If you’re any good at Monopoly, like me, you know how to position yourself to win.

Choosing this position isn’t cheating, per se. Maybe, I explain to my competitors as I lick my thumbs and count my stacks, it’s just because competitive, type A freakshows like myself naturally gravitate towards controlling currency as the banker. We’re the winning kind. It’s simple.

This is nonsense, of course. But an updated version of the game, called Co-opoly, reverses the Social Darwinist psychology espoused in the former set. Its players are members of a cooperative business, and the banker, a remote force in the game, plays the bad guy. In order to win, players must band together and work towards a common prosperity.

We’re hoping for the idea of collaboration and mutual aid.

Co-opoly is meant to educate players about the realities of participating in a worker-owned cooperative. Its creators, four former Hampshire College students, belong to one called TESA, the Toolbox for Education and Social Action based in Northampton, Massachusetts. By selling Co-opoly and providing services like democratic audits to organizations looking to infuse their workflows with more social justice, TESA sustains itself and its mission of spreading democratic education. The first pressing of the game in November of 2011 sold out within a year. And in 2014, the organization will be issuing a second pressing of 2,000 sets across Europe, and expanding to South Korea and the Philippines.

Co-opoly, as you might imagine, differs from its predecessor in several important ways. First you draw a character card. But instead of playing a boot or a Boston Terrier, a character in the game might be a 35-year-old single mother, struggling to make ends meet. Or you might play a retiree. Each player has different costs of living, accounted for by “points,” also the currency of the game. And while players have to pay their individual costs, their paychecks are tied up in the success of the cooperative as a whole.

The coop could be anything. “An art school for dragons!” suggests Brian Van Slyke, the game’s principal creator. Moving across the board generally works the same way Monopoly does, with a roll of the die. But when players land on “work” spaces, they’ll draw cards that demand a game of charades, or Pictionary. This is how the coop earns points.

Drawing a challenge card also presents an eerily realistic aspect of the game. A challenge card might tell you that there are sudden, unexpected medical bills to pay. Another might inform the coop that a big box retailer has come to town and is undercutting their success. Hard decisions must be made. Sometimes, everyone has to take a pay cut.