A New Token of Monopoly’s Affection
Wednesday, February 6th, 2013February 6, 2013
Hasbro, maker of the board game Monopoly, announced the results of a month-long voting contest held on its Facebook page. (Spoiler alert: the cat wins.) The contest allowed fans to vote both for a new game piece to be added and for their favorite existing game piece to be preserved. In the 80-year-old game, players buy and trade properties on a game board and can then develop those properties (albeit, with tiny plastic hotels and houses). The existing game tokens that players used to move around the board of properties were a battleship, a boot, a car, a hat, an iron, a Scottie dog, a thimble, and a wheelbarrow. Most of the tokens date to the first edition of the game issued by the toy company Parker Brothers in 1935, except for the Scottie and the wheelbarrow, which were added to the game in the 1950’s.
The most popular game token was by far the Scottie dog, with more than 30 percent voting to preserve that token. Voting was close for the losing piece–the boot, the iron, and the wheelbarrow were tied for last place, each with around 8 percent of the vote. For a time, it looked like the boot might get the boot. In the end, however, unable to iron out its differences, the fewest votes went to the iron, and Hasbro announced that the next edition of the game would no longer feature the antique flat iron. Apparently voters were less than charmed with that symbol of drudgery (or they were unable to even recognize a nonelectric version of the household appliance). The possible tokens for the new piece Hasbro offered in the voting were a cat, a diamond ring, a guitar, a helicopter, and a robot.
Cat lovers won out in a hard-fought campaign that did not, however, include much scratching or clawing. The cat token received 31 percent of the vote. Game experts hoped that the Scottie and the cat would not often land on the same square in the game’s new version due out in the fall.
Additional World Book article: