NEW YORK, Feb 17 — Chances are you’ve been hit hard by a “Go directly to Jail” card while playing Monopoly with the family, but now your gaming experience is about to change with Hasbro’s announcement of the new Monopoly Ultimate Banking game.
Instead of the usual wad of paper money, this new edition will instead have a credit card that players can scan to spend and receive money and the banker has been replaced with a swipeable, battery-powered ATM.
The banking system doesn’t really change the rules of play but there is the addition of new cards called “Life Events” which will cause prices of properties to fluctuate — similar to real life.
The classic “Chance” cards are still there but both sets will now have barcodes which the bank system can scan in every transaction.
According to Gizmodo, this isn’t the first time Hasbro has tried to go cashless with Monopoly before, in the interest of speeding up the game. Previous attempts in fact caused the game to get even slower, since they required all transactions to be keyed in.
It does seem like the new Monopoly Ultimate Banking would be appealing to the younger generation, but certainly would prefer those pastel paper stacks we’ve grown up with.
