Getting a Monopoly on fundraising

It won’t be called “Ida-Opoly,” but if Ron Gill has his way, an Idaho edition of a classic capitalist board game could be coming to a card table near you.

Gill is heading an effort by a regional Lions Club foundation to create an Idaho-centric version of Monopoly to raise money for eye and ear surgeries for the poor.

Under his plan, Gem State residents could guide a potato-shaped token around a game board studded with familiar places, symbols and people. Think Chief Joseph on Baltic Avenue; Lewis and Clark on Mediterranean. Think Vermont Avenue – one of the blue properties – replaced with the state fish, the cutthroat trout.

Players might land on squares emblazoned with the names of Idaho businesses and buy them with money imprinted with the logo of an Idaho bank.

Along the way, budding tycoons could raise as much as $200,000 for the Idaho/East Oregon Lions Sight and Hearing Center.

“This will be a high-quality game,” said Gill, who hopes to sell 20,000 boards at $34.95 apiece. “It won’t be a cheap knock-off.”

Gill came up with the idea last summer, after searching for a fundraiser that would be both profitable and entertaining. He figured an Idaho edition of Monopoly would rake in dough in a couple ways: first through sponsorships on the board itself, and then through purchase of the finished game.

So far, the Terreton man has about a dozen sponsors for spots on the board, including Doug Chadderdon, owner of Great Floors in Coeur d’Alene.

Interest in the project has not been as keen as organizers had hoped, Gill said. Not one state college or university responded to requests to sponsor the spaces normally occupied by Monopoly railroads. Ditto for the state’s Native American tribes, who were offered a chance to grace the utility sites.

“I guess they’ve seen a lot of people come along with fundraisers for similar games,” Gill said.

The idea, of course, is not a new one. Dozens of editions of Monopoly exist, in different languages and versions that Parker Bros. never envisioned when the 1933 original came out.

There are Monopoly games that celebrate subjects from colleges and cars to cartoons, according to the Web site for Hasbro, the game’s maker. Witness the SpongeBob SquarePants edition released last year.

And there are plenty of Monopoly games geared to specific U.S. cities: Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New Orleans, to name a few.

However, only one other state, Utah, has a Monopoly edition all its own, said Maggie Matthews, a spokeswoman for USA Opoly Inc., which holds a licensing agreement with Hasbro.

Under copyright terms, certain elements of a Monopoly game board are immutable. Newcomers can’t mess with “Go,” for instance, or “Free Parking” “Go to Jail” or even “Jail,” where Jake the Jaybird resides. No company name is allowed to trump the Monopoly logo, a brochure warns.

Everything else, however, is up for grabs.

Gill is hoping that publicity will spark interest in the handful of spaces that remain on the 40-space board. Bids of up to $5,000 will be accepted through March 31, including a silent auction for the coveted sites of Boardwalk and Park Place.

Pitching in could be good for business, said Dale Peterson, director of Buy Idaho, a nonprofit agency that markets state goods.

“I think there will be a great demand for it,” he said. “Because it’s supporting such a good cause. Who can be against the Lions Center?”

Proceeds from the project will allow the foundation to move into a new building – and to continue paying for cornea transplants and other necessary surgeries for 40 to 50 people a year who can’t afford the costs.

“It’s not just raising the money,” Gill said. “It’s also raising awareness of what we do.”