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I spent a couple days down the shore with my family this past weekend. We have the place for a whole week but I had to come back Tuesday to ace my Statistics quiz & test (but that’s another story). By far the best part of the weekend was playing Big Ben Riskopoloy with Jason and Derek on Sunday night. We were talking about favorite board games… Risk and Monopoly came up and wouldn’t go back down again. “Let’s play both!” We didn’t have a Risk board but an old Monopoly set materialized. So we used pieces from a Big Ben jigsaw puzzle and borrowed dice from a nearby game of Yahtzee that my mom and Dorothy were playing.

We figured out the rules as we went along and they worked out awesome!

Rules to Big Ben Riskopoly

Start with a Monopoly board, you’ll also need 3 extra dice (Monopoly only has 2) and a jigsaw puzzle.
Your playing piece acts as the General in your army… read on.
Pieces move around the board just like in Monopoly except
– The player may choose the direction of motion at each roll.
– If a piece ends up on a railroad, on the next turn, the player may choose to take the “underground railroad” to any of the other railroad stations. Changing stations doesn’t take-up any die-roll motion.

When you buy a piece of land (as per Monopoly), you can now buy armies to defend it (as per Risk). Armies cost $50 apiece. If you own a whole set of lands (IE Boardwalk and Park Place) you get a certain number of armies per turn:

Owning all of a set of properties on the first side earn 1 extra army per turn. Owning a set on the second side earns 2 armies per turn. Third side earns 3 armies per turn. Pacific, North Carolina & Pennsylvania will earn you 4 armies per turn. Boardwalk and Park Place will earn you 5 armies per turn.

If you manage to put hotels on a whole set, your properties earn DOUBLE the number of armies per turn (It’s strange how some of the guests mysteriously disappear from the hotel, isn’t it?)

Armies are represented by jigsaw pieces. Choose the color of the pieces carefully so there’s no confusion as to the owner of an army.

Armies can come onto the board on any property that you own. To attack, your armies must either be in a neighboring property or they can be paratroopered in to any spot that the General is currently on from anywhere on that same side of the board. To move armies normally, they use the railroads. Since they take the slow troop transport train, they take an extra turn to get through the railroads.

If you own the Electric Company, you can flip the power switch on the (electric) railways at the end of your turn. If you own Water Works, you can turn off all the water, dehydrating the world. This kills one army per player per turn.

The rules go on.. but you get the idea, don’t you? It was a riot playing and making up fair rules as we went along.