A meme I made has been turned into a playable board game!
First here’s images of the board and cards. Scroll down for the printable PDFs!
A bit of backstory:
A while ago I had a silly idea that would leave me alone until I made it: “what if monopoly, but linguistics?”.
The basic idea:
- Save up words (money) to buy languages (streets).
- Those who land on your languages have to give you words (rent).
- There are also “Change” and “Discovery” cards that give you a random event.
- Once you get all the languages within a family (colour), you can buy a reconstruction (house).
- With 4 reconstructions on a language you can buy a proto-language (hotel).
- The aim of the game is to buy up all the languages so you can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European and win the game.
I put together a board and a set of cards, full of little linguistic jokes and references. I shared it on Facebook and thought that would be that.
But to my delight people seemed to enjoy the idea, and half the comments were people saying they’d like to play it!
Soon after I got a lovely message from a family in California who had printed off my board and cards. They used them to modify their own monopoly set to actually play my version of the game. Heart-warming stuff, but I still didn’t really think about fleshing out the meme to make the game full playable.
But then, a fellow graphic design and language enthusiast Antti Hukkanen messaged me. He had adapted my game and made a version PDF format. This has since been expanded on and polished until we finally have a full game! Antti took my crude idea and developed it, designing property cards, tokens, and a set of rules (adapted from those of monopoly but with some fun modifications). The board and cards I designed also got a graphic design upgrade, and the whole thing looks fantastic.
So here it is, free for your enjoyment:
PDF of the board, for A4 printing:
PDF of the cards:
PDF of the rules
Credit to Antti Hukkanen for his excellent graphic design work in developing my silly images into this full board game.
Message me on facebook if you have any questions about the game, or just to tell me you’ve printed it out and enjoyed it.
Like all my content, this game is entirely free for any who want to print it for their own personal use.
That said, if you fancy dropping a few quid in the Starkey Comics hat, I’m always grateful to my Patrons:
https://www.patreon.com/starkeycomics
Enjoy!
-🌟