High school scuba club takes Monopoly underwater
By SHELLEY K. WONG
Associated Press Writer
December 30, 2005, 6:50 PM EST
PLAINVILLE, Conn. -- It's been super-sized, made entirely out of chocolate
and played upside down for 36 hours.
So taking the game of Monopoly underwater wasn't too far fetched for a group
of scuba diving students at Plainville High School.
It just made the game a little more difficult to play.
"It's definitely harder because you can't talk," said Nichol Coggins,
president of the school's scuba club. "You never know what they're
thinking."
Coggins and 10 members of the scuba club spent five hours Friday playing the
world's best-selling board game, while submerged in 12 feet of water in the
school's pool.
Plainville High School is one of a few high schools in the country where
underwater Monopoly is played and the only one in Connecticut, said Ken
Fusco,
the club's faculty adviser.
"We kind of just came up with the idea and ran with it," said Fusco,
chairman of the school's science department.
Designed by scuba club member Tim Porter, the board is printed on a
4-foot-by-4-foot piece of Plexiglas.
Students were split into five teams. Members of a team would take 30-minute
turns playing at the bottom. To communicate, students had to learn hand
signals
to buy, sell, and trade property.
The game teaches students responsibility and challenges them to work
together, Fusco said.
"It's a confidence builder," he said. "It's training them to scuba dive
safely."
Though the object of the game _ to bankrupt your opponents _ remains the
same in or out of the water, students had to improvise to make the board
game suitable
for underwater use.
Instead of playing with Monopoly's paper money, students used painted
washers to denote the different amounts of money. Also, the dice were
custom-made
out of brass and the property deeds were laminated and held down by binder
clips.
"We can't just bring a regular board down," Coggins said. "It took a lot of
time and planning."
And though the format remained the same, many of the details on the board
were different.
Property names like Boardwalk and Park Place were replaced by different
diving locations in the Caribbean and around New England. "Go to Jail" was
replaced
by "Go to the Recompression Chamber," and "Free Parking" was changed to
"Free Mooring."
Hasbro says on its Web site that the board game was invented in 1934 by
Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pa., who sold it to Parker Brothers.
Monopoly is
now sold in 80 countries and produced in 26 languages. Hasbro estimates
about 500 million people worldwide have played the game.
Ken Porter, 56, of Rocky Hill, said the game is part the country's pop
culture.
"It's part of American culture," Porter said while watching his son play the
underwater version. "It's an American game like baseball or football."
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