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In-Game Advertising Comes to Board Games
Grooves writes "Monopoly is getting rid of paper money in favor of credit cards. From the article: 'The new card, which resembles a debit card, is inserted into a small plastic reader/writer that can display and update the balance on the card. Traditional money is gone altogether, though purists can still purchase the original version.' Does this mean the end of complex Monopoly games where I charge grandma interest to borrow money?"
Now how will I cheat?
Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.
Damn, there goes my winning strategy: Embezzlement!
Its amazing how much easier Monopoly is to win when you steal a few $500s from the bank before the start of the game...
Unless I hack the reader... Hmmmm.
Test your net with Netalyzr
It's so much easier for the banker to 'accidentally' press the wrong key, than to stuff bright pink notes under something. And I'd be so pissed if the battery died halfway through the game.
damn, one of the best things of monopoly is about having big stacks of money in front of you.
Sure a game with the name Monopoly would be above the influence of corporate interests like Visa!!
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
On the bright side, we won't have to deal with those stupid 5s and 1s, which only serve to get in the way.
On the other hand, this is going to make a lot of rulesets more complicated... ranging from embezzlement to the more common and legitimate Free Parking "put $500 and any taxes/fines in the middle, pick them up when you hit Free Parking" rule.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
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What? People still play this horrible game? It's a nightmare form a game design perspective! The winner of the game is decided so early on in play, 80% of the time spent playing the game is virtually pointless because everyone can tell who is going to win (unless he/she makes an incredibly dumb trade or someone cheats).
At least if they're going to upgrade the game aesthetics, why not change the name to "Microsoft: The Game"?
*runs and hides*
If you old fuddy-duddies can't wrap your head around these elecomotronics, Parker Brothers is still offering the cold hard cash version.
However, I hope that they keep the currency version around for a long time. To a kid, having large wads of paper in front of yourself to show off and rub the fact that you're winning in the other players' faces. If everyone has the same boring card, that just makes things even, now doesn't it?
Also, if they stop the cash edition, I won't be able to fulfill my dreams of filling a room with monopoly money and swimming around in it ala Scrooge McDuck.
It is a neat idea that puts a spin on monopoly other then themed boards. Notice how it costs more. The company is trying to come up with ways for you to buy the same game you already own. And it will probably work. When you go to buy a board game odds are that you will buy a game you have already played. That is why we have the same dozen games, but with 50 themes (trivial pursuit star wars!). The sad thing is that Monopoly was a great way for kids to learn about money.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
What's next, identity theft?
Have you read my blog lately?
Take a ride on the Reading: $25
A house on Atlantic Avenue: $150
The look on your brother's face when he lands on Park Place with four houses: priceless.
And it's educational, too! Who doesn't charge their rent on a credit card? It's good, sound personal fiscal policy, the kind of lesson that I want my children to learn!
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
At least it not paypal -- you could be winning the game and have your funds frozen for suspect activity.
No, but every time you land on a space owned by another player, they'll run a credit check on you before you are allowed to stay there.
Will the bank will also keep 2.5% per transaction like in the real world?
Crack the card reader!!! Simply program it to send the fractional pennies left over from every transaction into a seperate account linked to yours. No one will every notice their money is gone!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
One nice thing about Monopoly is that children learn things like how to count money. With the credit card version it will be easier (and less time consuming) to play a game, but will there be the same educational value? Probably not.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I grew up playing Monopoly, but I've come to realize that Monopoly is a terrible board game. It is sad that it is still played so widely when there are so many great boards games to come out just recently. Monopoly changing the names and adding an electronic gimmick won't save itself from poor mechanics.
At bare minimum families should be playing Settlers of Catan these days. *Maybe* Carcassonne. Puerto Rico and Reiner Knizia games for families that claim to know something about board games.
A good site for other games, review, and community check out Board Game Geek
The way we played, there were no rules outside the banker. Pickpocketing, bribes, free trade, all tricks allowed. Shuffle that house two fields away onto your area and claim it's yours, or put the dice down, 6-up and claim you just threw them. Bring your own monopoly money from home. Nobody got desperate enough to trade the in-game cash for real money, but that would be perfectly legal too.
The "dirty" version of the game was fun. Electronics will most likely kill this kind of gameplay.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
They make a paper money version? I wish someone had told me sooner.
