By David Futrelle
From time to time, game company Hasbro gets bored and greedy and decides to perk up sales a little with a novelty version of the game Monopoly.
A couple of weeks ago, the company released Monopoly Socialism, a grim evocation of Soviet-style Communism seemingly designed to delight the Fox News crowd. Last year, they put out a similarly satirical version of Monopoly for Millennials, sans real estate, because “you can’t afford it anyway.”
Now the company has released a kind-of, sort-of feminist edition of the game — and Men’s Rights Redditors are crying “misandry.”
In Ms Monopoly, available for pre-order as of today, men get to see what it’s like to get paid less for the same work: Every time women pass “go” they collect $240, while men collect the standard $200.
Naturally, the inhabitants of the Men’s Rights subreddit — wage gap denialists all — don’t find any of this the slightest bit funny.
“That moment when you are so privileged in society that you need a leg up in a board game,” sniffed someone called Sir_Sux_Alot.
“Show boys that even when the rules are perfectly and objective fair to begin with and nothing is holding them back we still feel the need to give girls privilege over boys,” groused 5th_Law_of_Robotics.
“So they’ve taken a perfectly fair and equal game where everyone has the same chance as each other, and made it in to a sexist shit show,” lamented MrHolte.
“So when’s the new Life game come out?” asked Biff64gc.
Women getting discounted college degrees from female only scholarships and are guarenteed a stem or ceo job that pays more because of female affirmative action and men have a 90% chance of not finishing the game due to death or homlessness.
(Yes, these dudes actually believe that in the real world CEO jobs are handed out to women like candy; never mind that less than 7% of the CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women.)
“Well now I have seen it all,” mgtowjoe sighed.
The sad thing is even with 40$ more then men they will spend that one shoes and whatever other useless items that feed ego and not the common good.
Not to mention they talk about instead of properties it’s inventions that women made……. WI-FI…….. Last I heard that was an idea that was founded and proven by Tesla…..
Uh, no. Many people contributed to the invention of WiFi, including Hedy Lamarr, who is the person the game presumably celebrates.
The other invention listed was chocolate ship cookies….. Promoting the art of fattening foods to slam the idea of “healthy at any size” down our throats like a cock in a crappy porno film.
That’s … some interesting imagery there. I wouldn’t have gone directly from “chocolate ship cookies” to “cock shoved down throat” but I guess it does make for some vivid writing.
“Fuck you get woke go broke,” mgtowjoe concluded.
Someone called Ody_ssey bragged he’d beat the women at their own game.
I can guarantee I can still beat feminists in this game. The next 50% of the game is not about who had more money earlier. It becomes about decision making and probability and you need to make quick money management decisions to increase monopoly. They will complain about the game once men starts winning saying the dice is sexist.
NoButtholeNoGood, meanwhile, made the inevitable transphobic joke.
I’d just identify as female whenever I went to play this.
Hilarious.
No one tell these dudes about chess, in which the queen zooms about the board murdering opponents at will while the king stumbles around like some infomercial doofus.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
Here’s a good takedown of the ridiculously bad “socialism” monopoly.
Oh yeah, can I just say as someone who trained as an Electronic Engineer: can Tesla stans just not? I know what Tesla accomplished (thank you, 3rd Year Electrical Machines and 4th Year Radiation & Propagation courses) and while there is no doubt that he was an extremely gifted man who made immeasurable contributions in the field of power generation– thus making the electrified world we take for granted nowadays possible– the popular portrayal of him as an all-round, all-conquering mad-scientist genius is just flat-out wrong. Many of Tesla’s more outrageous ideas simply never panned out, and he retained a lot of obsolete 19th Century views on physics and electromagnetism right through his life (he never accepted the Theory of Relativity, for example). It doesn’t take away from his achievements as an engineer IMO, but the popular perception of Tesla as the supremely gifted naïf unfit for life in our cynical world, and Edison the showman-grifter is inaccurate, especially when Tesla was more than capable of turning on the showmanship himself and making outrageous claims.
