Lacking a holodeck, the next best option for getting your friends to do a weird group activity is to have a party and supply the booze.

Complete with giant inflatable dice ($8.95 on Amazon)

For my wedding reception, guests were subjected to pirate garb, mead, and Renaissance court dancing. For my 33rd birthday party—say hello to 1930s costumes, martinis, and life-sized Monopoly!

The backstory: I’ve lived in a 45-person co-living space in San Francisco called 20mission for two and a half years. The house is like family. Or, as a good friend likes to call it,

“…a Bitcoin-fueled tech hippie love fest.”

Fair enough.

A while ago I came across a floor plan of 20mission. It looked just like a game board — a near square of 41 bedrooms. As a childhood favorite, the classic game that I loved in childhood immediately came to mind.

So on September 20th, 2015, I turned our home into a giant game of (very Silicon Valley/Mission-themed) Monopoly.

Download templates and design files from GitHub

HUGE 1930s music Spotify playlist

How to make a classic gin martini

Making The Game

Ryan Singer, our banker and auctioneer, selling off an unpurchased piece of property to the highest bidder

Luckily I’m a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, and I know my way around Photoshop. Dozens and dozens of hours went into it. Game boards, currency, property cards, Chance & Community Chest, and the economy itself… there was a lot to rewrite and design.

The players divided themselves into four teams, and selected a CEO and treasurer. The CEO would be the one to gather input and deliver team decisions, and to participate in property auctions. The treasurer handled the money and transactions with the banker.

Each team got a laminated copy of the board and a dry erase marker, to mark down properties owned or make notes.

The team CEOs rolled to see who went first, and the game begins!

Currency & Banking

We are, according to our occasional nickname, The House That Bitcoin Built, and I wanted to do our economy was in bits (a bit of a precarious endeavor this week…). There was a buy-in per team of 64867 bits, which was about $15 that day. Winnings would go half to the team last standing (or with the highest net worth when we called the game), and half to the charity Child’s Play. The entire bank was 500k bits, with a 25× multiplier applied to all dollars from the original Monopoly game.

Somebody knows her twenty-five times table pretty well now.

Recent renovations to the park cost $20.5 million, so what’s a few bits?

Boardwalk, the most expensive property in the game, becomes Dolores Park in our Mission-themed version, and goes for a tidy 10000 bits instead of $400.

Bills

The bills are a brazen celebration of the Tech Gods, featuring a mix of entrepreneurs I tried not to think too hard about (and a depressing moment of ‘Oh shit! I need a woman!’).

Who’s on what

5000 bits: Elon Musk

1000 bits: Steve Jobs

500 bits: Evan Williams

200 bits: Mark Zuckerberg

100 bits: Marissa Mayer

50 bits: Travis Kalanick

I fear hate mail for putting Musk on the 5000 bit note instead of Jobs

The Board & Properties

One copy of the property cards was tacked up to the wall beside each of my housemates’ doors, with the corner rooms (bathrooms, common room, and kitchen) making up GO, Go to Jail, etc.

Best burrito in the country (say some)

Rent and other currency figures on property cards were simply multiplied by 25. Heads up: creating the property cards was by far the most tedious part of creating the game.

Teams wrote their name on properties they owned. When rent was due, the treasurer walked the rent payment to the owed team. Standard rules applied for purchasing houses and hotels.

Chance & Community Chest

Until 20m-opoly, I hadn’t thought much about the meaning of these cards.

How to represent Chance, the riskier draw of the two piles, in nerdville? There is an extremely popular gambling website called Satoshi Dice, which uses bitcoin. Boom.

Community Chest = Kickstarter. Boom.

These were the most fun to create, and I think inject the most personality into the game.

See the rest of the cards

Tokens