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Monopoly gets a new twist with an Orangeville flavour

July 24, 2020   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

If your idea of a fun night is playing board games, you’re going to love the new version of Monopoly that made its debut locally just a couple of weeks ago. 

Orangeville-Opoly takes the popular original game Monopoly and replaces the street names and properties with landmarks local to Orangeville.

Instead of Marvin Gardens and Park Avenue, you’ll see Broadway and Alexandra Park.

Canadian media company, Outset Media, developed the idea of a Monopoly game based on Canadian cities and towns using local sites on the game board.

The games have been wildly popular in the localities where they have been released with people snatching them up as collectors items.

“Monopoly is the best selling game of all time,” explained John Paul Teskey, senior vice president of Outset Media. “Instead of the usual spots on the board like Boardwalk and Park Place, they are all places in and around Orangeville. There are streets like First Street, Broadway, Ridell Road, and we have businesses like the Hockley Valley Brewery and the Orangeville Mall. There are parks like Rotary Park, and festivals like the Orangeville Blues and Jazz Festival. It celebrates all things Orangeville on the same Monopoly board that we all know.”

Once the concept was in place, the company started producing game boards using landmarks from Canadian cities. They started off with the main centres then began producing games for smaller towns and cities.

The response from the smaller centres was huge when local residents enthusiastically picked up the game that featured their own town.

“We’re up to 99 different communities across Canada now,” Mr. Teskey said. “Orangeville is brand new this year. We shipped out the first Orangeville-Opoly’s out about two weeks ago. They’re selling really well at Walmart. This all came out because of Walmart. They were doing a similar program in the States celebrating communities across the U.S. Walmart Canada knew that we, at Outset, had the rights do to Monopoly games exclusively in Canada and they asked if we can do a line of games for the communities they are in across Canada. The program has been around now for about a year and a half. We started with the usual suspects like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal – all the big ones. We also did some smaller places last year, but our best selling one which even outsold Toronto and Vancouver was Sarnia. Sarnia sold more than Toronto did and quicker too. We started focusing on smaller and mid-size communities across the country and we’ve had phenomenal success with it.”

While the company usually produces board games by the thousands, these games are tailored for communities so each production run is much smaller. They are all produced in Canada.  

The original Monopoly game was introduced in the 1930’s and created by the Parker Brothers company. It quickly became a best seller and has been around ever since.

For the localized Canadian version of the game, Outset Media has a product development team that researches each town or city to make note of streets, and prominent businesses and landmarks.

For Orangeville, Mr. Teskey was already familiar with the town himself as he has family connections in Caledon East and spent considerable time in Orangeville.

Orangeville-Opoly is sold exclusively at the Orangeville Walmart location.

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