What exactly are the official rules of Monopoly? It doesn't really matter; most people make up their own set of "house rules". Now Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly, want to include some of those house rules, into a brand new edition of the game.
It's no surprise that they are playing Monopoly at the Ottawa café on Somerset Street West, appropriately called "Monopolatte". You roll snake eyes: collect $500. Café co-owner Dave Narbaitz lands on the “free parking” space:
“Free parking,” says Narbaitz, “I get all the money,” he says as he scoops up the pot in the middle.
Or, how about this rule from player Kai Tan?
"If someone lands on my property they have to pay me. If I have a loan on that property, people need to pay me more every time they cross my property, that's my favorite,” says Tan.
Except those aren't the real rules; they're "house rules" that players have made up in the eighty or so years since Monopoly first appeared on the market.
“Monopoly has a hundred different house rules depending on which person's house you're at,” says Narbaitz, who, by the way knows all the official rules.
Now, Hasbo, the maker of Monopoly, is giving players a chance to vote on the best house rules that will then become part of a new edition of the game to be available this fall.(https://www.facebook.com/monopoly)
Hasbro recently did a survey and found that nearly half the players make up their own rules and about seventy percent have never read the rules, which is kind of surprising because they're not very extensive
At Strategy Games on Bank Street in Ottawa, Dave Gordon says “Maybe I’m one of the few people who have actually read the rules.”
But he says making them up is half the fun of playing.
"If that's the way you like to play the game, as long as you're having fun, that's the important thing.”
We took our camera to a place where everybody always plays by the rules, Parliament Hill, and spoke with folks gathered around the Centennial Flame.
“Do you make up your own rules when you play monopoly?” we ask one woman.
“Sometimes,” she answers, “because my friends have all sorts of different rules so we combine them together.”
Sometimes, though, even here, honesty is not the best policy.
“I despise Monopoly,” says another woman, “because I always lose.”
