Is Hong Kong Monopoly board game a good guide to exploring the city? It’s more of a starting point
- We roll the dice on Monopoly’s Hong Kong Attractions board, and find better nearby alternatives to the squares we land on as places to visit in real life
- For example, swap Canton Road for Kowloon Park or SoHo for Blake Garden. If by misfortune you are on that tourist trap The Peak, head to Victoria Park Garden
There are all sorts of ways to get around Hong Kong – trains, trams, automobiles – but none offers as many diversions as the Monopoly board.
Frequently cited as the world’s most popular board game, Monopoly’s Hong Kong version debuted in 1965. It’s undergone revisions in subsequent years, with a 1997 handover version to mark the British colony’s return to Chinese rule and the addition of funkier tokens such as a dinosaur and a duck.
But the most radical innovation is the latest, the Hong Kong Attractions edition, which introduced smart cards instead of the folding stuff, multimillion-dollar property values and tourist spots purportedly chosen by popular acclaim.
Inevitably, the attractions run the gamut of the usual suspects, from the Avenue of Star [sic] to Tai O, which a particularly waggish guidebook writer once dubbed “The Venice of Hong Kong”.
If you’re thinking about exploring some new ground in the city, rather than taking the game’s picks as gospel give the dice a rattle and then, wherever you land, veer off to somewhere less busy and more interesting.
Nothing’s changed as far as starting at Go is concerned, although the game’s conception of a “consumption voucher” is a not-too-shabby 2 million Monopoly dollars (M$) each time you pass.
