Hacking Thy Fearful Symmetry

A few weeks ago, while I was doing one of those activities that allow the mind to disconnect and roam of its own (could have been while I was showering, or riding the bus, or attending a team meeting, I don't recall), an idea hit me. The game Monopoly has variations themed on everything under the sun, from countries (Canada-o-poly, eh!), to TV programs (the Simpsons), to pets (Cat-o-poly), to God-knows-what. So why not do a Perl-themed variation of it?

• The currency of the game wouldn't be dollars, but lines of code (LoC).
• The properties would be modules, to which you assign code monkeys and gurus. The different module groups could be:

  Embperl HTML::Mason
  
  
  
  Acme::Bleach Acme::EyeDrops Acme::Buffy
  
  
  
  Email::Filter Mail::SendEasy::SMTP Mail::Box
  
  
  
  Net::Telnet Net::FTP Net::SSH
  
  
  
  DBD::SQLite DBD::MySQL DBD::Pg
  
  
  
  PerlQt Wx Gtk
  
  
  
  XML::LibXML XML::XPath XML::Twig
  
  
  
  Module::Build ExtUtils::MakeMaker
  
  

• The utilities would be 'perldoc' and 'perlbug'.
• You wouldn't go to Prison, but would 'use Safe;'
• Instead of Chance, we'd have rand().
• Community chest? Surely you mean comp.lang.perl.misc.
• Free Parking would be replaced by YAPC.
• Railway stations would be replaced by pragmas: strict, warnings, bytes and utf8
• Etc, etc, etc.

The whole idea tickles enough my fancy that I might whip up an SVG rendering of the board one of those days.