Fort-Dauphopoly!
What happens when an amusing idea gets wildly out of control.
So, a while back some of us vazaha types in Fort Dauphin got to talking about the classic board game Monopoly, and the criminal lack of a Fort Dauphin themed version. It’s just not the same playing with a board that has fancy foreign locations like “Mayfair” and “Regent Street”, when you’re surrounded by sun, sea and people trying to sell you raspberries (seriously I didn’t know it was possible to be this bored of raspberries).
Anyway, the jokes went back and forth, dozens of potential properties and chance/community chest ideas were debated, and then I found a free Photoshop template for making Monopoly boards online, and well, it escalated.
So, in all it’s glory:
Our choices for properties and sets are mostly thematic rather than reflecting values, but we had a lot of fun making it and playing it, and hope you will too. I also drew some custom artwork for the new transport squares, utilities and some other bits.
Note that there a few light-hearted jokes about life in Fort Dauphin in the chance/community chest cards; these are more jokes about how hopeless we are sometimes rather than reflections on FD or the people here – we love this town so much we made a game about it!
Gimmie the download already!
You can download the game board, property cards, and chance/fokontany chest cards here, ready for printing. It’s in £ due to the fonts used not having a Euro sign, but comment below if you want a Euro/$ version and I’ll get round to it.
Alternatively if you want to make some tweaks or make your own version entirely, you can download the source materials here. You’ll need Adobe Photoshop to edit the board and property cards, and Microsoft Publisher to change the Chance/Fokontany Chest cards. The fonts used are Cornerstone, KabaleMedium-Normal, Kabel Book BT, and Kabob, most of which are free.
Printing it
The game board TIF file is a giant 50cm x 50cm image, ready for printing. You’ll need to find somewhere with a massive printer or plotter. All of the cards are PDFs and can be printed on A4; property cards should be printed in colour and are single-sided, chance and community chest cards are black-and-white and double-sided. For authenticity remember chance cards are typically pink, and community chest yellow.
To print the game board in Fort Dauphin is actually super easy. Go to Tazoom, and ask them to print it on adhesive paper. You’ll get a big old 50cm x 50cm sticker which you can then stick on some cardboard. Ta-da! It costs around 22,000Ar and when we did it, they gave us 3 for the price of 1 – that’s how many happen to fit on the sheet. For printing the cards you can use any town printing shop.
Playing it
Eagle-eyed readers will notice there’s no dice, game pieces, houses, money or cardboard included in this download. Yeah, we didn’t make those. Borrow from an existing Monopoly set if you have one, or get creative!
Credits
The original Monopoly boardgame is published by Hasbro and they retain the copyright etc etc. Hasbro – you’ll notice above I kinda advocated buying a set so please don’t sue me, this is just a bit of fun.
Thanks to Brad Frost for creating the Photoshop template which made all of this a piece of godrogodro rather than an epic six month battle.
Thanks to everyone who chipped in ideas and helped make this!