A property trading game cannot cross a border unchanged. The board names real places, the money is a real currency, and the transport squares copy a local railway. So every local edition has to swap the same few things: place names, money, stations and utilities. Wikipedia's lists of licensed and localised editions of Monopoly, opened on 10 October 2026, show this country by country. Below is what six of them changed, what the lists leave out, and how I handled the same problem when I built a free property trading game of my own.
Where the borrowed board comes from
The board these editions copy began as The Landlord's Game. Lizzie Magie created it in 1903 and patented it in 1904, as Wikipedia's Monopoly article puts it. Parker Brothers began licensing the game abroad in 1936. A licence meant, first of all, a new set of names. The UK board replaced the American place names with London ones. The same swap was repeated in each country that followed.
Six local editions and what each swapped
United Kingdom; who published it, as the page states: Waddingtons, under licence; what changed: American place names replaced by London locations
Berlin, 1936; who published it, as the page states: Schmidt Spiele, Berlin; what changed: Berlin streets and stations such as Unter den Linden and Potsdamer Bahnhof; prices in Reichsmark
Milan (Italy); who published it, as the page states: Not stated; what changed: Milan streets such as Via Roma and Stazione Nord; prices in lire
India; who published it, as the page states: Funskool (India) Ltd., which has published it since 1987; what changed: Spaces named after Indian cities; stations from Chennai, New Delhi, Howrah and Mumbai; the rupee
Japan; who published it, as the page states: Not stated; what changed: Districts from several major Japanese cities, with Tokyo's Ginza the dearest
Rhodesia, "Tycoon"; who published it, as the page states: Darten, late 1960s; what changed: Colonial-era streets of Salisbury, now Harare
Two things stand out. The money changes every time, because a price in the wrong currency stops reading as a price. The stations change next, because a railway is the one square that every country has and none shares. The streets come last, and only where the publisher had local names to put there.
The lists are volunteer-compiled, and several rows give no publisher or year. That is why the table says "not stated" instead of guessing. I have not dated an edition that the page does not date.
A checklist for anyone localising a board
If you were making a seventh edition, the table suggests four jobs, in the order I would do them:
1. Choose the places. Pick ones that every player in the country can place on a map without help.
2. Set the money. Keep the same ratio between a price and a rent, or the game's pace changes.
3. Replace the stations with whatever people there actually travel through.
4. Rename the utilities last, because nothing else depends on them.
The second job is the hard one. Rents, building costs and mortgage values are all balanced against the prices. Change the currency by hand and the balance has to be checked again, not just relabelled.
Boards that left the home country behind
A board with no home country is not new. The Europe page lists a 2001 Europa edition from Parker and Hasbro whose spaces are the capital cities of European nations. The Monopoly article adds that Winning Moves produced UK city and regional editions from 1998. So the choice is between many boards that each belong to one place and one board that belongs to none.
Can you play a property trading game online with friends in any country?
Yes. Property Rush is a property trading game that opens in a browser, free, with nothing to install, and seats two to six people. A table can sit in three countries at once because the board belongs to none of them. People join from their own phones or laptops, and a typical game lasts around 45 minutes.
A board with no home country, in practice
When I rebuilt the property game on 2 September 2026, I did not pick a country. I picked cities and let the countries come from them. The board is made of 22 cities, two or three from each of eight countries. Brazil comes first, then Argentina, Italy, France and Japan, then Germany and the Netherlands, and Canada closes the circuit. Prices run from Salvador and Rio at the cheap end to Vancouver and Toronto at the dear end.
The station job went to airports. There are four, named for airports in Argentina, France, Japan and Canada, and they play the part that a local railway plays in the editions above. Two utilities, a power company and a water company, fill out the set. Property Rush is an independent Monopoly alternative, not a local edition of anything, so none of these squares copies another board's names.
I did not finish one local-edition job. Every price is written with a dollar sign, so a table in Tokyo still sees Salvador priced at 60$. A proper localisation would show yen, euros and reais by country. That is a bigger change than renaming a square, for the reason in the checklist: the rents and building costs are balanced against the prices as they stand.
The whole board, with its 22 cities, is on playboardit.com/play/highroad if you would like to see how it reads.
Boardit is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro.
By Ahmed Moaz, who builds Boardit.