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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 ;)"
basically you set it up, it ticks for 24hrs, then at the end it tells you how much money you made. im on about 300m last i checked, the game ends at 24hrs and you start again.
it isn't fun.
This seems....um...random?
What exactly is the added trill of having the position of your player on a monoploy board correlated with the position of a real life cabby?
I guess I just don't get it.
I'm not sure if the cab system differs in London compared to where I live, but I'd predict a large increase in abandoned calls from locations people have bought a lot of property on.
. I doubt that neither allied or enemy soldiers would consent to having remotely readable GPS units attached to their person
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if US soldiers had GPS trackers on their person trasmitting their individual locations (all encrypted, of course) - it's the kind of thing that the people in HQ 30 miles away could use to direct a battle.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
In fact, arguably the nearest of the properties on a UK Monopoly board to Wimbledon is Old Kent Road*, which, ironically, is the first and hence cheapest property on the board.
If I were to make an educated guess, I'd say that either Euston Road, Picadilly or Trafalgar Square would win this competition, as they are major traffic arteries that cabs are always visible on.
(*Both Wimbledon and the Old Kend Road are south of the River Thames. There maybe a property that is a little closer to Wimbledon, but anyone who's ever lived in London would know that trying to get a taxi cab to take you "south of the river" can sometimes be harder than drawing blood from a stone.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Not to take away from the submitter or from anyone playing the game, but this story is pretty much a non-starter. Either you are playing or not, and if you aren't then there's really nothing to discuss.
But I think we've all played Monopoly (R), so there is some level of commonality in our experiences. We used to have a "lottery" system where all taxes and fees paid were paid to the "pot" and anyone landing on Free Parking would win the pot. It gave losing players a chance to suddenly make a quick turnaround and made the game more interesting.
What were the types of rule changes did you make to Monopoly when you played with your friends?
Highly irrelevant here, but I used to be quite fond of all the anonymous trolls that kept posting on slashdot. I'm sure there are still many and they've moved on to other trolling methods, but this guy (whoever he was) always made me laugh:p roject=$2n _domain=$3
./troll.sh Asterisk 'Asterisk Project' Skype communication
#!/bin/sh
opensource_app=$1
opensource_
proprietary_alternative=$2
applicatio
SUBJECT="We tried working with ${opensource_app}..."
COMMENT="We tried working with ${opensource_app}
An employee suggested to me that we use ${opensource_app} on a few machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day ${application_domain}. So I decided to let him install the ${opensource_app} onto 5 machines to see how the users got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using it on his system and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the client machines?
Once he'd got the machines up and running with ${opensource_app} we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: ${opensource_app} was a pretty good replacement for ${proprietary_alternative} and the users could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could find things they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with ${proprietary_alternative} ${application_domain}. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when ${opensource_app} suddenly had an error reading from our intranet file server and corrupted his project.
Needless to say, ${opensource_project} offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee uninstall ${opensource_app} from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore."
echo $SUBJECT
echo $COMMENT
This guy did all sorts of 'insightful' posts with:
e.g.
$
All the other ones were usually crap and not very clever e.g. 'Netcraft confirms it' but this one really tickled my ribs!
What've been your favourites?!
I worked in Central London about twelve months ago. A mate and I had read up on decomissioned tube stations and the like, and thought it would be fun to spend a Saturday going around and trying to find them. This turned out to be not so fun. You pass a siding, see a shadow of something in the darkness, and go "Oh there it is"... and that's it. So this quickly turned into game of "let's see if we can pass through all of the zone 1 tube stations before the tube closes tonight. It was a close run, but we did it. We took a photo at each stop. basically - leap out of the train, *snap*, scuffle awkwardly away from the arms of any nearby security people, leap back on the train before the doors close and on to the next stop! During that day we got seriously yelled at for taking photos of an interesting looking building near Vauxhall Cross. Top day.
On another weekend I came third in a Mornington Crescent championship.
And since cab drivers are mentioned in this story, I'll also mention that during my time in London I also got propositioned by a cab driver. It was a company-paid and organised cab as well (!). I explained that while I had every confidence in his a lovely personality, I had a girlfriend back home and it just wouldn't do.
Believe with me, my saplings.
. . . the delightful real-life board game from New York, PacManhattan.
Where do you get that idea? Monopoly is quite a popular game over here.
If you want to have fun with Monopoly, try playing with more than one board. We used to do this with a Dutch and an American board, laid down side-by-side. Odd or even dice rolls would determine whether you would take a right turn or go straight on (and onto the other board), and we had a 10% loss when exchanging money from Dutch to US (and vv). Complicates things no end.
Other rule changes are also fun (have everyone play two 'pawns', allow more than 4 houses/1 hotel on a street, etc)
My favourite variant is 3 dice. Player chooses any two.
Allow landlords to haggle over which two dice the player chooses ("if you land on my hotel I'll only charge you $100")