Soon, someone will pass “Go,” collect $200 and land on Waconia.

How did it happen? Nobody seems to know.

“It’s definitely a mystery,” said Kellie Sites, president of the city’s chamber of commerce, “but we’ll take it.”

Last week, Hasbro announced the 22 U.S. cities — as determined by online voting via Buzzfeed — that will fill out the board of the U.S. edition of “Monopoly Here & Now.” The updated version of the ubiquitous real-estate trading game, which turns 80 this year, is due out this fall.

The usual suspects are there — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — along with a few outliers like Portsmouth, N.H., and Charleston, S.C.

Pierre, South Dakota’s capital, claimed the prized square traditionally reserved for Boardwalk after local and state officials pushed a get-out-the-vote effort. Minneapolis swooped in for Park Place.

Then there’s Waconia, a city of 10,700 (the smallest on the board by a comfortable margin) about 35 miles west of Minneapolis. It’s got an impressive lake and an emerging beer and wine scene. Back in the day, it used to ship ice to St. Paul. It’s not quite famous in its own state, let alone nationally.

Yet it snagged the spot on the board formerly known as Baltic Avenue. That’s not the fanciest space — the only cheaper property is Mediterranean Avenue, played in this version by Chesapeake, Va. — but it’s there.

Those two properties were determined by write-in votes, so a concerted effort by Waconia’s Monopoly enthusiasts could have tipped the scales (a Buzzfeed spokeswoman said nearly 4 million votes were cast overall, but replied to a question about how many votes each city got with a somewhat-conspiratorial “We can’t share that.”)

That’s where the plot thickens: Nobody in Waconia — or at least nobody who has come forward — seems to have had anything to do with it.

The mayor, Jim Sanborn, said he didn’t know about the write-in voting until the results were announced. He assumed a local church group or youth group had taken the reins and organized a campaign on social media, but found nothing of the sort when he looked into it.

“At first I thought it was kind of a joke,” he said. “Then it was, ‘Holy cow, this is kind of a big deal.’ ”

Jim Nash, the former mayor, current state representative and self-described Monopoly enthusiast, didn’t know about it either.

“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said after the March 19 announcement. “I think it’s fantastic.”

Nash said it’s his favorite board game, and that he’ll definitely be picking up an extra copy or two.

“People don’t want to play it with me because I rarely lose,” he said.

When the news broke, people started calling Sites, the chamber president, to congratulate her, assuming the group had helped engineer the decision. But she, too, knew nothing — and after a weekend of asking around, “even more people have no idea how it happened,” she said.

When Buzzfeed announced the write-in vote, the suggestions offered up in the comment section were largely of the punch-line variety — Normal, Ill.; Intercourse, Penn.; Sandwich, Mass.; Climax, Minn. — with nary a mention of Waconia.

Few people in town seemed to know the vote was happening until it had already happened, Sites said.

There’s “speculation on the street” that a few people figured out how to flood the ballot box, she said — but that could have happened anywhere.

Still, no one’s complaining: “People are so excited about it,” she said.

The only gripe so far? The icon on Waconia’s space, according to an image of the board released by Hasbro, is an ear of corn. That’s not how the city sees itself, Sites said; they’d prefer something more picturesque, like a lakeshore scene.

“We are working on that one,” she said.

Marino Eccher can be reached at 651-228-5421. Follow him at twitter.com/marinoeccher.