What’s the deal with Huntley-opoly?
Tony Pratt Huntleyopoly box with iconic landing spaces.
HUNTLEY — Residents shopping at the Walmart Supercenter located at 12300 Route 47 may have taken notice of a particular board game on store shelves that centers around the village.
The game called Huntley-opoly is a monopoly-style game that features well-known Huntley properties and landmarks making the game a much more personal experience for those residing in the village. However, most will be surprised to know that Hasbro, the company behind the official Monopoly board game, is not involved in creating Huntley-opoly.
Additionally, Huntley is not the only municipality in Illinois to have a monopoly-style board game centered on their town. Most if not all towns and cities within McHenry and Kane counties have their own version of the board game sold at their local Walmart stores.
The monopoly-style board games are created by a family-run business based in Cincinnati, Ohio called Late for the Sky Production Company. Their website states that the company began making specialty board games in 1984, with their first game being “MIAMIOPOLY,” based on Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Since that time, Late for the Sky has created monopoly-style games for many other cities and towns across the U.S.
As for how they find what to include in each board game, the company uses the power of the internet to do their research on various municipalities. They find most of their information through the Chamber of Commerce and websites for the towns.
“We try to stick around the points of interest just to make it a little less of who’s-who in the game as much as you can,” Late for the Sky Production Company representative Michael Schulte said in a statement to Queen City News. “Everybody has grown up playing a version of this type of game before and why not it be about your hometown.”
Late for the Sky has a contract with Walmart to create these monopoly games for places all over the country. The company leadership team states that monopoly-style games are not copyrighted, meaning that any board games they create can follow the basic structure of the official Hasbro version.
However, the Late for the Sky games must feature a different board, pieces, and names that distinguish them apart from Hasbro’s Monopoly.
