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Monday, May 20, 2013

Adventure Time Time: Monopoly: Adventure Time Collector's Edition Review

Monopoly: Adventure Time Collector's Edition


Time to play some video board games! The Monopoly edition of Adventure Time has come out and I played it to tell you it is Monopoly and it is Adventure Time. Do the two mix, sort of.

Off the bat, I'm going to say there were a lot of missed ideas. Some parts make me think no one from the show was involved. Which isn't true, the games tokens were based off Steve Wolfhard's designs, he does work on the show. So there was an actual mix of Adventure Time and Monoply in the tokens at least.

Then there's the missed opportunities. For every part of Ooo listed as a property a generic character picture is put up. There's so much free background art Monoply could have dug up from the show or just commissioned some new art. An a example of a good property picture is the Hot Dog Kingdom, which is an actual picture of the sad little kingdom with a tiny Hot Dog Princess in it. Everything else is character from the show, sort of see the background.


Even the center picture is generic clip art put together. The box art has a funny new design with the ice king stealing money with a top hat. The inside board could have been a new piece of art from Andy Ristaino, lead character designer or show creator Pen Ward himself. It's just some of the Adventure Time crew floating around on the in game board. They could have been dressed with monocles and top hats.

There might be a rule in monopoly theme editions of not changing the four iconic corner titles like Jail or Go. These spaces seem out of place on this board. Go To Dungeon would have been the perfect fit, alas it isn't on this board.

The houses or tree houses and castles should have looked like tree houses and castles. Instead it's the same generic house you've always seen. II was hoping that the houses in the game would be house people. One episode of the series has Finn and Jake defending tiny house people and I thought they make some tine versions of them. One color would have been fine and possibly three generic types. Instead the houses are light green and castles (hotels) are yellow.

The money, it's all about the money. There were so many in jokes to use on this, but Monopoly chose the generic route of random characters on the cash. Putting Princess Bubble Gum on it or unheard of royalty would have been funny. If President Lincoln is part of the show why not keep him on the 5 dollar bill? Why not make it Candy Kingdom bucks? Just some random ideas that would have made it better,

Good points coming at you. The two different card places you can land on in this game are "What the Lump?" and "Algebraic!". These cards go over some past moments from Finn and Jake's adventures, but either one can be negative or positive. There's some cute outline art from whatever the card is mentioning. The railroad is replaced with some good flying creatures and vehicles from the show including "the morrow" and Lady Rainicorn. The game also puts Beemo and N.E.P.T.E.R. for a taste of robot friendship on the board.


Playing with friends who already know Adventure Time will give you some inside jokes, but not that many. They did manage to put in Magic Man collecting a jerk tax, so some jokes do hit their target. I just wanted more jokes to blast me away into Adventure Time bliss. For a hardcore fan of the show there's a lot more that could have come with this game.

This game was provided by publisher for review