Iron's exit a new wrinkle for Monopoly

So for the past month I have been getting the occasional item in my Facebook newsfeed concerning Hasbro’s plans to get rid of one of the iconic Monopoly pieces of my youth. I figured they would conduct this survey and then take a few days before announcing the piece that really was history and what would replace it.

Instead, the voting closed last night and this morning I awoke to find out that my beloved iron is getting the boot. It will be replaced by a cat in new versions of the game, however it should come to nobody’s surprise that Hasbro will be putting out a Golden Token Bonus set that will include all of the current tokens and the five suitors for the open spot in the lineup. So a lot of this was – shocker – a way for Hasbro to get some attention to what might be a flagging brand.

I know, I hate it too, the idea that Monopoly, the king of board games over the past seven decades, needs to pull a stunt to make people try to remember the last time they played. I am still trying to figure that out myself.

I remember spending many summer evenings playing Monopoly at my cousin Ricky’s house on Smith Street while visiting my grandmother in Pennsylvania. I got an anniversary set at some point that includes a spinner to hold the property deeds, although that one was (and still is) back in Virginia, so I would head over to Ricky’s after supper (as opposed to dinner, but that is another story for another day) and we’d play for a couple of hours. Our games usually ended amicably, which is saying something since there are a lot of stories out there about games that end in fights. Or frankly just end because they were taking too long.

My current Monopoly set was purchased when Jamesway was going out of business in Luray in the mid-1990s. It is a 60^th anniversary set in a box shaped like Trivial Pursuit, and the board even unfolds like the one used in that game. The tokens are apparently modeled on the ones from Monopoly’s early days, and are also golden colored, so I think I’ll need to hang on to the older game for what I see as an authentic iron.

The iron was among the less-flashy tokens, so it should not surprise me that it didn’t make the count. I saw elsewhere on the internet that the wheelbarrow was the second-least popular. I know that I only used it when the iron was already claimed. Most players seem to like the racecar and the Scottie the best, but a few of these pieces are more questionable than the iron.

For example, the shoe. It’s just one shoe, not a pair, so what is its true worth? I guess it makes sense from the perspective that an unpaired shoe makes a great doorstop, so it could also be a game token.

I always thought the hat was not a very balanced piece of metal, and the horse was the only token among those in my first Monopoly sets that needed to be on a pedestal. The rest stood on their own.

When the news broke this morning, I mentioned it to Christina, and she seemed to process it and move on. Then, half an hour later, I hear from the kitchen: “Wait a minute. They still have the f---ing thimble?”

The impending loss of the iron sent me to the closet where we keep our board games, and there are lots of great memories stored there. Christina and I have started playing Mille Bornes again, which has already been the source of great fun. My 30-year-old Risk game is up there, and that got a lot of use in summers back in Chesterfield County, but not much in recent years.

I still have Payday and Gambler, two great Parker Brothers games of the 1970s and 1980s, and Scattergories, plus all kinds of versions of Trivial Pursuit. I also have a terrific game called Out of Context, which is a quote-guessing game we used to play at John Waybright’s house when the Page News and Courier news staff got together for, ahem, strategy meetings.

Finding time (and people) to get together and play these great games is not that easy these days, but trips down memory lane like this make me wish it was. And maybe there will be an opportunity to do so again.

But right now, my main concern is this disrespect for the iron. And I’m steamed.