Paradise Monopoly board game in the works
PARADISE >> Paradise is receiving a localized Monopoly treatment with the new crowd-funded Paradise-Opoly, a passion project of Paradise’s own Tanner Stauss.
The idea of a Paradise- centric Monopoly came about in the weeks following the 2018 Camp Fire. Like many from Paradise, Stauss experienced considerable loss. While passing time with family playing board games shortly after, Stauss conceived of a Monopoly game that memorializes the history and culture of Paradise.
“In the beginning, I started with community involvement really to gather ideas of what should go into it. I had endless spreadsheets of all suggestions and comments that would come along and then formulate that into votes,” Stauss said. “From there, it grew into this huge monster project.”
A Kickstarter campaign to help raise funding for the board game began on April 20. So far, the campaign has raised just over $53,000 of the May 20 goal of $88,000.
Proceeds from future sales will be donated entirely to charity.
“Since you can’t technically donate funds from Kickstarter, all proceeds at first will be going to the production of the game,” Stauss says. “But as far as I can take this outside of Kickstarter, through online and retailer sales, all sales will go 100% to a couple of local nonprofit organizations I’ll be partnering with. Specifically, affordable housing projects that help people get back up here
on the ridge.”
Communit y input through Facebook has helped shape and keep the
project multi-generational, Stauss said.
“It just felt like more of a diplomatic process. I would only have one generation’s point of view on the town. I wanted to have a little bit of each generation in it. Having
it be a community involved and decided process just felt like the right way to do it because they know.”
Stauss is hoping that through Paradise- Opoly, multiple generations of past and present residents will feel a sense of home through incorporated elements.
“It was meant to elicit a feeling of nostalgia and remember the town the way we all want to remember it,” Stauss says. “Paradise will come back, but it won’t be the same. This is sort of a memoir to that Paradise that we all knew, no matter what generation you came from.”
The Paradise- Opoly Kickstarter will be available until May 20 at https:// www.kickstarter.com/projects/ opoly/paradiseopoly. There are several levels of “pledge” available on the crowd-funding website, with single game boards, multiple games, a custom wooden box and even an option to get one’s name on the board available.