Oh, and if Tesla were still around, you can be sure that these MRAs invoking his name so reverently now would be either hating on him for being an immigrant and/ or laughing and calling him a “cuck” for having been swindled by Edison.
Sorry, personal hobby-horse. I’ll shut up now.
(PS When I was refreshing my brain about Tesla on Wikipedia, I ran across a rather appalling episode from the early 20th Century that peripherally involved him. The architect of Tesla’s famous laboratory at Wardenclyffe was designed by a Stanford White who was later murdered by a wealthy industrialist called Harry Kendall Thaw. The details of this affair and how it played out– the sensationalist “yellow journalism” that pushed it as the “Trial of the Century”, Thaw’s family using their wealth to get Thaw off, the treatment of Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit as the alleged trigger for the murder– just reminded me how little anything has changed in the past century. Thaw could be cut from the same cloth as Trump, Epstein, Weinstein and every other scumbag who thinks their wealth elevates them above the law)
@Cat Mara
The MRAs have had a bit of an obsession with Tesla in the past. My guess is that this is mostly because he was a man and he never got married, so the MGTOWs and incels can claim that he was one of theirs while other misogynists can say that he was a man as if that is an argument.
Why am I not surprised Hasbro is pulling this shit? They have been known to try to sneak in horribly outdated critiques and jabs at socialism, and every other subversive movement in general, in almost all their products, shows for children included.
I can only hope they’ll get boycotted to hell by Gen Z and be driven to bankruptcy in the near future, although it’s not likely given that they seem to be doing well at the moment.
@ Dali
You’ve clearly never dropped a Commodore PET on your foot.
@Diego
My guess is that Hasbro realized that time is limited for board games and so they’re trying to appeal to the cranky grandpa market. This is meant to be something for if you’re a misogynistic old man with a feminist daughter who is raising your grandchildren and you want to make them mad.
I would boycott Hasbro, but then I’d have to give up Scrabble.
@Naglfar:
From Ye Pffft of All Knowledge:
OK, so they might be onto something here…
lol pwned MRAssholes 😂
Ah, so one of those “pedestal sexists” then (also, “reverent worship”? Sounds a bit “supreme gentleman” to me). Disappointing, but hardly unusual for his times… but also hardly an ally of the MRA viewpoint either.
@Alan:
(Remembers what the Commodore PET was like, shudders)
Seriously, if you’ve never seen a PET check out this video from the 8-Bit Guy. The damn thing’s chassis was all-metal– it even hinged open like the bonnet of a car!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHbhH7ISL_Y
I once dropped a mid-90s-era IBM 486 machine that I had resurrected as a Linux server on my toe. That was unpleasant, let me tell you: most of the PC industry had gotten the memo by this point that machines didn’t have to be built like they were going to be installed in a 1950s Cold War nuclear bomber, but not IBM. The toenail turned black and fell off in short order.
Kids monopoly is the only version of the game I ever played and enjoyed. It goes for 45 minutes, IIRC. Been many, many years since I have played it (since I was a kid) but I could never play any other version.
I remember playing risk with some friends, it was an overnight affair. It basically went like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNdTLrM8HzA
(UNDERGRAAADS) (now you know how many years it’s been hahaha)
Anyway, I played it once, and learned that my limit on board games is pretty much an hour and a half-two hours, unless I really like the game.
Like the farming game. A eurogame before that was a thing, it’s sort of like monopoly played against the board and not the other players. I quite like that one! Wonder if they have an app version I could buy…
@Rhuu
Ahh risk! The game that is perfectly set up to end friendships and wreak havoc to an otherwise perfect evening.
Yes, I remember trying to instigate people to fight one another whenever someone was about to consolidate presence on a powerful continent, while I turtled and amassed forces in Australia.
It ended with my bestie getting resentful, fucking up my strategy in a straight up kamikaze move, out of pure fucking spite, and staying mad at me for the remainder of the next day.
