Monopoly Is Getting Rid of Jail to Appease Your Busy Kids
Really, nothing is sacred anymore — not even Monopoly. Because kids' days are filled with obligations and organized activities, young children these days are apparently busier than any of their predecessors history, toy manufacturers like Hasbro are tailoring board games to make them faster to play.
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"Hasbro's new Monopoly Empire, in which players compete to amass the most big-name brands, such as Coca-Cola Xbox and McDonald's, can be completed in as little as 30 minutes, compared with the hours that traditional Monopoly could take," reports The Wall Street Journal's Ann Zimmerman. Part of that is due to Hasbro removing the jail, which speeds up the pace and also removes a crucial safe zone in the latter stages of the game.
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Monopoly isn't the only game adopting to changes changes in kids' time commitments. Scrabble, Zimmerman notes, has a fast and furious version of the game that can be completed in two minutes and 30 seconds. And there are speedy versions of Boggle and Rubik's Cubes on the market, too. These are all designed to fit into the pockets of time that are allotted to kids these days in between gymnastics classes, test prep courses, and whatever they're signed up for.
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But at the heart of it, these "fast" games undermine the whole notion of board games, which are supposed to encourage bonding and silly fights over the "bank" stealing money or whether "knifes" counts as a word. Winning as quickly as possible was never the issue. At least not until recently.
