Newszine

This Cup is Half-Full

Who doesn't love free parking and get out of jail free cards?

My favorite board game growing up was Candy Land. I would beg and beg my brother to play the delicious, multi-colored game with me all the time. Perhaps he would have been more interested in climbing gum drop mountain if there was a prize of 20,580 Reeses Peanut Butter cups?

At the Monopoly World Championship in Las Vegas, people gathered from areas around the world to participate in a few games of the popular board game, Monopoly. Their incentive? $20,580 – the contents of the game’s bank – in real money.

USA today covered the Monopoly World Championship as a 19-year-old Norwegian student, Bjorn Halvard Knappskog, beat out his three other opponents to secure his rights as World Monopoly champion.

The game went on for about 45 minutes, a much shorter game than the 4-hour marathon some household games can turn into. In a turn in the game, an opponent traded Knappskog his red property, giving him a light blue property – and a monopoly. With enough money to build on his three properties, “Knappskog mortgaged his other properties and loaded up on hotels for Oriental, Vermont and Connecticut Avenues, seeing his opponents’ tokens within range of the spaces on the board.”

Knappskog won the real estate trading game with $6,888 in assets.

The history of the game itself is an uplifting story. Monopoly was created during the Great Depression by an unemployed American man looking to make the most of his situation.

In it’s first year, 1935, the MONOPOLY game was the bestselling game in America. The Hasbro Web site estimates the game has been played by more than 500 million people.

Who knows, maybe a new classic game will come out of our current economic situation?

Read the full story here, and find out about some fun facts about the game on the
Hasbro Web site.