Not here, Not now

Alas, Des Moines is not considered to be among the top cities of the world. At least voters selecting which cities should be on a new edition of Monopoly called Here & Now The World Edition did not include Des Moines. Various votes have been taken online for this updated edition of the Parker Brothers board game and the current vote ends on March 9, 2008. That vote is to select two wild card cities from a list of 20.

Should San Francisco be included? What about Quebec? Maybe you’d like to build a hotel on Cancun. Those are some of the cities on the wildcard list.

Voting started at midnight, Universal Time, on January 22, 2008. A list of 68 cities was offered from which 20 were selected. The two wild card cities will bring the list of cities on the new board to 22. The city that will be the new high-rent Boardwalk will be decided by which city receives the highest number of votes. That portion of the voting has closed. The winning cities will be announced and the new board will be available in stores in August 2008. Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, DC, are the United States cities that might be included.

In a news release announcing the voting, Hasbro told of some oddities in country-specific contests held for other editions. Paris did not receive enough votes to be on a French board. In the United Kingdom, more votes were received online for the Monopoly choice than were received at polls for local elections held at the same time.

While I was checking the Internet to see if there had been any nomination of Des Moines in the wild card list, I discovered Parker Brothers had a plant in Des Moines. There is a book called, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers from Tiddlywinks to Trivial Pursuit, published in 2003 and written by Philip E. Orbanes. An excerpt from this book found on a website indicated that a Des Moines plant manager went on to be a vice president in the company after it was bought. There is also a website that looks specifically at the history of Monopoly, including the designs of box covers.

The news release does not mention any updates for the railroads and the utilities, or if the $200 for passing Go will be paid in euros, U.S. dollars, or yuans. Nor was there any hint of new tokens.

Naturally I started thinking of what an Iowa version of Monopoly might be. I’m not sure if I was getting more chuckles for the tokens, the choice of low and high rent locations, or for the utilities and transportation options. Maybe instead of going to jail, where in Polk County players would have to pay $200 just to help build it, players could be sent to a hog confinement. Of course, one of the tokens would have to be a hog.

M.R. Field is editor of Leading Voices: Iowa.