Titus O'Reily.
With the pre-season just around the corner, our President sends us this update from Titus.
In recent years, the AFL and many of its clubs have released their own special editions of the classic board game Monopoly.
It’s a perfect fit for the AFL, after all, what describes AFL house better than a corporation that crushes all competitors and then gouges its customers with eye-watering prices?
Here’s a look at all the various editions.
AFL
The AFL version of the game is closest to the original. Players try to collect various stadiums and intellectual properties and then charge anyone that lands on them heavily inflated prices.
Instead of a ‘Get out of Jail’ card, there is a ‘Bury an Embarrassing Scandal’ card to be used when a player lands on ‘Star Player Gets Third Strike Against Them.’
Adelaide
One of the more difficult versions. Players need to avoid the Ramsgate Hotel and any player who lands on ‘Gold Coast preseason camp’ has to stay there forever, listening to the Richmond Football Club theme song on a loop.
Brisbane
Every players’ token is a koala and can have no success until they land on the ‘Merge with Fitzroy’ square. Whoever does this immediately wins the game.
Carlton
Every player starts with a brown paper bag full of cash and, ignoring the normal rules, can just buy whatever they like. Instead of railway stations, there are various pokie venues players can buy.
Getting all four of these gives a player a disproportionate and destabilising amount of control over the board.
Collingwood
Every second square is a jail. Landing on ‘Just Parking’ means any other player can steal your token. One of the ‘Chance’ cards is the ‘Do Better’ report. If you get this, the player must spin the wheel included in the version. They just keep spinning and spinning it until the game ends.
Essendon
Every player rolls a dice and skips across all the blank spaces until they land on the square marked ‘Stand by Hird’ and then they just stay there forever.
Fremantle
Every player rolls a dice which only has negative numbers on it and they go backwards for the entire game.
Geelong
Players land on squares where they receive money from the various state and federal political parties trying to win the marginal seats in the Geelong area. The player with the most government handouts wins and gets to build a Kardinia Park made out of solid gold.
Gold Coast
At the start of the game, every player is given hundreds of millions of dollars from the AFL and then wastes it for the rest of the game purchasing things like ‘Karmichael Hunt’ and ‘Rodney Eade’.
Periodically, the AFL hands them more money.
Greater Western Sydney
The only version of the game that can be played by one person. Instead of tokens, players use actual GWS memberships that are given away with the game.
Hawthorn
Every player rolls the dice and is then showered with premierships as they move around the board. Every player wins.
Melbourne
Impossible to win, every player moves around the board and every square is something worse than the square before. Community Chest cards include ‘hire Mark Neeld as coach, go back ten years’ and ‘Draft Tom Scully and Jack Trengove ahead of Dustin Martin and Nat Fyfe, go directly to the Long Room and drink heavily, do not pass go.’
Three-quarters of the way around players can stop playing.
North Melbourne
Every player is given a ‘war chest’ but can’t use it in the game. Every player starts with the same amount of money as in actual Monopoly, $1500, which is also North’s actual annual budget.
Best to avoid the ‘Party at Glenn Archer’s house’ square which replaces ‘Mayfair’ as the most expensive square to land on.
Port Adelaide
A steep learning curve to this version with the instructions written in Chinese. The ‘Get out of Jail’ card is replaced by a ‘Distract media with a Prison Bars jumper’ debate. Community Chest is called ‘Community Goon bag’.
Richmond
Free Parking square has manure dumped on it so you can’t land there. Players accumulate ‘arrogance’ instead of money and the person with the most arrogance at the end of the game is the winner.
Each token is a bandwagon.
St Kilda
Players lurch from crisis to crisis, trying to avoid landing on squares such as ‘Setting a dwarf on fire’.
The game can only be won once every 148 years.
Sydney
Every time you pass ‘Go’ you get $200 and a Cost of Living Allowance. One player gets the Buddy Franklin token but doesn’t get to actually play.
West Coast
As each player takes their turn, the other players must boo them constantly. Instead of passing ‘Go’ and collecting $200, the player is forced to relitigate the 2006 premiership with a Herald Sun journalist until they just want to scream.
Western Bulldogs
Nothing much good happens for most of the game, then something amazing happens, only to then return to mediocrity immediately. Whoever wins has to hand the victory to Bob Murphy.
