London Turned into Giant Board Game

webponce writes "Hasbro have fitted out 18 London cabs with GPS tracking devices, and hooked them up to a real time, real life game of monopoly. You get to choose which cab driver you want to 'play' with, and then pick which properties around London you want to put your houses and hotels, hit go, sit back and wait for the other cab drivers to land on your square and make you rent. You get 24 hours of your cab running around London, and you have to see how much money you can make in a day (my bet, put your property on Wimbledon this week ;)"

Comments

No Wimbeldon

[os2fan]

For those who have not seen a proper monopoly board, the streets are (by colour-group, from Go)

• Old Kent Road, Whitechapel
• The Angel of Islington, Euston Road, Pentenville Road
• Pall Mall, Whitehall, Northumberland Ave
• Bow street, Malborough street, Vine street
• The Strand, Fleet street, Trafalgar Square
• Leister square, coventry square, piccadilly
• Regent street, Oxford street, Bond street
• Park Lane, Mayfair.

The railway stations are in order, Kings Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street.

Utilities are Electric Company and Water-Works.

You still have chance and community chest, with such joys as "go back three spaces", and "take a walk on the broad walk, advance token to mayfair", although not the German "go back to Old Kent Road".

Re:No Wimbeldon

[jonwil]

Of course, that is only on a British monopoly board.
American boards, Australian boards, Star Wars boards, Star Trek boards, Simpsons boards and others have totally different stuff :)

Re:No Wimbeldon

[indianajones428]

I guess they aren't using the standard British Monopoly setup, because there is a Wimbeldon. IIRC, it's about where St. James Place usually is on the American board.

On the "Monopoly Live" board, the streets are (sorry for any spelling errors):

-Portobello Road Market, Camden Market
-Hammersmith Apollo, Wembley Arena, GMTV
-The Oval, Wimbeldon, Wembley Statium
-Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Tate Museum
-London Eye, Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square
-Tottenham Court Road, Covent Garden, Regent Street
-Notting Hill, Soho, Kings Road
-Canary Wharf, The City

The railway stations are now airports, and are in order: London City Airport, Stansted Airport, Gatwick Airport, and Heathrow Airport

Utilities are Telecoms and The Sun

There is still Chance and Community Chest, but you have to text message for those, so your guess is as good as mine (anyone in England willing to tell the rest of us what they are like?).

Re:No Wimbeldon

[Muttley]

Growing up in Australia I always thought the UK edition of the game was the 'true' version of monopoly, but the game was in fact invented in America, and so the original version, and the version used in all monopoly world championships, is the American version of the game.

Re:No Wimbeldon

[bluepaq2000]

I tried the Chance text and got this: Make general repairs on your houses and hotels £1,500,000.00 for hotels and £500,000.00 for houses You have 24 hours to deposit the real money or we break your legs!

Re:No Wimbeldon

[apesaga]

Isn't the reason that it's not the standard layout is that it's being run to promote the new version of the game which has taken into account the fact that London has changed considerably since Monopoly was first launched?

See http://www.monopolylive.com/the_board_game.html

(I think this is in addition to the "classic" version, not a replacement).

Mornington Crescent, anyone?

[Anomalous Communard]

London's been a board game for ages.

Re:i'm "playing" this now

[pcmanjon]

I happen to be friends with one of the guys who works at Hasbro; and he's told me it isn't GPS controlled as they claim.

This is just marketing to make it appealing and feel "real."

He's told me that although he didn't do any of the programming work for the cab stuff, he has done some apache configuration and stuff for the server.

He tells me that they used a "deamon" like program coded in C to sned the current location to an SQL database, and the webserver handles it from there.

It makes sense that they would make it all fake to save money, having GPS's and stuff for real cabs just seems like too much work.

Hear hear!!!

[madaxe42]

This country is nuts. You get paid more to sit on your fat ass on the sofa all day than you would with a minimum wage job, commuting to work (from 6 miles away!!!!) costs me £4000 a year ($7000) (admittedly 'only' £2000 a year at the moment, but they're doubling the price of a travelcard in november), and the state wants us to pay up to £2 a mile to drive. On top of our 90p/litre ($8/gallon) fuel.

So... even though the parent is a troll: Here's a hint, good people of Britain: get out of the fucking cab, get off the fucking Dole, and get a fucking job!!

Make extra money by requesting an chance or...

[Quazion]

community chest card by smsing a text to 82222, this i what they try you to do while playing the game, i am telling you its just another get rich quick sceme!

Re:crank cabbie callouts?

[GQuon]

I don't know wether you're English or not, but I thought that in England you can't usually telephone to get a ride in a regular cab. The cabs that you book by phone are called "mini-cabs" and look different from the standard black ones.

Re:Aaah London memories

[AndroidCat]

I'm sure it's been a while since Hywel Williams' excellent site was last slashdotted, so Underground History - Disused Stations on London's Underground META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="london underground, ghost stations, history"

Re:Does this mean...

[mmkkbb]

It was 1934, the height of the Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the MONOPOLY game to the executives at Parker Brothers. Can you believe it, they rejected the game due to "52 design errors"! But Mr. Darrow wasn't daunted. Like many other Americans, he was unemployed at the time, and the game's exciting promise of fame and fortune inspired him to produce it on his own.

http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/pl/page.history/dn/ default.cfm

Re:crank cabbie callouts?

[DrPepper]

You can book a black cab in advance or a minicab. However, only black cabs can go around looking for business, and not all black cabs can be prebooked.