DIY Lifesize Monopoly (San Francisco hacker hostel style)
Lacking a holodeck, the next best option for getting your friends to do a weird group activity is to have a party and supply the booze.
For my wedding reception, guests were subjected to pirate garb, mead, and Renaissance court dancing. For my 33rd birthday party—say hello to 1930s costumes, martinis, and life-sized Monopoly!
The backstory: I’ve lived in a 45-person co-living space in San Francisco called 20mission for two and a half years. The house is like family. Or, as a good friend likes to call it,
“…a Bitcoin-fueled tech hippie love fest.”
Fair enough.
A while ago I came across a floor plan of 20mission. It looked just like a game board — a near square of 41 bedrooms. As a childhood favorite, the classic game that I loved in childhood immediately came to mind.
So on September 20th, 2015, I turned our home into a giant game of (very Silicon Valley/Mission-themed) Monopoly.
Download templates and design files from GitHub
HUGE 1930s music Spotify playlist
How to make a classic gin martini
Making The Game
Luckily I’m a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, and I know my way around Photoshop. Dozens and dozens of hours went into it. Game boards, currency, property cards, Chance & Community Chest, and the economy itself… there was a lot to rewrite and design.
The players divided themselves into four teams, and selected a CEO and treasurer. The CEO would be the one to gather input and deliver team decisions, and to participate in property auctions. The treasurer handled the money and transactions with the banker.
Each team got a laminated copy of the board and a dry erase marker, to mark down properties owned or make notes.
The team CEOs rolled to see who went first, and the game begins!
Currency & Banking
We are, according to our occasional nickname, The House That Bitcoin Built, and I wanted to do our economy was in bits (a bit of a precarious endeavor this week…). There was a buy-in per team of 64867 bits, which was about $15 that day. Winnings would go half to the team last standing (or with the highest net worth when we called the game), and half to the charity Child’s Play. The entire bank was 500k bits, with a 25× multiplier applied to all dollars from the original Monopoly game.
Somebody knows her twenty-five times table pretty well now.
Boardwalk, the most expensive property in the game, becomes Dolores Park in our Mission-themed version, and goes for a tidy 10000 bits instead of $400.
Bills
The bills are a brazen celebration of the Tech Gods, featuring a mix of entrepreneurs I tried not to think too hard about (and a depressing moment of ‘Oh shit! I need a woman!’).
Who’s on what
- 5000 bits: Elon Musk
- 1000 bits: Steve Jobs
- 500 bits: Evan Williams
- 200 bits: Mark Zuckerberg
- 100 bits: Marissa Mayer
- 50 bits: Travis Kalanick
The Board & Properties
One copy of the property cards was tacked up to the wall beside each of my housemates’ doors, with the corner rooms (bathrooms, common room, and kitchen) making up GO, Go to Jail, etc.
Rent and other currency figures on property cards were simply multiplied by 25. Heads up: creating the property cards was by far the most tedious part of creating the game.
Teams wrote their name on properties they owned. When rent was due, the treasurer walked the rent payment to the owed team. Standard rules applied for purchasing houses and hotels.
Chance & Community Chest
Until 20m-opoly, I hadn’t thought much about the meaning of these cards.
How to represent Chance, the riskier draw of the two piles, in nerdville? There is an extremely popular gambling website called Satoshi Dice, which uses bitcoin. Boom.
Community Chest = Kickstarter. Boom.
These were the most fun to create, and I think inject the most personality into the game.
Tokens
- Find unwanted stuff around the house
- Buy silver spray paint
- Paint stuff
Players carried their token around the board as they rolled and placed it in front of the property door.
Rules
We played by original rules. Mandatory unsold property auctions, no Free Parking bonus, no weird double-1s rule. We were aiming for a fast game, and enforcing quick sales without pouring bonuses into players’ hands was a good way to encourage that.
Criminals were handcuffed and whisked off to the bathroom until rolling doubles or paying 1250 bits.
Materials
I spent about $120 to create the game. The most expensive thing was the laminating sheets. It might’ve been cheaper (and better) to go to a print shop, but I was quite happy with the results of my cheapie inkjet and the laminating sheets.
We ended up with:
- 22 full page cardstock property cards × 2
- 15 cardstock ‘Mortgaged’ signs
- 6 full page cardstock board templates
- 32 houses and 12 hotels in green and red construction paper
- 3 boxes laminating sheets
- Bills per team: 20,000 bits (5000ƀ × 2, 1000ƀ × 5, 500ƀ × 6, 200ƀ × 6, 100ƀ × 5, 50ƀ × 6) on colored paper
- Blue sticky tack for the properties, mortgaged signs, and houses/hotels
- 2 × inflatable dice
- 1 × accountant’s visor
- 1 × boobtastic ‘gangster’ costume
The Result
Well… everyone was kinda hammered by this point, and we didn’t exactly write down the details.
Essentially one team pulled into the lead, and the team in second disbanded and sold their assets to the winning team, and things wrapped up pretty quickly after that.
All in all, the dynamics of the game worked out pretty well, and the only major thing we changed on the fly was for teams to write their name on the door-mounted property card when purchased. We were going to announce properties and other transactions in a Slack channel, but the game turned out to be too demanding IRL to keep up with that.
Summary: one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had!
Credits
- Ryan, for hashing out the economy with me and being our banker & auctioneer
- Steph, for Photoshop assistance, photos, and much more
- Miles, for busting out his handcuffs
- Diana and housemates, for helping with various cutting and laminating tasks, listening to me go on about this thing for weeks, and being down with hosting the game!
- Guests! You made it happen :)
- Monopoly board/cards were adapted from Brad Frost’s template
- Shannin, for making me this awesome birthday cake
