Magnificent Road: - - Hasbro | Monopoly for Millennials Review

One of the board games I was able to convince my family to play during the quarantine was Hasbro's Monopoly for Millennials. This game came out late 2018, and although I'm not a board game (or Monopoly) collector, I loved the light-hearted jabs at millennials (I'm a millennial myself), so I went ahead and purchased the game. Yes, take my money, Hasbro!

Speaking of money - I couldn't find the symbol for monopoly money to paste below so I will be using "M[x]" instead. In other words, if you see something like "M[10]" as you read on, this will mean 10 monopoly dollars (and other variations).

Monopoly for Millenials includes the following contents:

1 Gameboard
6 Tokens
16 Destination Cards
16 Chance Cards
16 Community Chest Cards
64 Experience Chips
Money Pack
2 Dice

For the most part, Monopoly for Millennials has a lot of the same mechanics as the original Monopoly game. For example, you still:

Travel around a board
Use money in the game

every player starts with M[100]

Buy property

properties are now called "destinations"
buying a property is now called "discovering a destination"
unowned properties are called "undiscovered destinations"

Pay "rent" and fees

when you land on a discovered destination, you pay a visit cost
some Chance and Community Chest cards will ask you to pay fees

if you can't pay the Chance/Community Chest fees, you still have to pay what you can with the money you have and then start selling off destinations to the bank (at face value) or to other players (for an agreed-upon price)

Get a benefit when you collect all the properties/destinations in a colour set

a colour set = two destinations in the same colour group
you gain more experience at the end of the game if you have a set

Collect money when you pass GO

you get M[20] each time you pass GO

Have Chance and Community Chest cards in the game
Have Free Parking / Jail / Just Visiting spaces

you still can't collect money if you pass GO on your way to jail
when in jail, you can still collect money from players who land on your destinations
the 3 ways to get out of jail are still the same (pay, use a Get Out of Jail Free card, or roll a double)
nothing happens on Free Parking and Just Visiting spaces

Can make deals and trades

buy, sell, or swap destinations with other players at any time

Of course Hasbro's Monopoly for Millennials wouldn't be a brand new game without some deviation from the original Monopoly. The new features/changes to this game include the following:

The board is smaller

the original Monopoly game has 11 spaces on each side of the board; Monopoly for Millennials has 9 spaces on each side
having a smaller board/less spaces to travel is actually a typical characteristic of special edition Monopolies, so no - this game isn't saying that Millennials are too lazy to move around the board
don't worry - even with less spaces to travel, you can still have a fulfilling game!

The first person to start the game is the one with the most student debt

this is actually written in the instructions

No auction is held when you don't want to buy an undiscovered destination

many people don't know this, but when you land on a property in the original Monopoly game and you don't want to/can't buy it, the property immediately goes up for auction and other players bid on it
in Monopoly for Millennials, nothing happens if you don't want to discover a destination

Experience Chips

these are face-down "likes"/"unlikes" that are collected by you and a player who visits your destination
some Chance cards allow you to pick up Experience Chips
some Chips are worth points while others subtract points (because not all experiences in life are epic)
these cannot be collected while in jail (you still collect rent/money from other players while in jail)
once you get out of jail (no matter how you achieve this), you collect one experience chip because hey - it was an experience!
these cannot be sold, traded, or swapped

Bike Share

instead of railroads there are now Bike Share spaces
pay M[10] to travel to any space before the next Bike Share
pay an additional M[10] for each Bike Share space you pass
you do not collect M[20] if you pass GO while using Bike Share

Can't pay the cost to visit when you land on a discovered destination?

nothing happens!
nobody collects any Experience Chips

The game ends when all destinations have been discovered or when Experience Chips run out

if you feel like Monopoly games are never-ending, you would like Monopoly for Millennials because destinations can all be discovered very quickly (especially if you have the maximum 4 players) and the game can easily end in 20-30 min

The player with the most experience wins the game

total experience = experience from the destinations you own (don't forget colour set bonuses!) + Experience Chips you picked up
if there's a tie, the player with the most money wins

New tokens:

Less currency denomination

there are now only three types of bills - M[5], M[20], and M[100]
there are lots of M[5]'s and very few M[100]'s (see below)
each player starts the game with M[100] - I would recommend giving this amount in M[20]'s because a M[100] bill will need to be broken very quickly after starting the game

One thing that I noticed is that, to some extent, winning depends a lot on luck in this game.

Experience Chips play a significant role in determining your overall experience amount at the end of the game. While playing, the Experience Chips are always lying face-down so you don't know whether you're picking up positive or negative experiences. You could get really unlucky and have more negative experiences than positive ones at the end of the game.

Plus, there are some pretty savage Chance cards! Some cards allow you to take destinations from other players...for free. One card in particular allows you to take a whole destination set (i.e. two destinations of the same colour) from another player!

In other words, no matter how your game starts off or how it's going, Experience Chips and Chance cards can really change the tide of the game.

In my own experience of playing this game last week, I was the only millennial at the table. I faced against two other players - one Gen Xer and a Gen Zer. We played while having pizza and it was a lot of fun for everyone!

When all of the destinations were discovered, we decided to continue playing until we ran out of Experience Chips as well. In short, the game became so entertaining that by the end of it, it didn't really matter at all that it was about millennials.