Originally published at: Monopoly and Scrabble have a new merger on the table | Boing Boing
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So…take one of the best old-school board games and ruin it by combining it with the absolute worst of the old-school board games? Why?
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In this game, you can only have children if you can spell.
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They need to add a boxing component.
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Which is which?
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…and don’t not know how to achieve either.
Putting money on Free Parking injects money into what is designed to be a closed and regulated economy. This lengthens the game which is why monopoly has a reputation of taking a long time
This is why there are professional game designers; to evaluate the actual effect on a game of a particular rule. Some house rules (especially in Monopoly) make games objectively worse.
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Indeed. One of the main reasons (I think) for Monopoly’s bad reputation is that almost nobody plays by the actual rules. There’s supposed to be a trading phase, for example, and various other things that nobody does.
That said, Monopoly is still not good. But it’s not as bad as everyone thinks. 
You still couldn’t pay me to play it, even by the real rules.
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As somebody who loathes Monopoly as much as I love Scrabble, all I can say about this stupid, stupid idea is:
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Yeah, playing by the rules as written is most likely to keep a game of Monopoly mercifully short (-ish… no guarantees).
There are rules tweaks that can shorten it a bit (dealing out the property cards, etc.), but for my money the best modern Monopoly experience is the Monopoly Deal card game. Plays in under 30 mins.
And the best non-Monopoly game that delivers on the promise of Monopoly is the game Boomtown:
Cutthroat property bidding with just enough luck salted in to keep things interesting for everyone.
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Reminder, Hasbro is the company that somewhat recently sent the Pinkertons to harass and “recover” some cards that a fan got shipped by mistake, who did so in characteristically Pinkerton way. Hasbro could’ve just called the guy and left a voicemail, but decided that was too much trouble.
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I hate Scrabble. This idea has nothing on my gf and my’s idea of Trivial Monopoly! You want to buy that? Answer a question matching the colour correctly. We played for 3 days and got nowhere but we had fun.
I contend that Chinatown holds that position. (Except for the somewhat suspect name, alas.) But yeah, Boomtown is pretty good.
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Honestly, this is a pretty clever mashup. When I first got heavily into the board game hobby, there were huge complaints about roll and move games (because people attack the familiar). Somewhat controlling how you move in Monopoly and turning it into a race sounds like a good move. There might be something for Hasbro to take away from this if aspects of it actually work.
Cool! Looks like fun - I’ll check it out.
Because you can, obviously. Monopoly was bad, but yes, you CAN make it worse!
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That may be the intention, but in practice that breaks the game and leads to interminable tedium. AFAICT, 99% of people’s house rules for Monopoly make the game strictly and objectively worse. And it’s not that good a game in the first place!
This was the mash-up my boy invented when he was not-yet-ten.
In your turn, you can do a chess move, or a scrabble move.
The words form barricades: chess pieces can travel up to and onto a barricade; to move further takes another turn.
He hadn’t worked out scoring yet.
It’s a full-on brain-stretching game.
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MONOBBLE or SCRABBOPOLY?
I personally like the name SCRABBOPOLY.
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