Nanaimo-Opoly, a local take on Monopoly, is being released by Victoria-based Outset Media for Walmart Canada. (image submitted)

A family board game favourite now has an all-Nanaimo edition.

Nanaimo-Opoly, a local take on Monopoly, has been released by Victoria-based Outset Media for Walmart Canada.

“It takes a distinctively Canadian spin on the classic game of Monopoly where the properties and places are Nanaimo staples,” noted an e-mail from Outset. “Landmarks … featured include the Bastion, the Oxy Pub, B.C. Ferries and many others.”

David Manga, president of Outset, said his company started creating city versions of the game last year, starting with seven Maritime cities. More recently, Victoria-Opoly and Langford-Opoly were released, with the latter selling especially well and requiring a second printing.

RELATED: Langford-Opoly game coming to West Shore Walmart

“We find that the smaller the community is, usually indicates that the better the product does,” Manga said.

Lauren Collicutt, an administrator at Outset, said the process of determining the Nanaimo ‘properties’ was different than with working on some of the Eastern Canada versions.

“With Nanaimo being only a couple hours away, it’s a little easier and I kind of have a better idea of what’s going on,” she said.

Outset said board game players across Canada haven’t seemed to have been vocal about what properties made it onto the board or which ones were left off.

“So far so good, no one’s really complained about the value of their properties,” Collicutt said.

Manga said a company in Eastern Canada about 15 years ago created Monopoly games and sold spaces on the game board to businesses, but said Outset doesn’t do that.

“You want the best places that should be on the board to be on the board,” he said.

The two most expensive ‘properties’ on the Nanaimo-Opoly board are Downtown Nanaimo and the Harbourfront Walkway, respectively, while the two most inexpensive properties are the Dinghy Dock Pub and the Oxy Pub.

Instead of railways, streets are featured: Front Street, Comox Road, Commmercial Street and Bowen Road.

The playing pieces aren’t Nanaimo-themed, as they include a hand, a heart, a bulldog, a smile, a pretzel and a shoe. Manga said all the games have the same tokens to keep the product at a certain price point.

“What this allows us to do is to print smaller quantities so we can get to a place like Nanaimo,” Manga said. “If we were to do, let’s say, a bathtub, you couldn’t afford it. The game would be prohibitively expensive, or we’d have to print so many that Nanaimo would never be able to get their own Nanaimo-Opoly.”

Nanaimo-Opoly is a limited edition sold exclusively at Walmart. Manga said the product was shipped last week.



editor@nanaimobulletin.com

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