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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 ;)"
real life counterstrike would be better... guess you'd have to go to iraq for that though...
Get your torrents...
Steve Jobs is also playing and he's landed on Regent Street.
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.
Watch out horses, Vegas, and greyhounds. Make way for the next level in high stakes betting. Who wouldn't be willing to put down a few real dollars ( or pounds) on a real live Monopoly game for once? I can see it now, Hasbro goes from clean cut toy company and becomes a modern day Mafia. Leading the way to high tech illegal gambling and racketeering.
"Man, I am so unbelievably stupid."
And you have to send them your email address to sign up.
Apparently I've been receiving notices about this game for the past year or so and just didn't realize it was Hasbro.
Stop spam!
Oldschool cardboard-and-paper Monopoly is boring as hell. This sounds much more fun, since you can just get out of the cab and go to the pub.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
...that some lucky cab rider gets a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card? If so, are there limits to what they can do to land themselves in jail? ;)
libertarianswag.com
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.
Democrats flew President Bush over (on the pretense of buying him a pet sheep) for a similar trick, but Bush simply changed the constitution so that while he didn't have to go to jail, he did get to collect $200, and without having to pass Go, either. He then rewrote to board to read "Go directly to Guatanamo Bay. And stay there."
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
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".
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
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
Yeah, I know Hasbro is running the game, but..
Why not do something interesting like this based on a game that is actually fun to play. Puerto Rico, Catan, Carcassonne, etc. Especially in Europe where they don't play crap like Monopoly, and they play good games.
Playing real-life Monopoly in London is kinda of dangerous with all the spooks, CIA agents, and Russians with posion-tipped umbellas running around. Personally, I would try my luck with a pissed off New York taxi driver since it would be safer as the muggers get run over more often than the pigeons.
What frequency. . .
Give up the AC bit Dan, we know it's you.
KFG
1. You wouldn't be in direct control of the soldiers, they'd just go where they wanted to.
And this is different from Counter-Strike how, exactly?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
London's been a board game for ages.
Sweet deities, you've found a way to make an already punishingly protracted game last even longer.
Here's my idea for a MpyMod: start all the players out with five bucks so we can actually finish the game tonight.
Why not Scotland Yard? It's IDEAL to be played in the centre of London!
Some idiot marked that "redundant". Maybe pointng out spelling and grammatical errors in a samzenpus story is redundant, but I'll add that "London" and "Wimbledon", in quaint British usage, normally have capital letters.
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.
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!!
Only six miles? You'd better buy a bicycle - and BTW, can you verify your comment about getting "paid more to sit on your fat ass on the sofa all day than you would with a minimum wage job" ?
Mornington Cresent, cabbie.
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!
Steal another player's cab and drive it around. (Yes, stealing a data-linked cab with GPS would be stupid. So what? Plenty of stupid crimes every day.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You simply stop by Chance and get a "Get out of Jail Free" card.
Get your Unix fortune now!