Monopoly, a game that destroys friendships around the globe and has more variations than any other game on the planet, is looking to shake things up once again by allowing the Internet to select the next generation of 8 game tokens.
So What’s Going On Exactly?
Hasbro has launched VoteMonopoly.com, a website that gives you the chance to select 8 game tokens from a total of 64 different options including emoji’s, animals, vehicles, household objects and footware. The updated 8 tokens of Battleship, Shoe, Car, Top Hat, Thimble, Wheelbarrow, Scottie Dog & Cat (Cat was added to the official line up in a 2013 fan vote, replacing an old school flat Iron) are in the mix, so you have a chance to keep the line up the same if you so choose.
This might just sound like a promotion to sell units of the Monopoly Token Madness edition game, where there are 16 tokens included in the classic board game, but there’s a high chance that this could be a full replacement of the normal 8 tokens, much like the fan vote that saw the Iron token replaced with the Cat token in 2013. So at the moment, since Hasbro will not confirm anything, we can place Monopoly’s colourful money on the fact that no piece is safe and that everything can be replaced.
The 8 winning tokens will be announced on World Monopoly Day which happens on March 19, 2017. The winners will then go into production with the first run being available in stores from August.
What Can Go Wrong?
As anyone with a brain knows, the Internet is a very stupid place. The Internet is the place where Harambe, a dead Gorilla, gained a 5% vote in the US Presidential Election. The Internet also voted for a boat to be named Boaty McBoatFace… Why? “For the lols”. Safe to say that if the Internet gets its way, we’re going to have the next generation of Monopoly tokens be Hashtag, all five emoji (Smile, Wink, Kiss Blowing, LOL & Monopoly Man), T-Rex, Facebook Like & Harambe (or Sliced Bread since it’s an official entry). To be honest, if that was to happen, then while those people on the Internet will get their lols, it’ll leave the actual fans of the game, the collectors and generations of people who buy the game new for the first time with a bunch of stupid pop culture icons that will not mean something in the next decade.
Monopoly is more than the board we play on, the tokens are iconic to the point where everyone can name at least half of them without thinking too hard. It would be a shame to see those classic tokens disappear for modern junk. While there are a lot of good updates to classic tokens (Replace Car with Race Car for example) and some of the new ones are creative (Turtle is pretty cute), so why not stack the vote and save the ones that people love while updating the game at the same time? Just don’t let those people on the Internet win “for the lols”.
