Games Mad – Crazy games for everyone!

Mad about Monopoly

We all have our personal favourite games, whether they are board games that bring back fond family memories, or more likely highly competitive family memories, or video games we have enjoyed p laying with our mates. All are games that we remember and will carry on enjoying to play despite our increasing years. For me, one of the all-time best family board games is Monopoly, with all the competitiveness, familial rivalry and eventual harmony that generally results from protracted games of it.

Classic Monopoly, with its 1940’s London street names, values and societal nuances, is still many players’ idea of ‘traditional’ Monopoly ‘as it should be’, understandable really as this is the original game which they grew up playing. But nowadays kids might have grown up playing all kinds of variations of Monopoly, including everything from Monopoly Fishing, where players compete to catch the world’s most coveted fish, to Monopoly: Swindon Edition, where the UK town of Swindon is laid out on the Monopoly board in all its questionable glory.

More ‘usual’ and far more common variations are simply the traditional formula of London addresses updated to the modern day, with inflation, electronic money and the changing face of the city all taken into consideration. Although many of the original streets and places are still to be found, new districts have been incorporated, such as Soho, to most modern London versions of Monopoly. Of course, American versions, many centred on New York, have been produced as well as many other international variants covering most of the world’s capital cities, with places like Paris and Rome being particularly popular.