vovat | If you pass Go, collect $200

One game that I meant to mention in my last post but forgot during the actual writing was Advance to Boardwalk, a Monopoly derivative where you built hotels on the Boardwalk. I remember that one of the tokens was a baby buggy, but not all that much else about it. Honestly, we never played it that much. Thinking about it did, however, make me recall some other games inspired by the classic Monopoly. There was something called Free Parking, which I seem to recall trying to play in school, or at least watching other people play. I remember trying to play the original Monopoly in school, and arguing with other kids about the rules. Some of them said that you weren't allowed to buy property until you'd been all the way around the board once, which I'd never heard of. On the other hand, I always played so you'd get money on Free Parking, which isn't in the official rules, but I believe it's pretty common.

The young daughter of one of the women my dad dated had Monopoly Junior, in which the rules were a lot simpler, and you bought amusement park rides instead of streets. Wikipedia also mentions a die-rolling game called Don't Go to Jail, which I hadn't heard of before. The interesting thing is that I think all of these games were products of the eighties or early nineties, even though Monopoly itself had been around for decades before that. The trend of Monopoly knock-offs based on other towns, movies, TV shows, popular characters, breeds of animal, etc. also seems to be relatively new, although I'm sure people were coming up with unlicensed versions of these things long before they came to be sold in stores. I remember coming up with the list of properties for a Monopoly game based on my own hometown, although I never got as far as actually making a board or anything. I remember finding a Monopoly-type game about racism at my grandmother's house; I think she'd taken it from a magazine.