We love Monopoly as much as the next guy, but you can only play the same game enough times before it gets boring. That’s why, we’ve seen endless variations of the economics-themed board game, from localized spin-offs and extended gameplay editions to extremely jaded versions that put cheating at the forefront. If you love Monopoly as a standard part of your family game night at home, it never hurts to have more than a few variations of the classic tabletop game. The Winning Moves Monopoly Scrabble combines the property-owning gameplay of one board game classic with the crossword-building of another.
That’s right, they combined Monopoly and Scrabble into one game, so you can buy property, cut deals, and dig deep into your vocabulary all in one sitting. Is it good? We have no idea, but if you ever find yourself unable to decide whether to play Monopoly or Scrabble during family game night, we have a feeling this might just be the best way to compromise.
The Winning Moves Monopoly Scrabble gives you a pretty standard Monopoly game on the edges of the board, with squares listing properties that you can buy or rent, along with a few squares that will cost you money or land you in jail. It’s, pretty much, your basic Monopoly game. In fact, you can probably play this like regular Monopoly, so long as you pick up some dice from your own other board game sets.
That’s right, there’s no dice included with the game. That’s because they replaced the dice-rolling with a round of Scrabble between moves. In fact, the entire center square of the game is a scrabble board and each player gets those letter tiles that you can use to form words on the board. Instead of rolling the dice during your turn, you build a word and use the score for that word to move the same number of squares on the Monopoly board.
The Winning Moves Monopoly Scrabble comes with some other twists, too, such as premium squares on the Scrabble board, which allows you to claim a Monopoly property whenever you build a word on them. It retains the Community Chest and Chance cards from the traditional economics game, of course, which should help move the game at a faster pace, although you’ll have to keep the decks outside the board since the entire center square is occupied by the Scrabble board.
The game finishes when the last letter tile is played on the board, with the winner being whichever player has the highest total amount in both cash and property value. According to the outfit, each game is designed to finish in under an hour, which sounds like it can make for a fun game night pick. At the least, it spares you from those Monopoly sessions that end up dragging on for way too long, so everyone should still be somewhat enthusiastic from start to finish.
The Winning Moves Monopoly Scrabble is slated for release in the fall, priced at $35.95.