Monopoly Streets preview: I call the racecar

So you're playing Monopoly and there's a pile of money sitting in the middle of the board collected from income taxes and Chance penalties. You roll the dice, count off your move, and then land on Free Parking. Payday! You get all of the money sitting in the middle of the table, right? Wrong. "That's not part of the official rules of Monopoly," says EA Salt Lake producer Jeff Peters. "One of the things we found while making this game is that nobody actually knows how to play Monopoly."

Turns out your older brother was lying to you. But not knowing how to play hasn't affected the game's popularity -- over its 75 years of life, Monopoly has become known as the most popular board game in the world, and Monopoly Streets is EA's attempt to reimagine the game in honor of the 75th anniversary this year. Instead of just a standard boardgame, Streets tries to create "a living, breathing place that is the world of Monopoly," says Peters.
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And for the most part, it works. Players (up to four, both online and offline -- the board game calls for "6 to 8," but Peters says anything above four "just isn't fun") start by choosing one of the famous Monopoly tokens, and get a character associated with each. The racecar comes with a cartoony driver, the shoe comes with a little girl, and the top hat comes with a sharply dressed little kid. Each player rolls the dice, and then races around the board in a fully 3D world, buying up property lots, building houses or hotels on them, and of course charging rent and trying to win it all.

The design of the world is what really sells this one -- the familiar lots start out as abandoned urban spaces with "For Sale" signs on them, and then when first purchased, grow into tidy small city parks. When houses are built, each color on the board represents a certain part of town, so Baltic and Mediterranean are kitschy and dumpy, Atlantic and Ventor are a little more ritzy, and of course Park Place and Boardwalk are high class establishments. The Go, Jail, and other special spaces all have their own buildings, and there are lots of fun graphical touches -- when you buy a railroad station, a train pulls in and out of it so you can see it's active and running.

And that's just the main city -- there are lots of other cities included with the game, and even more will be offered as DLC. Landmark City assigns a real-world country to each color on the board, so building in the green area will get you Japanese dojos, and building on the orange properties creates German bier haus-style buildings. There's a Stratosphere City, which takes place in space, and a few other boards to load up and play on, each with their own architecture and place names. It makes building houses that much more fun, trying to see what a more developed version of your property looks like after you get a monopoly and start building there.

In terms of gameplay, EA Salt Lake wanted to put the original rules first, so just entering the game without changing any options will give you the official board game rules. But if you want your Free Parking payout (or you'd rather give an extra reward for actually landing on Go -- another very popular house rule), you can dive into the game's ruleset system, where you can adjust tons of options for gameplay, including how much starting money each person gets, whether properties are auctioned off or not, how much Income Tax charges, and so on. The game comes with some predetermined rulesets, but you can create and name your own as well. The standard game, Peters said, ran 60-90 minutes, depending on how much talking and property trading the players decided to do, but special rulesets can lower or raise that playtime.

Finally, there are a few fun additions to the title that EA has added in. Mr. Monopoly is the MC of the game as you play -- he pops in with full audio (over 1100 lines, said Peters) tips, insight, funny banter, and general atmosphere. The auction mechanic has been given an arcade element -- players can raise or lower their onscreen prices at any time during a countdown, so players who act fast can raise a price to steal property at the last second, or even lower their price quickly to stick someone else with a purchase. And as each player earns money, they each get a corporate headquarters in the middle of town (adorned with their token) that actually grows or shrinks according to their cash and property total. And you will see your friends' Xbox Live Avatars and Miis wandering around the city as you play, or you can use your own avatars as characters.

The game's fun -- at its core, it's Monopoly, and all of the extra splash does a good job of making the experience enjoyable without getting in the way of the original game. Peters says the target audience is kids under 13 and their parents, but at the retail price of $39.99, I think this one might be worth checking out for the next board game night, even if it's just the grownups. Monopoly Streets will be out for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii on October 26.