The all-time classic board game Monopoly is now available in a City of Burlington version that features local landmarks in place of the classic game components.
‘Burlington-Opoly’ is now available at local Walmart locations. Similar to the original version of Monopoly, players move around the board buying properties of differing values.
Properties that players can buy are customized to Burlington such as the Royal Botanical Gardens, Spencer Smith Park, Ribfest, GO Station, Mapleview Mall, and Lakeshore Road.
The only thing that isn’t customized are the game pieces, which are all developed by a company in China.
In 2019, the “Gateway of the North” project was announced by Walmart who hired Victoria, BC company Outset Media Corp. to create Monopoly-type games for 40 small Canadian cities.
The board game is exclusively sold by Walmart Canada after the company approached store managers across the country to see if they were interested in selling a board game local to their city.
Outset Media has the rights to the “Opoly” name through the game creator Late for the Sky Productions, who acquired it after Monopoly was sold to Hasbro in 1991.
Walmart has tried a similar idea in smaller communities in the U.S. but said that sales were slow in larger markets such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Canadian cities that had success with the concept so far are Peterborough, Ontario; Nanaimo, British Columbia; and Thompson, Manitoba.
There hasn’t been any information released about a Hamilton version of the game. But if they did create one, what would want some of the customized properties to be? Let us know in the comments?
