Queen has been honored in many ways over the years. The band will now be immortalized in board game form, in a Special Edition copy of Monopoly.
Queen guitarist Brian May announced the news, saying the game should be released in May. May says the band has been “very secretly developing Queen Monopoly for over a year.” Writing that he’d had “a blast” helping put the game together, May went on to compare the process to making an album and concluded, “We hope you love it! Choose your weapons!”
According to Entertainment Weekly, the game board has been altered to reflect the band’s legacy; instead of buying up real estate and utilities players will instead attempt to achieve Queen-style greatness by following “the amazing gig history of Queen, from their very first at Imperial College in 1970 to their last with Freddie Mercury at Knebworth Park in 1986” and buying “gig locations and hit singles” as they go.
Of course, the altered board isn’t the only that has changed. As with most Special Edition Monopoly games, Queen Monopoly has an assortment of new playing pieces designed after key moments in the band’s history. In addition to May’s guitar, players can choose from a robot (inspired by the News of the World album artwork), a bicycle (a nod to the bands’ “Bicycle Race”), a vacuum cleaner (as seen in the video for “I Want to Break Free”) and a hammer (an allusion to “Hammer to Fall”).