His brother also won the game, which made things worse for everyone, because he had no strategy whatsoever and deserved it the least.
I wonder who runs the department in Hasbro that comes up with these.
I mean, I don’t wonder, but I do wonder.
@Dali:
Heh. My father cussed out his chess-playing computer on more than one occasion.
I wonder how much computing power it had, compared to an iPhone. Sadly, it’s probably now residing in a landfill somewhere.
RE: Old electronics. I remember how hideously noisy those old Epsom printers were. And Multimate, an old word-processing program. I’d have enjoyed hand-to-hand combat with that monstrosity.
Completely OT, but I saw an adorable caterpillar that looks just like this
I was kind of surprised because it’s nearly fall and in MN. I was thinking it was a butterfly and those typically are larvae in the spring. But nope, the Minnesota DNR page tells me it’s a tiger moth larva and it’s trying to find shelter for the winter, after which it will become this in the spring
Silly thing, but I feel like I’m still learning new things about nature all the time. I’ve never even seen a fall caterpillar before and didn’t know moths stayed caterpillars through the fall and winter.
@Dormousing_it
Though I can’t say for sure without knowing the model of computer, probably far less powerful. Middle of the range computers built even just 10 years ago were somewhat less powerful than a modern iPhone.
@WWTH
Where I live, we call those “wooly bear caterpillars” and they’re fairly common (though I haven’t seen any this season). When I was a kid, I took one and tried to keep it as a pet (in a plastic box filled with leaves), but it died within days due to 6-year-old me’s ineptness at caterpillar habitat construction.
@Naglfar: To put the difference in power between modern processors and those of the 1970s and 1980s in context, Apple alumnus Chris Espinosa recently tweeted:
The Apple II (in various models) was in production between 1977 and 1993, and Apple sold somewhere between 5 and 6 million of them…
Naglfar,
They’re apparently common here too, but I’ve never seen one I don’t think!
I really love caterpillars in general, and I haven’t seen one in ages. I used to find ones that look like the wooly bears, but with a white stripe as well, and I can’t even figure out what they were now. We assumed they were monarch caterpillars as kids, but they weren’t.
@Simon
The first two answers to that takedown are two guys who brag about “buying two right away before the left pulls it”.
Erm… since when can we do that? And are they really bragging about wasting money on a bad game to “own the libs”. Have we devolved that fa- oh, who am I kidding?
-_-
These are the fuzzy caterpillars I remember from when I was a kid!
Wiki page on them. They are called
though we always just called the caterpillars ‘fuzzy caterpillars’ haha.
ETA: @Diego Duarte – never lost friends over it, but I think that’s because I only played the once. XD
I used to find the ones pictured by WWTH and Rhuu, plus this one:
@WWTH:
They’re called wooly bears in the NE US. I see them every fall. It may be too early so far this year, because I haven’t seen any yet.
@Naglfar; Cat Mara:
I’ve read that the unmanned spacecrafts Voyager 1 & 2 had computers with much, much less capacity than iPhones. Simply amazing.
@Katamount:
Good lord, I actually remember that Careers game.
We also had a Mad Magazine board game that was deliberately something of an anti-Monopoly in that you won by losing all your money.
In more modern times, I and my friends have a fair number of board games, though we tend to focus on things like Settlers of Catan, Power Grid, or Puerto Rico. We have Pandemic for the co-operative mode, but one of my friends isn’t fond of it because the game can end up with one person trying to steer everybody else’s turns to maximize everything.
@Dalillama:
I once heard a comedy skit just after Deep Blue had beaten Kasparov that basically spun on the fact that Deep Blue was only good at Chess, and if, say, an earthquake hit the area, Kasparov could still get away.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Ahhh, the Commodore PET. One of the few computers that you could actually destroy just by typing in commands on the keyboard.
(Not joking, look up the ‘killer poke’ some time. Part of the video circuitry was configured by software to handle the multiple possible motherboards, and on at least one of the motherboards if you changed a setting in the video generator by pushing the wrong value into a specific memory location you could overload the controller for the CRT. This was found because that particular memory location could be used on a previous version of the motherboard to disable video output and let the program run faster.)
