more Monopoly advice

Also don't buy Water Works. It is the kiss of death. Seriously, don't. Don't buy it.

Monopoly advice

Don't ever buy Electric Company. Ever.

Get to know your imaginary community (part 2 of 22)

Pennsylvania Avenue: "The Virginia Avenue of the East."

This was the rallying cry of Heinrich Behrenkinder as he built the original gridwork of "Penn Ave" (as it is called) in the latter years of the 19th century. When Behrenkinder's father first moved to Baltic Avenue, there were no railroads. By the time young Heinrich came of age (back then that meant he turned eight!), the Reading was complete and ground was just being broken on the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad. Heinrich got in on the ground floor and rode that train all the way to the top. He soon owned a palatial estate on Virginia Avenue, a vantage point from which he could easily oversee the railroad operations which, by his 13th birthday, were largely under his own control. He could also see, from his rooftop, the virgin prairies of the northeast he had somehow always longed for.

Yes, many thought Heinrich crazy when he extended the Pennsylvania Railroad all the way past the Go To Jail box. Few imagined he could get anybody to live in the "emerald city" he started building there. And, indeed, Heinrich grew old and died alone, the only human resident in what we now think of as "the green properties." Rumors and theories abound-- some say he kept company with phantasms and ghosts, some say he took a shine to the native ibexes and billy goats that used to pepper the hills, some say he never really left his mansion on Virginia Avenue, but built the emerald city after losing a dare to a hobo in States Avenue, a hobo who, under the identity of Heinrich Behrenkinder, lived out his final days in opulent solitude in Pennsylvania Avenue.

Whatever happened to Heinrich, soon after his death gold and silver were discovered in the surrounding prairies. On the newly-built Short Line Railroad came prospectors, then realtors, and finally the monocled and top-hatted elite who populate the East today.


Did you know? . . .

-Pennsylvania Avenue was once called home by major-league third-baseman Corey Koskie?
-The Fruit Roll-up was invented on Pennsylvania Avenue?
-Pennsylvania Avenue briefly adopted the metric system in the 1930s?

Get to know your imaginary community (part 1 of 22)

St. James Place is a modest, lower-middle class community located along the Eastern border of our imaginary city. Originally settled in the great northeastern pyrite rush of the 1820s, St. James Place became known for both its prostitutes and its sasparilla throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1903 discovery of an old leather and cork sports ball in the public square put St. James Place in the running as an alternate location for the baseball hall of fame, an honor this beleaguered town saw slip through its hands when the ball was revealed to be a key instrument in a primitive form of bondage-style sex playfully referred to by town residents of the day as "them ol' peculiar hoodwinks in the parlour," and made briefly famous on a national level with the publication of Philbert Tripleday's 1906 foxtrot of the same name.


Did you know? . . .
-You can get to St. James Place on the Pennsylvana Railroad?
-St. James is the patron saint of vinegar-based condiments?
-There are two Wendy's restaurants on the same street in St. James place?!?
-The scenes at "Adams College" in the film Revenge of the Nerds were shot in St. James Place?


And did you further know . . .
-Famous celebrities born in St. James Place include: Neil Patrick Harris!
-The St. James Place Children's Zoo tops the nation's list in unaccounted-for ungulates! Nobody knows how they got out, or where they went! This zoo needs more oversight!
-On an average day in St. James Place, there are over 4000 sandwiches eaten! This is hundreds more than are eaten in Marvin Gardens!