By JIM KINNEY

Business writer



EAST LONGMEADOW - Three-thousand people around the world, including 68 workers at the Hasbro Games factory in East Longmeadow, played Monopoly Wednesday and nobody had to be the thimble.



But players could be a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, a hackney cab from London or an arm clutching a boomerang from Australia because they were playing with Hasbro's new Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition game.

Hasbro tried to establish a new world record for the most people simultaneously playing Monopoly with games at the factory in East Longmeadow, Atlantic City, N.J., which is the birthplace of Monopoly, London, Tokyo, Madrid and Bogota, Colombia.



Hasbro estimates that 3,361 played Wednesday, but it's up to Guinness World Records to verify the record.



"If you want to make people smile, play a game," said Odalie M. Ince of Monson. "It brings people together."



Ince works on the production line at Hasbro making Monopoly and other games. But Wednesday she joined her coworkers at card tables set up on the production floor playing Monopoly. Within a few minutes, Ince had already purchased Athens, London, Tokyo, Montreal and Toronto, many of the high-rent spaces on the new World Edition Board.



"You can't buy everything you land on," she said. "But you have to buy something."



Cities got their places on the board through a worldwide vote. Montreal won to claim the most valuable spot normally held by Boardwalk. Riga, the capital city of Latvia, collected more than 700,000 votes from within the country of Latvia and took the Park Place spot.



"The people of Latvia got really excited," said George E. Burtch, Hasbro's vice president of Global Integration.



He went to Latvia two weeks ago for a celebration.



Hasbro put 20 major cities up for the vote then left two cities open as "wild cards" where citizens could write in the name of their own towns. That's how Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and Gdynia, a city in Poland, got on the board.



Jeffrey R. Lombard, vice president for operations at the plant, said workers there have been making the new games since July. The production line makes an average of about 35,000 Monopoly sets a day.



The games went on sale this week at $34.99 each.



About a dozen residents at Reeds Landing, a retirement community in Springfield, also got to play with the new Monopoly and help establish the record, said Pamela H. Simpson, a sales manager at Reeds Landing.



"We're thinking of doing a tournament in the fall," she said.



At Hasbro, Corey T. Odentz was able to buy Riga, but he wasn't having a lot of luck getting people to land on it and pay him his rent.



"I'll have to pass Go and get more money," he said.



Odentz, of Longmeadow, should know. His real job at Hasbro is in the finance department.



Business writer Jim Kinney can be reached at jkinney@repub.com