By David Futrelle
From time to time, game company Hasbro gets bored and greedy and decides to perk up sales a little with a novelty version of the game Monopoly.
A couple of weeks ago, the company released Monopoly Socialism, a grim evocation of Soviet-style Communism seemingly designed to delight the Fox News crowd. Last year, they put out a similarly satirical version of Monopoly for Millennials, sans real estate, because “you can’t afford it anyway.”
Now the company has released a kind-of, sort-of feminist edition of the game — and Men’s Rights Redditors are crying “misandry.”
In Ms Monopoly, available for pre-order as of today, men get to see what it’s like to get paid less for the same work: Every time women pass “go” they collect $240, while men collect the standard $200.
Naturally, the inhabitants of the Men’s Rights subreddit — wage gap denialists all — don’t find any of this the slightest bit funny.
“That moment when you are so privileged in society that you need a leg up in a board game,” sniffed someone called Sir_Sux_Alot.
“Show boys that even when the rules are perfectly and objective fair to begin with and nothing is holding them back we still feel the need to give girls privilege over boys,” groused 5th_Law_of_Robotics.
“So they’ve taken a perfectly fair and equal game where everyone has the same chance as each other, and made it in to a sexist shit show,” lamented MrHolte.
“So when’s the new Life game come out?” asked Biff64gc.
Women getting discounted college degrees from female only scholarships and are guarenteed a stem or ceo job that pays more because of female affirmative action and men have a 90% chance of not finishing the game due to death or homlessness.
(Yes, these dudes actually believe that in the real world CEO jobs are handed out to women like candy; never mind that less than 7% of the CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women.)
“Well now I have seen it all,” mgtowjoe sighed.
The sad thing is even with 40$ more then men they will spend that one shoes and whatever other useless items that feed ego and not the common good.
Not to mention they talk about instead of properties it’s inventions that women made……. WI-FI…….. Last I heard that was an idea that was founded and proven by Tesla…..
Uh, no. Many people contributed to the invention of WiFi, including Hedy Lamarr, who is the person the game presumably celebrates.
The other invention listed was chocolate ship cookies….. Promoting the art of fattening foods to slam the idea of “healthy at any size” down our throats like a cock in a crappy porno film.
That’s … some interesting imagery there. I wouldn’t have gone directly from “chocolate ship cookies” to “cock shoved down throat” but I guess it does make for some vivid writing.
“Fuck you get woke go broke,” mgtowjoe concluded.
Someone called Ody_ssey bragged he’d beat the women at their own game.
I can guarantee I can still beat feminists in this game. The next 50% of the game is not about who had more money earlier. It becomes about decision making and probability and you need to make quick money management decisions to increase monopoly. They will complain about the game once men starts winning saying the dice is sexist.
NoButtholeNoGood, meanwhile, made the inevitable transphobic joke.
I’d just identify as female whenever I went to play this.
Hilarious.
No one tell these dudes about chess, in which the queen zooms about the board murdering opponents at will while the king stumbles around like some infomercial doofus.
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@TheKND:
And that original inventor was… a woman! Then it was stolen by a guy who sold it under a new name. He made a lot of money, while she didn’t. Another chapter in “men invented everything”.
@TimS it is absolutely the worst sort of performative feminism, making jokes about surface problems while ignoring the underlying systemic problems.
@Vicky all the hugs.
I wonder if Hasbro are trying to derail Socialism:The Game, which, I am given to understand, a third party was already marketing as an unofficial expansion pack for the ‘classic’ Monopoly game.
Capitalists finding a way to financially exploit socialism – I’m in agreement with those who hold that we’re living in an era that’s beyond satire.
I can tell you who bought “Monopoly for Millennials”: every uncle of every millennial, for christmas when it came out. Millennials now have stacks of this game in their closets.
I figure the target audience of Ms Monopoly is similar: not feminists, but conservative relatives of feminists, who want to give it as a joke gift.
@TimS, Betrayer
Of course it’s not actually a feminist game. As far as I can tell, the whole point is to mock feminism. The MRAs have really misinterpreted it if they think it’s a feminist game, but then again they do that regularly, thinking that antifeminist things are feminist.
@Amtep
My conservative relatives hate me too much to send me any gifts ever, but this is probably for the better. At least I don’t receive board games that mock my politics.
I strongly suspect that this novelty version of the game is like the other 10 zillion novelty versions out there, in that it’s not supposed to be played so much as just exist as a collectors item. I’ve seen versions that were themed around local cities, assorted colleges and universities, and assorted fandoms too; this version isn’t so surprising when looked at from that angle.
