Pablo Fernandez

I am talking about the game, you know, Monopoly! There are so many versions of it but the other day I’ve seen the most interesting one. No, not the Esperanto one: Monopolo. A do it yourself Monopoly, or a Make it yourself-opoly.

From that I’m deriving the idea, why can’t you design your Monopoly in a web application, or even in a desktop one but that ultimately submits it to the web and you get the finished game delivered to your home. You add pictures, you pick themes, you pick the title, the language, the currency. It could make a perfect purchase or a magnificent gift.

Why can’t you sell it to other people? Like you do for stuff in CafePress. Hasbro would take some earnings but all the design is ultimately crowd-sourced, the designer also gets some money. I find one reason why that may not work and that’s because most stuff for which is worth it to make a monopoly are also copyrigthed. Average Joe wouldn’t be able to make a Monopoly of his favorite movie without striking a deal with the movie makers, which is not likely for average Joe.

But the movie makers could make them in a self-service way. That’s also unlikely to happen. But an xkcd Monopoly? That’s likely to happen and sell quite a few copies. Companies with a sense of humor or with a good PR would have some employee doing tha. Do you imagine Microsoft or Google Monopoly with each property being a product. Do you want to buy Office? Do you want to buy Chrome? Do you want to play as Bill Gates? Steve Ballmer? Larry Page? I know some geeks would stack them up and have one of each of those.

I thought about starting to make the web application for designing a Monopoly. It could generate PDFs that you download and print and paste in a normal board as an interim while not having any production. But there’s only one company that can legally do this: Hasbro, and having only one company as your potential exit is not a good idea. So it was dropped from the ideas board into here, my blog.