@Cat Mara, regarding iPhone transistor count vs. Apple ][:
Sounds about right. And the ARM processor used in pretty much every phone was originally deliberately designed for a low transistor count to reduce power usage. Of course, ‘low’ compared to, say, the Intel x86 processors of the time isn’t exactly difficult.
But, yeah, back when I first attended the University of Waterloo in 1986, in one of the tours we were shown the ‘Red Room’. The Red Room was the centrepiece of the Math building built in 1967, and was literally built to house an IBM mainframe that at the time was the largest computer in Canada. Even in 1986 it was noted that there were now desktop computers that were more powerful than the machine that had previously filled this entire room with its own climate control systems.
@Dormousing_It
Voyager 1 & 2 combined have less processing power than the graphing calculator I had in 1990. An iPhone could emulate them more easily than it plays a song.
@Katamount
I had that exact same Star Wars monopoly set!
We also had a tape-based board game that sounds vaguely like Nightmare, which, rather uncreatively, was called
Star Wars: The Interactive Video Board Game. Me and my sister used to play that a lot for the span of a few years. I think my parent’s still have it boxed up somewhere.
I remember that episode of “undergrads”
I’ve long hated Monopoly for the reasons others have outlined, and Risk because its mechanics very, very bad.
“So let me see if I understand: if I attack your territory,defended by 10 armies with 20 attacking armies, I will probably win at the cost of 12 armies.”
“Yes.”
“And if I attack your territory, defended by 10 armies with attacking 200 armies, I will probably win at the cost of 12 armies.”
“Also yes.”
“So there is no benefit whatsoever to attacking with superior force, because EVERY battle in this game is Thermopylae.”
“That is correct.”
“And my efforts to capture territories and conserve my forces will prove useless because the longer the game goes on, the more armies cards are worth, so on turn five Steve will turn in cards for more armies than any of us have raised this entire game and win because of that.”
“So you DO understand the rules!”
I was VERY happy to discover Axis & Allies at age 10, which, while not a perfect game, at least rewarded things like “concentration of force” and “planning ahead.”
Though my favorite board game of All Time is still Space Hulk. When played properly (i.e. 1st or 3rd edition) it is VERY tense.
We can’t boycott Hasbro! They’ll stop making G.I. Joes!
…wait, they haven’t made any G.I. Joes except convention exclusives since 2016…
Burn it all down.
Supposedly, the width of the rust-colored stripe on woolly bears predicts the harshness of the coming winter. A wide stripe means a mild winter, a narrow stripe means a severe winter.
The rusty stripe correlates with the age of the caterpillar. More brown hairs mean it got going earlier in the spring. So basically, it predicts the harshness of the previous winter.
Growing up, one of my favorite eco-soy-cuck board games was Dirty Water. It has cute amoebas and groovy Schoolhouse Rock graphics, and teaches about the food chain and pollution. I still play it with the kids sometimes.
Re: Monopoly, my strategy is to pick the smallest game piece (the iron) and hope people don’t notice when it lands on their property.
Late in the game, once all the properties have been bought, it’s a good idea to get into jail and stay there. You can still collect rent while you’re serving time, but you’re not moving around the board landing on other players’ properties.
@Buttercup
That actually never occurred to me. I’ll remember to do that next time I’m forced to play Monopoly. That’s probably not a good real life strategy, however.
For me, Monopoly is often fun for the first few minutes but then gets boring as it drags on and on and on until people lose. I was once visiting my uncle when I was about 13 and he had a special edition Monopoly set. My sister and parents and I started playing and my parents lost pretty fast but my sister and I ended up playing for at least 6 hours a day for the next 2 days until I finally won. We didn’t have much else to do, so it was fine then, but not a riveting game by any means.
I agree with all those who are dissing monopoly. there are much better economic themed board games. The railroad building games from the empire builder series are pretty good as is power grid.
