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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.
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
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")