San Marcos Opoly

I took some PTO so we had a four-day weekend.  As we were puttering around Encinitas, CA we found a copy of San Marcos Opoly.  Backtracking a bit, 2 or 3 weekends ago we relisted our stack of extra board games again on NextDoor, and ended up selling Masterpiece to someone who worked at USAOpoly, the maker of so many of these locally themed Monopoly clones.

It turns out that San Marcos Opoly was not from that company, but was made by ___ in ____ instead.

I get the attraction of these, since the original game used streets of Atlantic City which most of us have never seen.  So it was fun seeing our local places like Money Pit and the Palomar "P" on the board.  But there are hundreds of these clones on the market now and it just looks like the world gone crazy.

The game itself was Monopoly with the spaces renamed and different cards.  There were two cards we saw that were unlike anything in the original game: one has you roll a die and move backward that many spaces, and the others let you move to any space on the board (I'm going to pick Free Parking here) or move another player to the space of your choice (probably your most expensive rental, right?).  Other than that, it included the house rules of putting cash in the middle and getting it when you land on a space, and the rule to get double your pay if you land exactly on the Start space.

Our game session went slowly, since neither of us are cut-throat players.  I think we did one trade so we would finally have somewhere to build some houses.  We almost let it fizzle out when it looked like nobody was going to come out on top, but then I hit some big rent and it was over.  We don't bother with $1 or $5 bills, and once someone has to start mortgaging properties we figure it's done, since it just goes down a sad spiral after that.

We saw a show on Amazon Prime last night about the history of the game.  It briefly looked at the collectors that many of these themed sets are aimed at.  I'm glad I chose to collect stamps as a kid -- they take up so much less space.