On these pages are the various parts of a game similar to Parker Brothers’ Monopoly®, based on the mythical country of Esperantujo, where everything is communicated in Esperanto. You can print out the game on your printer:
First, print out the board.
You can print out the small board on a single sheet of card stock. If you’re very fortunate, you have a color printer. Set your printer driver to print backgrounds before printing.
Or you can print out the large board on five sheets of card stock. The first four sheets are the four sides of the board, in two rows of five spaces each. Trim these, and glue them to a piece of cardboard large enough to hold them. The fifth sheet is the name of the game, and spaces for the Chance and Community Chest cards.
For either size board, if you have a black-only printer, leave off the printing of background colors and images, and use a set of colored pencils to fill in the colored areas of the board.
There are three pages of deeds to print out and cut apart with your friendly neighborhood paper-cutter.
If you have a color printer, set the prowser to print the backgrounds, or with a black-only printer, color the borders of the deeds where appropriate as you did the spaces on the board.
Note that in my version of the game, one color-set is streets, another is avenues, etc., and that the two or three properties in each set have related names.
Print out the sets of “Chance” and “Community Chest” cards and cut them apart, as you did with the deeds.
If you’re fortunate, you have two different colors of card stock to print these on. If not, you’ll have a set that looks like mine.
I’ve made a philosophical change to the sets of cards. The real sets have sixteen of each type of card, whereas my set has twenty of each.
The “Chance” cards mostly send you somewhere, and I have cards not contained in standard sets: one for each utility and railroad, and one for a property in each color group. The only one involving money is “Advance to GO”.
The “Community Chest” cards are the ones that give or take money.
Print out the houses, hotels, and tokens, on cardstock, if possible, glue the sheet to a piece of heavy cardboard, and cut the individual items apart.
Using colored pencils or pens, you can color the backgrounds of the houses and hotels green and red, and the tokens various colors to make them more recognizable.
Or, if you have a lick of sense, skip this whole step and use the houses, hotels, and tokens from a real Monopoly® set instead.
Print each sheet of play money about thirty times. Due to an overabundance of cuteness in my psyche, all these bills have serial numbers that change every time you hit the [F5] key to refresh the screen, so you can print stacks of bills, each with a unique number.
These look best printed with a color printer. If you have a black-only printer, push the [Black-and-White Bills] button so that they don’t come out too light to see.
And of course, the bills are denominated in steloj, with the symbol ˜, but in English, we can call them stars. The stelo is the monetary unit of Esperantujo, and I imagine it as having a value of about $10. Their coins, in denominations of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 cendoj are the small change for things like newspapers, magazines, and lunch at «Ho-Kia-Sandviĉo» (Esperantujo’s blatant rip-off of the Southwest’s Whataburger® chain), and the bills are for large purchases, like meals in better restaurants, gasoline, and major appliances. So a couple of those ˜1000 bills will get you a new car, plus a wad of change.
Of course, my choice of property names, words on the cards, designs of the money, etc., are not the only possible choices. Here are two other designs, one on Vikipedio (the Espersanto version of Wikipedia), and one by a fellow named Dave Rutan, both of whom have nice-looking designs for their boards, but neither of them can be printed out on your printer and played, so of course, mine here is vastly superior.
If you have actually printed out and assembled this game and have tried it, I would appreciate hearing how you liked it, as well as any critical comments, questions or suggestions. Please write, and I’ll get back to you.
Copyright © MMVIII Steve MacGregor