I've been playing the "Monopoly: Yap Edition" from Micronesia. Keeping track of and moving hundreds of giant stone discs is not as fun as it sounds. Passing Go! is usually seen as physical punishment, not a reward. Toes get stubbed. Basically, after about 15 minutes, everyone gets too exhausted to keep going.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
No one in their right mind, who doesn't have a FICO in the 400s, uses a debit card. No anonymity and it's YOUR money that's gone temporarily if there's an error. Credit cards don't have anonymity, but if there's a screw-up, you've got anywhere from 10 to 40 days to fix it before you every have to consider shelling out a cent. Plus, if there's a royal fuck up, you don't end up bouncing your mortage payment and every other bill that month. Let the CC company float that cash and take the brunt of the errors.
If you need anonymity, do what Sen. Bob Dole does - have your assitant take $10k out of the bank every couple weeks and pay for everything with cash. When asked why he does this, his answer was simple: there no way to trace it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Monopoly the boardgame + American Express = new tagline:
"Don't leave home."
Uhh, no it doesn't. I get to pay later and get 1% cash back.
Uhhh... yes it does. The merchant gets to pay VISA say 4% for the priviledge of letting you pay later and get 1% back. Guess what, the merchant you bought from had to raise prices 5% or even more in order to afford allowing you to make purchases with VISA.
As long as I make my payments it is a smart thing to do.
Negotiating terms, buying on account, and paying by cheque is even smarter. Not something you can do when buying a roll of toilet paper at walmart... but then the quote referred to "businessmen" not "walmart shoppers".
IF they are going to update they economics of the game, they should go all out..... You can buy Park Place with a 7 turn interest only ARM, inflate the profits using mark-to-market accounting and dump all the loses to a dummy corp setup under the Thimble. Genius!
I can't imagine that this game will be popular, even with a computer-literate set. For one thing, ideas like this credit-based Monopoly ignore the very real fact that a symbol is not the same as the thing symbolized, either conceptually or in emotional terms.
Now, I'm a woman, so my perspective may not be shared by the estrogen-challenged among us, but for me part of the satisfaction of board games (as well as of many other hobbies) is the opportunity to interact with and manipulate real objects-- to see a stack of money grow, move around a little iron doggie, build wooden roads in Settlers, construct fields of color in Blockus, etc. It's not especially smart, I know, but it is a very visceral and very real component of my enjoyment of the game. For children, exploration of the objects involved may constitute most or all of the pleasure they take in gameplay, and rightly so, since that kind of play is needed to build spatial relations and motor skills.
Even for adults, though, I can't help feeling as though interactions with concrete physical objects are necessary to keep in touch with our environment and maintain a sense of control and comfort in our world. We evolved from monkeys, after all-- manipulating objects is what we do best. Abstract thinking is useful and necessary, too, of course, but I can't help feeling as though the ongoing virtualization of everyday life is going to result in increased stress and poor decision-making for our recently-ex-hunter/gatherer selves.
That said, I do hope the social scientists mount some comparative studies of virtual-Monopoly vs. real-Monopoly gameplay. What a great opportunity to examine the psychology of credit!
The traditional Monopoly game helps teach kids how to understand folding money. Now it's just a video game where the kid can say "here's my card!" instead of having to learn count the bills. This is a sad day.
It's a sad day, but it's a sad day because it appears to be reducing the flexibility of a classic game, not because it's no longer teaching kids an obsolete skill that is only relevant in technologically-backwards societies. Monopoly is great because it's fun, not because it's educational.
Seriously, I've never had more than two or three banknotes in my wallet at a time in the last decade or so, and I expect the number of transactions I use cash for to fall to zero as soon as someone comes up with a decent micropayment scheme. How exactly is knowing how to count out primitive tokens going to be useful to my kids, who I expect to grow up in a fully-electronic society where even carrying a set of cards around seems clumsy and archaic?
I remember playing Monopoly with my siblings. At one point, we got tired to handing the paper money back and forth, so we each grabbed a cheap calculator, and used the "memory" feature to store our balances. It worked like a charm (or, rather, it worked very much unlike a charm, since charms have a tendency to do absolutely nothing but make the wearer look gullible)!
http://outcampaign.org/
The thing that keeps a Monopoly game mildly interesting is all of the under-the-table and back-room (or bathroom) wheeling and dealing going on. It makes it more about the people, and the players' interactions.
