Monopoly City Streets, the game that took the world (or at least the world I live in) by storm!

For those of you who don’t know, Monopoly City Streets (MCS) is an online version of the recently released board game, but uses Google maps to allow real roads to be brought, built upon and sabotaged. There are also local, national and international leader boards for the top few of the digital tycoons out there (I’m currently number 3 on the South Staffordshire local boards).

MCS has been running a while now, and I expected there to be some sort of reward at the end of the season (set for January 2010) such as an iPod or laptop (or even a car or house? – It is Google powered, after all).

However, following a recent post on the MCS blog it has been announced that there is NO rewards and that the game is just that – a free online game to promote the board game. Hasbro also stated that they underestimated the popularity of the game and as such the databases were unable to cope with the pure number of queries being thrown at them.

Now, featuring one of the world’s most popular board games and powering it with one of the Internet giant’s software, and then sticking it on the most readily available media source in the world would perhaps make developers think it may be a golden egg? Perhaps not.

Anyway, to the point of this post – Start charging some money (say £15) to sign up to an account and use the profits to increase database functionality and throw in a few prizes for the winners (or top 3!) of each leader board?

It’s just a thought, but surely the way forward with traditional board games. It makes you wonder what else could be digitalized? I’m thinking of starting a design for a detective based game, with rooms, characters and weapons in… Rowley in the study with the Laptop, anyone?