve finished with my irreverent look at how Here & Now was conceived, I’ll get into reviewing the actual game… thanks for your patience.
----- The times they are a-changin’ -----
For starters I’d like to clear up a misconception I had before playing this game. I thought there would be a few rule changes, optional rules or cards, special features, unique squares, or possibly player bonuses specific to Here & Now. Just so you know, this is exactly the same game as Monopoly Classic, except for the fact that all the names have been changed and the cash values have gone sky high.
Real Estate: The biggest change is obviously the new properties, utilities, and the change from railroads to airports. For what it’s worth I don’t think voting on both what to include and where to put it on the board was a good idea at all. I’ll say more about that later, first I’ll give a quick rundown of the changes to the squares.
All properties are now either a sports stadium, national landmark, or a famous location. Examples include; Texas Stadium (Dallas), Gateway Arch (St. Louis), Mall of America (Minneapolis), South Beach (Miami), Liberty Bell (Philadelphia), Disney World (Orlando), Las Vegas Blvd. (Las Vegas), The White House (Wash. DC), Fenway Park (Boston), and Times Square (N.Y.)
The switch to airports for transportation was a good idea and I approve of the four included locations, O’Hare, LAX, JFK, and ATL (Atlanta). As for the utilities they are now Cell-Phone Service and Internet Service. Both utilities function as they did before and only are worth owning if you can acquire both.
Other squares such as Chance, Community Chest, Income Tax, and Jail function as they did in the classic game.
Cash: The monetary values in the game have been inflated to much more modern standards, although I do NOT approve of the included denominations in the game. Instead of the easily added small currency in the classic game, Here & Now has 10K, 50K, 100K, 200K, 500K 1 million, and 5 million dollar bills. This leads to pointless confusion when making rent payments or changing in bills at the bank. The designers should have stayed out of the 10K and 20K bills and just kept to the 100K and millions. Instead of $200 when you pass go you collect $2,000,000 every time ‘round the board. Rents are up to 150K on average and houses push the rents into the millions.
A perfect example of the frustration caused by this new cash system is the utilities. When you land on a utility and its owner doesn’t have the other, you must pay 40,000 times the amount shown on the dice. If the owner has both utilities you pay 100,000 what’s shown on the dice. After you’ve been playing for an hour and a half you don’t want to figure out 40,000 times 9, you want to multiply 9 x 4 like the old game.
The bigger problem I (and the friends I played with) noticed is that this new value system just doesn’t feel right. Even though the values are up across the board they still aren’t even close to current market values. Wrigley Field for $3,000,000 or Waikiki Beach for $2,200,000, credit card interest of $750,000 owed, I don’t think so. Since the prices are up but still not accurate for today it just doesn’t seem any better than the old game.
----- Gameplay -----
Most new tokens are all instantly recognizable to anyone who’s been around the past decade, the only one that stumped me was the Labradoodle (cross between a Labrador & Poodle), not sure how that one made it in. The game flows just like the classic game except for the learning curve required for all the new names and property values. As expected all the Chance and Community Chest cards are new and themed for the 90s and 2000s with clever culture nuggets such as Video Game Contest and Reality TV Show winner. Are they any better? Not in my opinion, but as you can tell I’m not sold on the whole idea anyway.
As with the classic game the goal of Monopoly is still to buy property as fast as you can, obtain monopolies and build as fast you can. Hopefully your friends will land on your homes and hotels thereby leaving all their cash in your pockets.
----- Bottom Line -----
I was very disappointed with the overall feeling of Monopoly: Here & Now Edition as it seemed like a gussied up version without any new features or content. The lack of any new features begs the question why is this version any better than the classic?
My all-time favorite version of Monopoly is the $19.99 Deluxe version still available at most stores. It features a real bankers tray, wooden houses and hotels, a property card carousel, and a heavy stock single-fold board.
For my $30 (Here & Now) I expected at least a stinkin’ bankers tray that worked and someplace to hold my properties still owned by the back. This version of Monopoly has probably the worst plastic trays of any version I’ve seen. The cash tray is very tiny and the money is stacked on top of each other so close it’s very difficult to sort and stack it correctly. As for the card/property tray it only has three sides and is open on the fourth, I dare anyone to store this game on a flat shelf and not find all the cards mixed in a pile at the bottom of the box.
The new houses and hotels are hollow plastic and poorly finished. I also have two half-houses, either a miracle of modern duplex housing or more likely a sign of fast-n-furious outsourced game construction. While I’m on the subject of new trends, I really hate the quad-fold boards used in games nowadays. This board was very hard to line up correctly due to the curvature of the board in storage. As a brand new game we had to bend the quarters slightly backwards repeatedly just so the surfaces would line up. Again, this was never a problem with the old single fold board included with the Deluxe edition. My last beef is with the cardstock used for the property cards, it’s very thin and of poor quality. The backs aren’t even glossy or finished like the fronts, they’re just gray looking card stock. If you’re going to cut corners over the current game you have out there don’t charge me $10 more.
The friends I was playing with became very tired of trying to remember the names of the new properties and their locations. We soon started referring to everything by its original name for simplicities sake. The biggest problem with the new real estate isn’t the names, it’s the fact they aren’t associated with each other in any way. The real-world property values and geographical locations have nothing to do with where each property is located. They aren’t even arranged by theme or type. This is a game that would have been better to design and playtest for smoothness and flow than letting everyone vote on the locations for properties.
I don’t mean to be a total killjoy, the game still has merit if you’re a culture or sports junkie and like a new take on an old classic. However I strongly feel the actual game is inferior for the makeover, it’s just not any better. If you love Monopoly and want a new look I’d find one of the specialty editions which lines up with one of your passions. Find a copy of Disney or Star Wars Monopoly and play away. That way it will at least be a complete theme transformation instead of a blended, homogenized, and random infusion of the “Here & Now”.
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Thanks for reading and feel free to comment!
© Openroad 2006
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 30
Type of Toy: Board Game
Age Range of Child: 9 Years or Older
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