Over at ali.com, you can rank the potential tokens for USAopoly’s forthcoming Muhammad Ali Monopoly game. So we did.
The rankings ranged from 10 (highest preference) to 1 (lowest preference) for 10 contenders: a set of boxing gloves, a pair of boxing trunks, a butterfly, a bee, a championship belt, a silhouette of the champ, the Muhammad Ali autograph, a boxing shoe, a speedbag, and a ring bell. Here are our choices, with our reasons.
10/9: Butterfly and bee. We ranked the butterfly ahead of the bee, but the important part is that these are the top two. If you’re making a game specific to Muhammad Ali, these are the single two most important things to include. They’re the most fun, and the most likely to promote storytelling (Why is there a bee, daddy?), and repeat plays (I want to play the butterfly game!).
If these are not in the game, we will eat a bee pie, stingers and all.
8: Championship belt. Who doesn’t want to be the championship belt? You’ve won before the game even started. That’s a strong selling point, and reinforces that Ali was, you know, the champ. Good to remember in a game bearing his likeness.
7: Bell. We will not play regular Monopoly if we are not given the Iron, so we’re suckers for kitschy, slightly offbeat tokens. It’s just fun in a way that’s not Ali-specific — but make every single aspect of the game Ali-specific, and you’ll risk alienating people who could use it to learn about the greatest. (Editorial note: he was, and still is, the greatest.)
6: Gloves. Since you literally couldn’t make a boxing game without a boxing gloves token, we’re going with this one here. Someone will say “I want to be the boxing gloves!” before you even open the game.
5: Boxing shoe. Nice continuity from the original Monopoly game with this one. It’ll getyou pulling down the old game and comparing the two, and maybe even playing that one again too. Savvy.
4: Speedbag. A nice idea, but it’s kind of hard to tell what it is. You want the pieces to be self-explanatory.
3: Boxing trunks. These made me think of sweat. I don’t like thinking of sweat.
2: Champ statue. A big gratuitous, but the big problem is that it’s not identifiably Ali the way, say, a Michael Jordan logo would obviously be Michael Jordan. Many people would probably think it’s Rocky. In an Ali-branded game, that would seem to be a mistake.
1: Autograph signature. A decent idea, but far too gratuitous in the company of clever ideas like the ones above. No one would choose this piece, ever. Or at least no one we’d like to play with, or be afraid of losing to.
Disagree? You can assign your own rankings. That’s the great part. (We’re pretty confident in ours, though, and would post photos of all of them if formatting wasn’t such a hassle.) Happy Friday!
Columbia Pictures, Happy Madison, and Hasbro, Inc. are in final talks to develop Candy Land, a live-action movie based on the Hasbro board game, with Adam Sandler attached to star.