How playable these collector items are as compared to the standard versions of the game, I have no idea. It’s been ages since I’ve played the game; I’m not the one to judge that.
But its ok! You can kill the queen, while the king can only be sorta trapped and threatened, and the old boy’s club will sort him out with a new army and kingdom and wife for next time.
No, wait. Not only is it possible for the black side to win in chess, but the
cannon-fodder beta cuck piecespawns can be turned into queens if they make it across the board. If that isn’t globohomo gayplex propaganda, I don’t know what is.The direct precursor to Monopoly, Elizabeth Magie’s ‘The Landlord’s Game’, was literally designed to expose the flaws and injustices inherent in capitalism in general and landlording in particular. Magie was a Georgist, believing that individuals should keep the proceeds of their labour, but economic benefits arising from land should belong to the community.
In other words, Hasbro using Monopoly to put the boot into socialism is pretty ironic.
@Citerior Motive thank you, that’s most interesting.
@VP I’m so sorry. Much love to you.
I’m sure I still have it somewhere, but I have an old Star Wars Monopoly game back when the Special Editions came out in ’97 with Pewter figures. Damn that was fun to play.
Board games, board games… that was always a thing our family did when we went to see the grandparents. After they passed away, we didn’t do them as much. Most family game nights these days are trivia, card games or Telestrations (which never fails to result in hilarity). Although on my late-June birthday, I’m given lease to subject them to Nightmare and its many expansions (of which I own all of them). Mwahahaha! That’s right, you’re going to be called a “maggot” by a weird Belorussian-Australian dude and like it!
Just on the topic, if I might take a moment to complain, but I absolutely hate it when you want to buy a new version of an old board game you’ve misplaced and they fuck around with the gameplay on you. This happened to me twice, once with Clue and another with The Game of Life. Just… update the look, update the art, but leave the mechanics the way we remember them.
At least we still got the 1971 version of Careers.
That’s right, Ecology is the career of the future!
Monopoly is the sort of game my friends and I call a “roll-go”. The strategy consists of “you roll, and then you go”. The complexity of the game mechanics boil down to “you roll, and then you go”. You can’t be “good” at Monopoly. It just isn’t a skill-based game. That’s fine if that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for, but the comment from the guy insisting he could beat any woman at Ms. Monopoly is just silly.
I also want to echo the chorus of those who have said that these Monopoly variants aren’t really meant to be played so much as to be stupid gifts. I mean, I have a copy of “Beer Monopoly” at home that was a gift given on the grounds that: 1. Relatives know I like board games, and 2. Relatives know I drink beer. It’s never been opened, and likely never will. I will admit that I did buy Anti-Monopoly when I was in school and made an inordinate amount of my friends play it with me, but that was more out of some ill-conceived plan to make them think economics was cool.
Also, re: @Katamount’s post above, I had completely forgotten about Careers as a game. My mom had a copy of that when I was a kid and I have vague-but-fond memories of playing it with my parents and sisters growing up.
@Katamount
I love Telestrations, but I rarely have enough people around at once to play it. Since I’m very bad at drawing (as are most of the people I usually play with), it becomes humorous quickly.
One question, though: You actually draw well. Does that make the game less funny because your illustrations would presumably be more recognizable?
A few years ago I was visiting my grandmother’s house and I found a 1970s Scrabble set. Since I enjoy Scrabble (and am generally pretty good at it), I decided to play a game with my sister, who was there with me. Inside the box was an advertisement for a bunch of other games from the same manufacturer. The one that stuck out to me the most was an extremely sexist advertisement for a career-based game (not the one you showed) where boys had career choices like football player and astronaut and girls had choices like flight attendant or teacher. I was reminded of it because I realize that although I would like to look back upon that as an artifact of the past, it seems a shocking number of conservatives still see the world through that lens. Presumably the kinds of conservatives who send Monopoly special editions to younger relatives.
@AcidTrial
From my limited experience, I would argue that there is some level of skill to monopoly. It’s pretty minimal like deciding whether to buy something or agreeing or not to deals, but there is something to it.
Special edition games as a whole are generally meant to be gifts or collectibles. I’ll play monopoly to waste time if there is a set around, but I don’t really do it for fun.
I never liked monopoly. It always seemed like a long, boring game to me. And I’m someone who plays online chest with my fiancé on date night. Game night at my apartment includes charades, card against humanity with harry potter pack, truth bombs, no trump (which is a card game where you guess between of one of two quotes is trump or not), and guess who youtuber addition.
