Want to buy a street in Paris?

V Kapadia is the owner of Marine Drive... well, virtually.  A premium property in Mumbai, you would expect him to earn hefty rents from the buildings he has constructed on the road, which includes a ‘four-sided fortress’ next to Taraporewala Aquarium. Unfortunately, a rival built a sewage plant at Girgaum Chowpatty, and as a result VKAPADIA can’t earn any rent from his buildings. A huge investment literally gone down the drain.

Such are the twists of fate in Monopoly City Streets, an online version of the popular board game launched this week by Google in collaboration with Hasbro, the maker of Monopoly.

The scale of its online version is huge: you start with 3 million Monopoly dollars and the whole world — more specifically, the world as seen in Google Maps — is your board. You can compete with players all over the world and get a kick out of being the biggest property magnate in the virtual world, depending on how smartly you build and earn. You can also bid for streets owned by other players.

Then there’s the luck factor. Players randomly get three types of chance cards: Hazard, Bulldozer and Bonus Buildings. A Hazard card allows you to construct either a prison, sewage plant, or power plant on your rival’s street. The moment you do that, your rival stops getting rent on the buildings he has constructed there. He can only hope to get the Bulldozer chance card with which he can destroy the sewage plant.

Unlike the board game, with a limited number of locations, online Monopoly lets you own a street practically anywhere in the world — even in your own neighbourhood.

After registering for the game, the first thing I did was to zoom into Andheri. To my surprise, most streets including the one where I live, had already been bought. I still placed a bid for it. The game requires the owner to respond to my offer within 7 days. If he/she fails to respond, then the street is mine regardless of the sum I quote. Only an obscure street was available in Andheri and I immediately bought it and constructed a Nova Tower Block (Cost 300,000, Rent 67,000 per day).

I also wanted to buy properties in Lonavala and Mahabaleshwar, but the game does not include any streets there. The situation was better in my hometown Bangalore (where I have bought two streets). But there are bugs. Though the Google Map is accurate, the Monopoly card says my Andheri street is in Thane, Mumbai.