MONOPOLY City allows players to build an actual 3-D city in the centre of the game board complete with residential and industrial buildings. For the first time since MONOPOLY was invented, the game play has changed, the need to collect an entire property group before building has been removed with players building their cities from the ground up from the first roll of the dice. And just like in real life, property values – and players’ rental income – may rise and fall with the changing landscape of the city. Players can build structures that increase their property values, such as schools or eco-friendly wind farms, or they can sabotage opponents by building sewage plants or prisons on the competitions’ property.

The new game play was developed from a three-month long online game, MONOPOLY CITY Streets, in which some five million players logged on to ‘develop’ their own home towns, purchasing nearly nine million streets and constructing more than 175 million virtual buildings.

For the MONOPOLY cognoscenti: among the changes, the four railway spaces have been replaced by four planning permission spaces. Each offers a choice to build one of two options in a district: either a specified hazard (prison, sewage plant, rubbish dump, power station) that makes an opponent’s residential blocks unrentable, or a bonus building (school, park, windfarm or water tower) that prevents placement of a hazard in that district. Chance cards remain but Community Chest spaces have gone.  The ‘Free Parking’ space has now a card, named ‘Rent Dodge’ that can cancel payments to other players if the person with the card lands on other player's property.

Since 1935, more than 250 million copies of MONOPOLY have been sold in 106 countries and 40 languages. More than 200 different editions of the game have been published, but the most popular continues to be the classic ‘Number Nine’ based on the streets of Atlantic City and nearly identical to Charles Darrow's original submission to Parker Brothers. MONOPOLY is now owned by the US firm Hasbro, Inc., a global leader in children’s and family leisure time products and services with a large portfolio of brands and entertainment properties.