Monopoly Live and Battleship Live Games [Toy Fair 2011]
Written on Feb 20, 2011 by Brian and filed under Hasbro
Hasbro has a refreshed version of Monopoly and Battleship that put an interesting twist on the classic games. Both rely on an all seeing tower that sits in the middle of the game board. With its motion vision play technology, the tower does everything from manage the game to issue rules. The Live series of games are set up and ready to play in minutes, and in the case of Monopoly, there’s no longer a need for the bank, managing auctions or even keeping an eye on cheaters, the tower manages it all. Battleship gives up the old school peg board and ads several new gaming elements like a spy plane and missile attacks.
As noted the Live versions of these games have loads of new elements. In Monopoly, to roll users cover their piece with a hand. The tower makes the dice rolling noise and tells the user how many spaces to move. If the player goes to the wrong spot, the tower knows and issues a gentle reminder. There are also various sensors on the board, the silver spots in the center are used for player feedback, and the red card slots in the center are used to deduct money from a player’s bank, or used for other game elements like auction bidding.
The Monopoly die hards won’t like the missing cash and dice, but the benefit is the game is faster-paced and easy to pick up and go for kids new to the experience.
Battleship gets the same sensor-based play update, players will cover the launch buttons for instance to issue a missile strike. The different ships also have a feature that can be used once per game, livening up the old school B4, C7, and D2 game calls.
Add in the spy plane feature that can reveal locations of the opposing ships, the fact that some ships can move and the surprise commands the live tower issues, the gameplay is much more immersive then ever before.
Both Hasbro’s Monopoly Live and Battleship Live are expected this fall for a retail price of $49.99.
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