Walking Dead Monopoly

There’s a Walking Dead Monopoly now, which is funny in the particular way that licensed board games always are. Someone convinced Hasbro that zombie-apocalypse survivors need a casual evening pastime, and they actually went and designed it. You move around in an armored bus. The prison is safe. You collect supply crates and weapons. The base premise is so absurd it wraps back around to charming.

I stopped watching the TV show somewhere in the middle, but the universe has this gravitational pull anyway. Every corner of it—games, comics, merchandise—grinds through the same loop. Find shelter. Establish community. Watch it fall apart. Repeat until people stop watching. Ritual masquerading as survival.

The thing about licensed board games is they live in this weird space between genuine product and generous thought. Someone had to actually sit down and design this thing. They had to figure out which properties mattered in a zombie economy, whether weapons should be currency, what the winning condition even looks like when you’re supposed to be surviving. It’s earnest capitalist creativity, which is somehow worse and better at the same time.

I’d play it once, probably. At some gathering where everyone’s looking for something to do. We’d be mildly bored. But I’d get it.