Ecclesiopoly

A couple of weeks ago while visiting my mom's house, my eyes alighted on a gift we bought her a couple of years ago. It's a game called "Wine-opoly," one of the many knock-offs of the vastly popular "Monopoly," first made in 1935 by Parker Brothers. For some strange reason--perhaps because I was on vacation and my mind had no other pressing projects to work on--I immediately thought it would be cool to have a Monopoly game based on church history. But "Churchhistoryopoly" makes for an unwieldy name. So I took the prefix from "ecclesiology"--the study of the church--and the suffix of the game, and . . . voila! Ecclesiopoly.

Not content to leave the idea in the stratosphere of the abstract, I got to work with Publisher, Wikipedia, and Google. After a few days on the machine, I was ready to proof the game board in black and white:

Due to a glitch in my Publisher program, the cool graphics of hands worshiping and the twin steeples of Our Lady of Tyn Church in Prague smeared when I printed them. Sigh. I'll have to go minimalist this time around.

Here are the sections getting trimmed before I glued them to the board:

One fun aspect of this project was learning obscure facts from global church history. Did you know that the apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus evangelized Armenia in the first century?

With the help of my in-laws' Monopoly game, I got the specs on the title deed cards. Of course, you don't put houses and hotels on your properties here; you put sanctuaries and cathedrals on them.

After discovering that a blank game board and box from the internet would cost me about $30, I decided to take a cardboard box we already owned and cannibalize it for a board and box. Cost of supplies for this part: $4 in packing tape.

Gluing the tiles to the game board took almost a whole bottle of rubber cement:

I had to do some serious work to customize the appearance of the bills. But once that task was done, they printed and cut easily. I wish multiplying cash were this easy in real life!

I chopped up some wooden dowels I had lying around for sanctuaries and cathedrals. Here they are before dying:

And here they are in food coloring, looking more like holiday okra and rhubarb:

Dye in food coloring overnight, bake them to dry, then rub lightly with linseed oil to keep the dye off the hands during play:

And at last, the final product, ready for play!

Now I just have to find some church history nerds who will be jazzed about play-testing a game called Ecclesiopoly. Where will I find them?

~emrys