Dollar Tree ... tiny Monopoly??

We stop at local Dollar Tree stores pretty regularly, looking for bits and pieces for crafting projects.  On our anniversary weekend trip to San Juan Capistrano, we saw the local Dollar Tree had a games section.  But what games came you really get for a buck?  

It turns out, they now have little editions of Monopoly and Candy Land plus a bunch of little plastic pinball-type games and card games.  There's a cute version of Road Trip Bingo.  I can see doing a cheap version of Candy Land since it's just a board, some pieces and a few cards with colored squares on them.  Battleship was original a pencil and paper game, you don't even need a board to play it.  But Monopoly?  How the heck do you slim that down to $1.25 price point?  We had to get one and find out.

Here it is:

I put a dollar bill in the picture for scale.  Check out the micro money and mini micro dice.

First of all ... ta da!  It's Colorforms fun!  That was an unexpected twist.  Once or twice in the last year I have asked people if they even remember Colorforms.  Now that Anne is making vinyl project on the Cricut machine, it made me wonder if all Colorforms ever were were little bits of vinyl.  Anyway, the board is a Colorforms pad of some kind.  You get to add some more icons to Free Parking and other spaces using the tiny vinyl bits.  The property card were all there on one sheet.  The money was all there and it comes with three really tiny dice.  The playing pieces were half-inch disks you put you Colorforms icon onto.  The houses and hotels were very small vinyl bits.

It is comically tiny, any way you look at it.  And you do have to look at it very closely (haha).  You could almost lose one of those houses under a fingernail trying to pick it up.  They couldn't figure out a way to include all the cards for Chance and Community Chest, so they packed those words onto a single tiny card in the smallest font I have ever seen in a production product ... almost exactly the size of the mint mark on a USA Jefferson nickel.  But putting it on one card meant they had to include a third die in the set, and rolling 3d6 gives 3 to 18 results in a Bell curve, so the chance of getting each cards is not equal.  That's weird.

It still feels like more than $1.25 in parts.  The board and cards should be a buck, the tiny tiny stack of money with the little dice should be $1.  Surely the box and instructions cost 20 cents.

It's baffling, but also cute.  We decided not to try and play test it until we got back home and had a baggie to put any stray molecules into.

Next article: Is it Playable?