There is just too much of a roll and move aspect to monopoly for it to be really interesting and once a player gets all the good properties it just seems to become a slow grind to the end.
And a couple of movies. Which raises a question: what the FUCK happened between the first and second film? I mean, in the second one, they’ve lost nearly all their cool tech — no energy guns, no Delta Accelerator Suits — and half the cast are dead, but Storm Shadow is back from the dead, somehow? And the music isn’t half as good, and and and. It’s like the second one was a lower-budget “mockbuster” from another studio (think: Transmorphers, Atlantic Rim), except for all of the branding saying it was the real sequel.
@ Cat Mara
Some British toffs ,at least, do use their title in place of their surname. Prince William was William Wales on his service record and Prince Harry was listed as Henry Wales. Using ‘Windsor’ might have been a bit inconvenient.
@ Kevin
The naming was more of a security issue. A certain newspaper got a bit of bollocking when they leaked about William’s deployment.
Harry isn’t even a Wales; he’s Duke of Sussex.
I hate Monopoly for many of the reasons people describe above. Plus I naturally hoard in-game currency – which is a guarantee of fail.
My son had never played and really wanted to so he played with my partner and his son while I excused myself. I hoped he would discover that it was a crap game and never mention it again. Turns out my son won the game on a cliff-hanger ending – and now thinks it’s a great game.
@ Alan Robertshaw
A Sussex since his wedding day, when he was created (I think that’s the form of words) Duke of Sussex as a wedding present, I am led to believe.
He was a Windsor/Wales on joining up. And I was hinting about security with ‘Windsor’ being inconvenient.
Nonetheless, we do have here an example of toffs substituting their title for their surname as common oiks like me understand them.
@ Cat Mara:
Oh yeah, the Stanford White murder and trial are *famous*– they’re the rl events that the book/movie/musical Ragtime is based around, and there are probably other works that reference it too.
(If you need an architectural-career chaser, go look up Paul R. Williams, African-American architect who designed many of the iconic buildings in and around LA)
@Alan Robertshaw:
That reminds me—yesterday I hit a “can’t remember password, please send me an automatic email” button, and either it included first and last name fields I didn’t notice and fill, or the fields didn’t exist on the screen but where still referenced in the code, because the response email I got, while perfectly usable, began “Hi NULL NULL.”
Agreed on the obnoxious mechanics of Monopoly. House rules always made it more fun in our family, like the Free Parking tax windfall.
@Fabe
Aww, you beat me to the Undergrads reference. Man, I tried watching that show again… hasn’t really aged that well.
Just on the topic of mad inventors, I might have mentioned this a couple years back when I returned from Nova Scotia, but much like Tesla was wrong about a lot more things than he was right on, Alexander Graham Bell was much the same way. The AGB National Historic Site in Baddeck has a treasure trove of artifacts from his years living there. Once he had the patent money from his development of the telephone to set him up for life (which was in his late 20s, early 30s), he literally just busied himself with family and whatever scientific stuff interested him for the remaining 50 years of his life. Genetics, biology, aeronautics, physics, he devoted time to all of it. Aeronautics was his big thing later on (hence the Silver Dart), but most of his experiments were either unsuccessful or weren’t picked up by the governments of the US, Britain or Canada.
Setting Bell’s eugenics support aside (which I suspect stemmed from viewing deafness as a pathology rather than a culture), I find he actually stands as an example of the power of science and imagination. Seeing the photos of Bell in his later years at Baddeck, he was clearly devoted to his wife, daughter and his grandchildren and had a love of science that was every equal his love for his family. It’s a stark contrast to this “antisocial misunderstood genius” trope that Manospherians heap upon Tesla.
@Katamount
IIRC Bell had some very strange looking aircraft designs, all of which failed. I almost wish they had succeeded, seeing as modern day airplanes would look cooler if they looked like this:
@ Kevin
Well, he probably has a waffle iron from his army days.
@Kevin
.
