The owner of a hotel on Boardwalk was once considered the wealthiest player in Monopoly.
Now it’s the player who finds the special edition game flush not with colourful Monopoly bills, but real money.
To celebrate the iconic game’s 80th anniversary, Hasbro has secretly slipped real cash into 80 sets. The jackpot? The box with €20,580, the equivalent of one full Monopoly bank.
The 79 other sets will also contain bonafide dough, ranging in amounts from €50 to €200.
Florence Gaillard, brand manager at Hasbro France, said that when the manufacturer asked their French customers how they would like the company to honour the game’s anniversary, the answers were unsurprising, and the fantasy of every Monopoly player.
“They told us they wanted to find real money,” Gaillard told the Agence France-Presse in an interview.
To keep their plan top-secret, a small team handpicked by Hasbro France holed up in the small French town of Creutzwald to carefully pack up each set and ship them out. A bailiff was even on hand to count and re-count the bills for each box.
So you want to begin your hunt for a loaded box? Start by searching for any of the 300,000 boxes with the special edition sticker indicating they could contain real money. Then keep an eye out for a bulging lid – the real bills expand the box a tiny bit. (On the other hand, the real notes weighed almost the exactly same as the fake bills. Unless you bring a scale, the weight difference is unrecognizable.) Finally, move to Europe. So far, these special edition boxes are only available in France.
