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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 ;)"
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?).
When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it. --Anatole France
London's been a board game for ages.
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.
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.
M.
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.
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http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/pl/page.history/dn
-mkb