They should’ve gone back to the old family name, and listed him as William Saxe-Coburg Gotha.
@Katamount, @Naglfar:
Bell was very into tetrahedral kite designs (which I imagine did provide a lot of structural strength) and it carried over, logically enough, into his aircraft experiments. Here’s a gif of Bell and his wife Mabel being cute with one of the kites (hope the gif doesn’t flash too much for anyone viewing it, if so please remove this post, Dave):
@Alan Robertshaw
I guess he doesn’t need an oven, then! /s
@Katamount, Naglfar, Moon Custafer:
Heh. A ‘steampunk’ story I wrote years ago (meant to be in the third issue of a magazine that unfortunately folded after the second issue) and set in Canada during the construction of the B.C. end of the Canadian Pacific Railway actually used Alexander Graham Bell as a background character. One of the main characters in the story had used some of Bell’s kite designs to build what was essentially a hang-glider, which ended up being used in a rescue operation after a rockslide. I fudged the dates a bit, since in real history most of Bell’s work on kites wasn’t until 1898, but the railway was already built by 1886.
And regarding deafness, my understanding is that some deaf people curse his name to this day because he was one of the bigger proponents of ‘deaf people should learn to read lips and get along in normal society’ and actively tried to stamp out sign language during his life time. His work on sound and sound production that led to the telephone all started with learning how people speak and hear.
@Jenora Feuer
Sounds like a fascinating read!
And yeah, the Museum in Baddeck lays out that speech pathology and working with the hard of hearing was basically the Bell family business. Both his father and his grandfather had worked in that field and passed on that passion to him.
@Dalillama:
Ye Pffft of All Knowledge suggests that the British Royal Family’s surname (if they can be said to have one at all) should be “Wettin”:
@SurplusTo Requirements
The last movie was released in 2013, while the last retail toy releases were 2016. As for the events of the second movie, most of it was pretty clear – the Cobra/US attack in the first act killed most of the Joes that were at a field base for a mission, while most of their tech was back at the Pit or on the Flagg (which we did not see attacked, presumably for budgetary reasons), leaving Roadblock, Lady Jaye, and Flint as the only survivors at the field base, with Snake Eyes and Jinx out on the mission to capture Storm Shadow. Everyone at the Pit or the Flagg was presumably captured, killed, or went into hiding.
(Also, in the first film only Cobra had pulse weapons, because MARS Industries produces all the best toys.)
Eh, he’s a ninja master, and he only got stabbed and fell into icy water. He came back from worse in the comics. (Speaking of which, the films’ treatment of Storm Shadow displeased me greatly, despite how awesome Lee Byung-Hung is. The comics Storm Shadow is straight-up heroic, and he and Snake Eyes love each other like brothers, while the film Storm Shadow is at best an angry asshole, and he and Snake Eyes tolerate each other at most. Way to treat one of my favorite characters.)
Agreed on that. Henry Jackman is good, but he’s no Alan Silvestri.
It DID have a significantly lower budget. Plus, the new filmmakers were trying to hew closer to the Larry Hama comics and the 2010 Renegades cartoon, which were WAY less overtly sci-fi than the 80s cartoons or the 90s Sigma Six incarnation (which inspired the Accelerator Suits).
Still, it had a more accurate Cobra Commander than the first film, focused on my two favorite heroes (Roadblock and Storm Shadow, even if they made Storm Shadow a jerk), had one trulay amazing action sequence (the mountain chase), and did what Hasbro chickened out of in 1987 and actually killed Duke.
Why yes, G.I. Joe IS one of my autistic Special Interests, why do you ask?
Wait, since when can you buy shoes and other such ego-feeding commodities in Monopoly? Or items that serve the “common good” for that matter? Is this some weird variant I’ve never heard of, like that thing about putting your fines in the middle of the board and if someone lands on the Free Parking square they get to claim all the money?
This is what ‘socialist’ monopoly should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly
It isn’t really socialist, its a capitalist properly regulated free market.