@Katherine
The misandry in chess is a actually pretty recent. (Compared to the history of the game as a whole). The piece now called the queen was originally the Vizier, and could only move one space diagonally. The name changed to Queen in Europe sometime in the early part of last millennium, and in Queen Isabella’s Spain in the 1470s ‘[Mad] Queen’s Chess’ was developed, giving the queen her current powerful moves.
Trivial Pursuit is my favorite board game. Monopoly is entertaining for a short while, but it takes waaaaay too long for anyone to emerge as a winner.
Trivial Pursuit is my favorite board game. Monopoly is entertaining for a short while, but it takes waaaaay too long for anyone to emerge as a winner.
Not only WiFi…Lady Ada Lovelace, back in the mid-1800’s, was “the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is sometimes regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a “computing machine” and one of the first computer programmers.” (Wikipedia)
I’m sure all the MRA’s will thank Lady Lovelace for making their complaint forums possible.
@Naglfar
My hilarity comes with what I pick to draw. We rarely use the cards and just opt for whatever pops into our heads. Obscure and vulgar references galore!
@Victorious Parasol:
I’m so sorry about your kitty. I’m sure you gave him/her a wonderful life, and the best of care. Most cats don’t live to be 20.
Lately, my family and I have become fond of games that are either cooperative rather than competitive (Mansions of Madness, a Lovecraft-themed exploration game is our favorite,) or more chill and relaxing “competitive” games, like Ticket to Ride.
On a related note, I tried to play Munchkin with my three younger brothers a couple years back. The oldest of the three got so mad when I made a move that screwed him over that he knocked everything off the board and stormed off.
@Katamount:
Wow, that Careers game looks soooooo familiar to me. Tho, I would have been a little kid when it was being sold.
I liked Candyland and Parcheesi when I was a little kid. As I got older, I really liked Clue.
I agree with a few other commenters about Monopoly – it’s a long, boring game. I’ve never been a fan.
My father liked to play chess; he taught my sister and I the moves, but of course we weren’t competent opponents for him. My mother wasn’t interested. Around 1979, he bought himself a computer chess game. It cost at least $100.00. I apologize if I’ve mentioned this before, but that game blew my dad away. He thought it was just so futuristic and sci-fi, to play chess with a computer. Incidentally, there’s an episode of the original Star Trek where Spock plays chess with a computer.
@Garnetstar: Have you seen the Plan 28 project? It is an attempt to build Babbage’s Analytical Engine using the technology of his day. Actual progress on it is slow because the initial steps have involved laboriously collecting and scanning all the designs of the Engine that Babbage created over his lifetime… not helped by the fact that Babbage created his own graphical “language” to describe the mechanisms of the Engine.
Interestingly, the paper written by Ada¹ to which you refer, the one where she outlined how the Analytical Engine could be used to compute Bernoulli numbers, has apparently uncovered a shortcoming in the design of the Engine; basically, Ada’s program assumes the Engine has what we nowadays would call arrays, but it’s not at all clear from the surviving plans that it did. If Babbage told her otherwise, that makes Ada not only the first programmer but also the first one to be stung by vapourware promises from her hardware vendor ?
Stephen Wolfram, the author of the Mathematica programming language has a great post on Ada which he published on the 200th anniversary of her birth (and which includes some stuff like Babbage’s graphical language). It also has this great picture of Ada looking like she walked straight out of a Jane Austen novel:
“Why, Mr. Darcy, while your drenched appearance is not altogether unconvivial, it was your recent paper on prime number theory positively set my heart a-flutter!” ?
Anyway, it’s a change from the usual portrait one usually sees of her (which, according to a biography I read of her back in university, she apparently loathed because it gave her a fashionably pointy chin, when in fact she’d inherited a strong jawline from her father, Lord Byron. You can see it in some of the other portraits in Wolfram’s post)
¹ I never know how best to write her name: I know most people just write “Ada Lovelace” but “Lovelace” was her title, not her surname, dammit! Or maybe British toffs habitually used their titles in place of their surnames. In any case, if I write “(Augusta) Ada Byron-King, Countess of Lovelace” people are either not going to know who I’m talking about, or think I’m an insufferable pedant… though there may be some truth in that last one.
@Dormousing_It
A computer once beat me at chess, but it proved no match in hand-to-hand combat.
(Not mine, just something I picked up off the web)
Whenever I go to my local game store’s game night, Ticket to Ride, Tokaido, and Azul are always my favorites.
In the Harmless clan, Monopoly’s generally the one that gets suggested sarcastically when no one has any idea what they want to do, but there was a time when my cousins really liked this Pokemon Monopoly game they had.