The unusually meta tabletop game launches today at Target stores and on Amazon. It’s a petite package (about the size of a dinner plate) that, as its name might imply, is less cumbersome to take on the go than an original Monopoly board. It’s also much quicker and easier to play. While it might still generate some competitive tension, it’s less likely to cause lifelong feuds among family and friends. 

The making of Monopoly Go, the app

To understand how the new Monopoly Go board game came to be, we first have to rewind to its digital predecessor. The Monopoly Go app was designed by the interactive entertainment company Scopely over the course of about six years. The game was an instant hit, earning $2 billion in revenue in its first 10 months.

According to Massimo Maietti, Scopely SVP of product and general manager of Monopoly Go, the mobile game sought to capture the “core emotions” that the original Monopoly game inspires. “[Original Monopoly] is very contemporary in terms of the themes of the perils of wealth, negotiating your personal relationship with wealth—you know, a kid bankrupting their father, a mother asking their kid to pay rent; it mixes up money with relationships and creates an interesting explosion of emotions,” Maietti says. 

There were plenty of challenges in converting the original game to an app—chief of which, Maietti explains, is keeping players playing. While a board game might be played in person with friends for a few hours, an app is meant to serve as a “lifelong companion.” His designers had to find a way to make the game ongoing while still inspiring a fiery competitiveness.

So, Scopely focused on re-creating those emotions by allowing users to play with real-life family and friends (or online strangers). The mobile game is structured in levels, with every user having their own boards and serving as greedy landlords in locations like New York City and, oddly, Space Metropolis. Users can conduct “bank heists” and “shut downs,” wherein they visit their loved ones’ boards and destroy their property.

It’s pretty addictive. I promised to “test it out” for 15 minutes during a workday, and found myself emerging from a stupefied daze an hour later. It lacks the strategic nature of original Monopoly, but it has plenty of dopamine boosts that keep you coming back for more. That sense of ease is by design: Maietti’s team took three years creating an initial version of the app that they ultimately scrapped because it required too much effort and cognition from players. The current iteration embraces randomness with a hint of strategy, rather than the other way around.

Into the Monopoly Go metaverse

True to the capitalist spirit of the game, the Monopoly Go app achieved massive early success. The mobile game was so well received, in fact, that designers at Scopely pitched Hasbro on pulling a full 360 and turning it back into a board game. Eric Wood, Scopely’s SVP of publishing, says the idea of converting the app into a physical game was floated during a meeting, but no one was sure whether Hasbro would agree.

Hasbro signed off, and an unusual design process ensued. Hasbro’s team—board game aficionados who are accustomed to ideating new concepts from scratch—consulted with Scopely about the lessons that they’d learned from Monopoly Go’s user base. Insights into points of user enjoyment included the game’s portability, its fast pace, and its unique features, like bank heists. Hasbro’s designers then had to work through the unique challenges of converting a computer-run mobile game back into a player-friendly tabletop game. 

“With a mobile game, there’s a lot of calculations that the program does in the background,” says Brian Baker, Hasbro’s SVP of board games. “We had to make sure that a lot of the transactions were really simple for the players, so that we could maintain the level of energy and that Monopoly Go the mobile game delivers. Another challenge is that the mobile game never ends. [. . .] One of the things we had to do with the board game is actually create an end state.” 

Testing my friendships with Monopoly Go

Baker argues that the resulting game, while still centered on the concept of property trading, is ultimately quite different from classic Monopoly. To put that theory to the test, I pressured my close friends into joining me for a few rounds (after work, this time). 

Besides the portability of the board, the first difference we noticed is that each player receives their own board, and there are no stacks of paper money. This was great news for those of us who were never particularly gifted in math, and not so great for those who enjoy leaning into their inner avarice. The rules are also quite simple and easy to learn.

Like the mobile game, the pace was fast: Our first round lasted about 10 minutes, and later rounds were even shorter. The game is essentially a race to collect a certain number of tiles before the rest of the group, and while there might be some strategy to this (which evades me, personally), it does feel less cerebral and more like a matter of luck. We did have quite a bit of fun, which could be best explained by the fact that we chose to play another round despite an active tornado warning. However, the quick pace and sense of randomness meant that the game started to feel monotonous after a while. 

Fast Company