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SALT LAKE CITY — Board game giant Hasbro is making changes to on of the most beloved board games of all time, Monopoly. One of the iconic game pieces will be nixed from the board, never to pass go and get that sweet $200 ever again.
But the players will be the ones who decide which piece goes to jail: Forever.
In typical Monopoly fashion, fans of the game must compete in order to keep their favorite piece in Hasbro's "Save Your Token" campaign. People can vote for the one the like the most. Whichever has the fewest votes gets put in the slammer for life.
The change comes as a way to begin updating elements of the game that seem dated.
"The tokens that are in the game today represent household items from the 1930s when the game was first introduced," Hasbro Vice President of Marketing Jonathan Berkowitz told the Daily News. "We wanted to introduce a new token to the game that's more representative of today's Monopoly players."
To that effect, they're also allowing the fans to choose the piece that will replace the loser: A robot (which ironically looks pretty dated itself), a ring, a cat, a helicopter and a guitar (strangely, an acoustic rather than an electric, which is again a little dated itself). Also, the robot has a mustache for some reason.
For those of you who think Monopoly is extremely boring, well, it will continue to remain so because no rule changes are in order. By the way, the longest Monopoly game in history lasted a nightmarish 75 days.
But for those who adore the classic game which helped define board games, and indeed, parts of American pop culture, there will be a new piece to choose from that may just wind its way around the board and into America's hearts.
As of this writing, the wheelbarrow was losing, with a mere 3 percent of votes cast. Which makes sense because everything else in the game seems to be associated with something at least cute or fun or bomb-carrying. But what can you really do with a wheelbarrow except move dirt? At least the iron makes your shirts look nice.
An odds expert has predicted the cat will win the vacant spot. It's cute and there are plenty of cat people out there.
#poll
"Cat lovers outnumber dog lovers," R. J. Bell of pregame.com told USA Today. "Knowing how popular the Scottie is, I just assume there have to be far more people out there who are cat lovers who would love to see their icon in the game."
It's also not the first time that the pieces have been updated. The race car, thimble, boot, battleship, hat, and iron have been around since the game's inception, but the wheelbarrow and the Scottie were added in the late 50s. Another vote-driven change added a money bag as a bonus in the 1990s.
