'Monopoly City Streets' a fun way to buy Bedford County

In this screen capture from midday Monday, an opposing player has placed a factory on Madison Street, preventing the owner of that street -- T-G city editor John I. Carney -- from earning any rent on the street. Carney can, however, still earn rent from the homes he's placed on South Hillcrest Drive.

Did you see the skyscrapers I built on Madison Street last week?

No?

Maybe you just weren't looking closely enough.

One of the most ambitious online game launches in recent memory took place last week -- not without some glitches. "Monopoly City Streets" is a sort of global melange of Monopoly and Sim City, with Google Maps as the playing board. You can buy and sell almost any street which is named on Google Maps, anywhere in the world, and build various types of buildings on the streets you own.

The organizers of the game weren't quite prepared for the avalanche of players who participated in last week's launch, and there were tons of problems, slowdowns and shutouts as players tried, often in vain, to log on. Because of this, the game will be reset at some time this week, starting everyone over again from scratch and implementing some bug fixes. That may or may not have happened by the time you read these words on Wednesday. The organizers planned to give advance notice of the reset at their blog, blog.monopolycitystreets.com, and through Twitter, at twitter.com/monopolycitysts. The reset gives you a new chance to get in on the ground floor of the game, if you're interested.

UPDATE: After our print edition was put to bed, it was announced that the game will be taken down at 10 a.m. local time on Thursday. It will be offline for 12 to 24 hours and then reset and re-launched.

The game is only scheduled to be available for a few months; it's a promotional tool for a new Monopoly variant called Monopoly City.

The game is online at monopolycitystreets.com. New players get $3 million in Monopoly money and can immediately start buying streets, anywhere in the world, and building on them. You can't buy a street if someone else has already bought it, but you can wheel and deal with your opponents, making offers to buy and sell.

You collect rent once a day based on the streets and buildings you own, which gives you the money you need to keep on buying and building.

From time to time, "Chance" cards pop up which give you the opportunity to harm another player or protect yourself from harm. The harm takes the form of putting an undesirable building -- like a factory -- on one of your opponents' streets. That prevents your opponent from collecting any rent from that street's buildings until the undesirable building has been bulldozed. The protection comes in the form of desirable "bonus" buildings like schools. A school on one of your streets prevents your opponents from placing a factory there.

Other "Chance" cards randomly cost or earn you money, just as in the traditional Monopoly game.

Your rent is deposited only once a day, and you only earn rent on days when you visit the web site -- it doesn't accrue in your absence.

It's a fun idea -- there's something irresistible about being able to buy the streets where you live, work and play. While it may be too simple to hold people's attention forever it's not intended to go on indefinitely.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.