Way back in the dim, dark days of my youth – which actually weren’t that dark actually since we did have, you know, fire and such – I spent many a happy hour playing Monopoly with my family, usually during end of year summer holidays when we’d decamp to a beach somewhere for swimming, sausages and minot bouts of mind-numbing boredom.
It was a fun way to whittle away some of the less exciting moments of the break, marred only by my inability to acquire anywhere near enough houses or money to become a capitalistic force powerful enough to force my siblings and parents to bow before my near-omnipotent (fake) financial wealth.
I usually ended up being bundled out early, up to my eyeballs in debt to my sister, who was a whiz at the game, and frankly haven’t played it much since.
But Hasbro may be about to change all that with a new version of the game that ties in with the zeitgeist-spanning The Walking Dead.
Instead of buying all the property you can get your grubby paws on, you acquire walls and guard towers, which are infinitely more sensible as investments in a walker-overrun apocalypse, moving yourself around the board with player pieces that include Michonne’s katana, a bucket of limbs (those walkers are so careless, leaving body parts lying around where anybody can find them) and Dale’s 1973 D-27C Winnebago Chieftain RV.
It sounds like a lot of undead fun but I warn you – do not play with me.
Should you unwisely decide to do so, you will likely end up on a windswept piece of grassland, no walls or guard towers to be seen and a herd of plastic ravenous walkers coming in from all sides since it’s highly unlikely my luck with Monopoly has improved any in the intervening years since my youth.
You have been warned.
You can buy the game via Think Geek and Amazon.
(Source: news.cnet.com)
Or if Monopoly’s isn’t your thing, then why not play The Walking Dead bingo instead?
During one of your breaks from fighting for your pretend life in The Walking Dead Monopoly game, of which I will have many no doubt alas, you may want to spend some time speculating on what form the show’s recently announced spin off may take.
With time to go before the show hits the air in 2015, The Walking Dead‘s creator Robert Kirkman has plenty of time, along with Gail Anne Hard and David Alpert (both executive producers on the show) to draw all manner of exciting scenarios for the much anticipated spinoff, which has fans in a lather of excitement and Kirkman himself thrilled about the possibilities, according to tvline.com:
“After 10 years of writing the comic book series and being so close to the debut of our fourth, and in my opinion, best season of the TV series, I couldn’t be more thrilled about getting the chance to create a new corner of The Walking Dead universe. The opportunity to make a show that isn’t tethered by the events of the comic book, and is truly a blank page, has set my creativity racing.”
One particular idea which has garnered a lot of attention in the past few days is that Kirkman may choose to tell his new apocalyptic story in the past, explaining the origins of the epidemic which has ravaged humanity and brought civilisation to the brink of walker-induced oblivion.
In an interview with ign.com, Kirkman made it clear that the new show will not be set in Georgia, home to The Walking Dead‘s nail-biting action, and won’t crossover with the existing cast at all (which isn’t hard given how quickly and nastily people die on the existing show), all of which has invigorated his creative juices to try something totally new:
“I’m pretty excited, very excited. To a certain extent, I feel like the 34-year-old me is in competition with the 24-year-old me. It’s like, “Okay, kid. This is what you did. Now that I’ve had this ten additional years of life experience, I’m going to set things up this way,” and that’s a fun challenge for me. It’s fun because I feel like the 24-year-old could win. [Laughs] But it’s great to go back to page one and think about it. It’s going to be set in this world, but it is a new cast and a new setting, and it’s going to be very different. It’s just exciting to be able to start over again and try to do cool stuff.”
As noted though, it’s early days yet and thus far AMC has declined to comment on which direction the spinoff will take exactly.
But you may want to have your katana-equipped DeLorean ready to go just in case.