Monopoly is the paradigm of personal political artistic board game design, with a brutally ironic story behind it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach

>Ralph Anspach (15 March 1926 – March 2022) was a German-born American economics professor and games creator from San Francisco State University. Anspach was a graduate of the University of Chicago and fought with the Mahal in 1948 in support of the independence of Israel. He is best known for creating the game Anti-Monopoly and the legal battles that followed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly

>Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly. The idea of an anti-monopoly board game dates to 1903 when Lizzie Magie created The Landlord's Game, which later inspired Monopoly.

Reading Ralph Anspach's book "The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle" inspired me to design and produce a board game called "Micropoly" in 1999, about Microsoft's monopoly in the computer industry and free open source software.

(Not to be confused with "Micropolis", an old hard disk manufacturer and the original name of SimCity before it was published, and the open source version of SimCity after EA released it under GPL-3. Nor with the micro poly industrial lubricant of the same name.)

Micropoly is delightfully dated procedural rhetoric and ham-fisted interactive agitprop, as you can see by the names of the circa-Y2K companies like Netscape, SGI, and Sun, the Windows 95 motifs, $200 salary for passing the Window "Start" Menu instead of "Go", "Free Software" instead of "Free Parking", "Corrupted Registry" goto "Reinstall Windows" instead of "Jail", "Download" instead of "Chance" cards, "Open Sources" instead of "Community Chest" cards, "ISP" instead of "Utility", "Network" instead of "Railroad", "Deposition" and "Antitrust Ruling" properties, etc.

Here's a page I wrote explaining it with links to pdf files for the board and cards:

https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/

https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-board-big.jp...

Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a political statement protected under the First Amendment.

This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman.

You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly!

The Goals of the Micropoly Project:

To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the economy.

To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers.

To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in 1973, that teach why monopolies are bad.

To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source" game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly.

To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet.

To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth.

Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the Twentieth Century:

Monopolies are bad, and competition is good.

The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist. That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life!

The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers.

The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game all over the world.

Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other peoples original ideas.

Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with frivolous lawsuits.

They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the "Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won!

As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's safe to call a game "anything-opoly".

We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly.

The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and Microsoft should be obvious.

Micropoly Board:

https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-board-whole....

Micropoly Cards:

https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-cards.pdf

Micropoly Properties:

https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly.html