I last played Monopoly with my sister, her boyfriend and some friends over a year ago. We started happily enough, but it soon became clear my sibling's partner was an even more unscrupulous businessman than Cyril Sneer. His combination of a voracious appetite for property, an inclination towards punitive taxes and, crucially, control of the bank meant the game lasted about 30 minutes before I was forced out, homeless, with no business interests and entirely empty pocketed.
But when I played the new online version this morning I was free from such a driven competitor. Monopoly City Streets, a link up between game owners Hasbro and Google Maps, launches on Wednesday for a four-month period. It enables one, in theory, to buy any street in the world.
New players are given no less than 3m Monopoly dollars – a far cry from the £200 clutch of brightly coloured notes of yore – to build their empire. If you get in first, you can buy the street straight away. If you're beaten to it, you can make the owner an offer. If they don't reply in seven days, this offer is automatically accepted, no matter how contemptible it may be. (Cue the obligatory "So make sure you log in everyday!" order in the instructions that accompany the game).
Finding the main urban areas of Manchester, Birmingham and London already snapped up, I decided to be influenced by nostalgia rather than greed, and switched focus to my home town of Preston.
In lieu of the currently ailing development plans in the self-professed administrative hub of Lancashire, I immediately took the initiative in a way that real developers are failing to do and snapped up Fishergate, the main street in England's newest city. Paying $1,140,000 for this prime real estate represented solid value, and to celebrate I immediately built an obnoxiously tall skyscraper.
With that property earning $288,000 dollars a day in rental income – a variant of the online game is that a landowner is automatically paid rent, rather than waiting for some poor unfortunate to visit your street before cashing in – I turned my attention to the leafy suburb of Penwortham, or as the game has decided to call it, "Penworthamdale".
Having spent my childhood tearing up and down Liverpool Road in Penwortham(dale) on my Raleigh Wolf, it was with a feeling of immense pride that I returned to buy the street outright, and immediately commissioned the building of a castle. Liverpool Road in real life boasts 11 hairdressers and five estate agents in a 100-metre stretch, but is distinctly lacking in a fortified defensive structure. Not now.
As nice as it is to construct wildly improbable premises around areas you're familiar with, and see the structures displayed on the Google Maps format, putting up buildings and watching the rent roll in could become quite dull. Thus, the online game encourages conflict between land barons by sporadically offering "Chance Cards" where players are given the option to bulldoze properties lovingly built by other land barons, or construct sewage works or prisons on rivals' streets, lowering their rental income. Perhaps there's a place for my sister's boyfriend after all.
I was in a rather benevolent mood when I was invited to flatten a fellow player's property – how many people own a castle, after all? – but for the purposes of research destroyed a magnificent 15m-Monopoly-dollar property recently constructed in Blackpool by an erstwhile opponent.
This is all very well, and the satisfying graphic of a demolition ball swiftly assuaged any guilt, whilst cementing my position as the top property-dog in Lancashire.
But the problem is the game shows players exactly who has been trying to ruin their empire.
I now have an enemy. A rich enemy. What does that mean for the future of the castle? Are Preston and Penwortham(dale) to be beset by an evil tycoon, hell-bent on dismantling the friendly fiefdom I've worked so hard (three or four clicks of the mouse) to develop?
Scary. Very scary.
Sounds so cool !!
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