Take that away, and you get mind-numbing tedium. Wasn't that what computers and microeletronics were supposed to save us from?
What are you talking about?
If I have money, of course I would want to defer payment as long as possible. As long as you pay your bill in full, then there's no interest charged on the bill, however I would've gained the interest with the money I kept in my account.
It's standard practice for companies to wait till the due dates to clear their accounts payable, just for that reason.
Now why would I want to pay upfront, when I can gain money through interest, plus earn speciality points for a particular credit card?
If you've got the money in the bank, there's no reason to use a debit card over a credit card. You are more likey to be a victim of fraud, and you don't get any credit rating.
I don't think you really understand how credit cards work.
Interesting... I pay my balance off every month, and they raise my credit line.
So, is it because they like me, or because they hope i'll spend more and _not_ be able to pay it off in one month?
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
I don't want gagets around me every single moment. I surf the net, play video games, watch TV, all electronic activities that I enjoy. But somtimes I want non-electronic enjoyment, and board games are one excellent alternative.
There are already electronic versions of monopoly the people play, it seems to me like the people who still fork out money for the board probably are after a differet experience - I know I am. But as long as there are paper versions out thre, I guess I can't complain.
"I owe you $8, hm? Well, will you give me a $10 if I give you the $2 change?"
This worked on me...four days ago. In my defense, I was really tired and not paying attention at the time. And hey, at least I got an awesome photo of my friends laughing at me.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I don't know if this is the FIRST place to say they are deadbeats, but where I know it from is the best show ever, Frontline. Specifically the episode "The secret history of credit cards". It was Ben Stein who specifically said that credit card companies call people who pay their balance in full each months are deadbeatsd it/view/
link for ya: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cre
People need to watch more pbs
I got you an Andes mint, but it melted in my pocket
Both. By regularly paying off your bill, you demonstrate that you're a good credit risk. The bank is hoping that you'll be stuck with a running balance and pay their interest fees on it, but they're also confident that if/when you do, you'll make regular payments and not default.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
and outweight the annual fee you have to pay
Plenty of cards have no annual fee, and still give you miles/cashback/etc. Mine does 1% off everything and 5% off gas, which is especially useful these days.
Then again, I'm sure the credit card companies hate people like me, who are essentially taking advantage of the system.
Of course they'd rather we spend like typical consumers, but they still make a profit off the transaction fees.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
No, credit history is built with every cent you borrow. It's true that, starting from scratch, it's very difficult to qualify for larger loans. Without a strong credit history, you probably won't be able to get a home loan, or a car loan with any kind of decent interest rate. In fact, pretty much the only large loan available to someone without a good credit history or collateral is a student loan.
Using a credit card, and paying the balance in full each month, is probably the easiest and best way to get a good credit score. However, it's certainly not the only way.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
That's a violation of almost every merchant account agreement I've ever seen. You ARE allowed to offer a cash discount, but you may NOT charge a price higher than the displayed price for credit card purchases.
That's a violation of almost every merchant account agreement I've ever seen.
It certainly is. That doesn't prevent it from happening.
credit cards~ cost the merchant money.
I am a credit card merchant. if someone pays me cash, I get 100% of the funds
if someone pays me via cc, I get from 96-98% of the funds
if I wind up doing a return, I lose 100% of the return.
for some transactions, credit cards are NOT appropriate.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The summary is mistaken. TFA is quite clear that this is for a British version of the game and that it is merely one of the 10,000 variations of Monopoly. I mean- we have Star Wars Monopoly, 'Cleveland in a Box' Monopoly, and my personal favorite Ghettopoly (which you can;t get in the U.S. now, google it sometime for the Department of Justice freaking out over it). This is simply Visa Monopoly. Nothing to see here- move along.
Bravo Slashdot submiter & editor... Bravo.
Let's see first of all RTFA. It is ONE edition of monopoly. Not all future editions.
Secondly, the title of the slashdot post. "Advertising comes to Board Games."
Really? Ok, hrmm lets read the summary.. Odd No mention of this advertising...
Yes, I know Visa worked with Parker Brothers to make a credit card swiper for ONE edition of monopoly (only in UK and parts of europe so far). And they have the Visa logo on it... Of course, I know that not from this summary.. I guess it was good that I RTFA before slashdot posted it, so I knew what this post was about before I read the summary that misses the point.
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