The LA Times has the scoop on the Monopoly movie thanks to Frank Beddor, the man who is helping develop the concept behind Scott's latest project.

So here's the set up. The story stars a loser type fella in Manhattan who sucks at selling real estate, but he's great at Monopoly. Irony! When he tries to beat the world Monopoly playing record, 70 days straight, his friends tell him he's an idiot and tease him. Words are exchanged and he throws down a chance card and goes to bed. The next day he wakes up and . . . he's in Monopoly City, where everyone pays for things in Monopoly money, and there are buckets and sports cars and everyone stands around waiting for this tiresome game of life to end but it never will, it never will. Because like the game Monopoly, Monopoly City is a tedious city where you're forced to watch one idiot spend all their colorful money buying up Park Place and Boardwalk which never works. Meanwhile the rest of the town just prays for it to be over. But forget it Jake, it's Monopoly City.

Alright I made that last part up, but the main character does wake up in Monopoly City and is forced to fight the EVIL Parker Brothers because if he beats them he wins. We don't know why and we don't really know how, but there you have it. Let's just accept that they are evil and invented a neverending game where you're forced to use a small amount of math.

Here's what Beddor says to the doubters:

Look, so much of it is about the execution. You know the visual component is going to be beautiful with Ridley. And you have all of the world editions to deal with — there are different editions of the game so the city won't be limited to the Atlantic City edition that we know in America. Ridley grew up with the British version ...

So half of us won't even get the references! I do agree to some extent, Ridley Scott is pretty amazing at what he does, and there have been other film premises we thought were ridiculous that turned out to be entertaining blockbusters. Beddor points to Pirates of the Caribbean as an example.

But on the plus side, Uncle Pennybags will be in the feature Hitchcock style, "appearing in the background as a maître d' at the restaurant and he's the buggy driver and the local eccentric and the doorman at the opera." Which is excellent. But who should play him?

[Image via Comedy Central]

Cosmic Encounter has gone through a conga line of publishers since first being released in 1977 (that's the Avalon Hill version pictured below). Each publisher altered the rules slightly and introduced various expansions. Fantasy Flight is creating a game for 3-5 players that will last one or two hours. The game board is highly variable - the planets are not hex shaped, so players can set them up however they prefer, and designer Kevin Wilson is leaving lots of room for expansion sets.
Players compete to form alliances and acquire five colonies outside their home system. Each battle or trade deal can result in a strange effect or new power for an alien species, and the shifting alliances keep everyone on their toes. With a release date set for "late 2008," I am definitely putting this on my Christmas list. Images by: Fantasy Flight Games and boardgamegeek.com.

Dust is actually two different games. The "Premium Rules" allow each player to control an established superpower in world that has been divided by the battle to acquire and use alien technology. The "Epic Rules" start each player with a meager power base that gradually expands as the game goes on. The epic version can take up to six hours, compared to the three or four hours for the shorter version.

Each game plays out on a large map of Earth, and has some similarities to Axis & Allies - you produce units, move existing units and then fight your battles. The turn order is determined by an innovative mechanic in which each player secretly chooses a card. The cards set the order of battle along with production and combat limits. On any given turn, you're forced to compromise with yourself and hope your cards fit in with your plans for conquest. The coolest part of Dust is the mix of WWII flavor with alien tech. The mechs look like walking Sherman tanks, and the air units are strange, boxy machines. You can read both versions of the rules online. Images by: Fantasy Flight Games.

With a variable map that encompasses an entire galaxy, hundreds of playing pieces, multiple winning strategies and a minimum play time of four hours, Twilight Imperium pretty much defines "epic sci-fi board game." If you're playing with six players (or eight, with the Shattered Empire expansion), plan to spend an entire day sparring with your friends over planetary systems and Galactic Council votes.

Each player has hidden agendas that they pursue to accumulate victory points, along with shifting public goals and a strong political component. You can wage war to win, but you can also legislate your way to victory. One of the strengths of Twilight Imperium is the feeling of participating in a true science-fiction narrative as each game winds its way to an epic conclusion. You can head over to the official site for the FAQ, optional rules and notes from the game's designers.

By the way, for the io9 readers who are gaming nerds like me, I'll be hitting the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, OH next month to bring you tons of info on all the latest tabletop aliens, space marines and star destroyers. Image by: Fantasy Flight Games.

Merchant of Venus incorporates all the great elements from 4X computer games (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) in board game form. The basic game is actually bloodless, but optional rules for combat make the game more balanced. Players spend their first few turns finding out which alien races populate the star systems on the board. Then they set up trade routes, monitor supply and demand and start earning cash, the accumulation of which is the game's win condition. Hey, it's the 32nd century, and there's money to be made.

Since cooperation is usually required to keep trade routes profitable, combat is used mostly as a last resort, but it keeps the other players in check if one of them starts running away with the lead. One player can take the role of the Rastur, a standoffish race that inhibits trade, while other races have their own attributes. Players can even find interstellar artifacts that will give them bonuses, such as faster ships. Maybe if enough people write letters to Hasbro, they'll put this classic back in print. Photos by: Avalon Hill.

In Car Wars, scarce resources lead the U.S. government to nationalize oil production, causing a second American Civil War. Three "Free Oil States" spring up with their own oil production — Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Famine and plagues also hit the world hard, and then the U.S. and the Soviet Union launch World War III. In the wasteland that remains, a bitchin car is a necessity for travel, but people also duel cars for sport. (And the game explains away that you can come back from being destroyed because of advances in cloning and memory "backups.")

The original Car Wars came in a ziploc bag full of rules and information, in 1981. You'd have a certain amount of "money" to spend on your car, and you could allocate it to armor, weapons, engine enhancements, and so on. Here's one fan's explanation of the problems with this points allocation system, which later banned tank guns.

(The game's maker, Steve Jackson Games, claims that a Swedish bus company's recent development of a bus with mini-electric engines in each wheel, fed by a central generator, may have been inspired by one of the enhancements you could add to your car, back in the early 1980s.)

Eventually Car Wars came out with a version for tanks and boats, and even allowed you to add airplanes to the mix. You roll dice to simulate combat, and each player gets to make ten moves per second, including moving, turning, and firing weapons. The more complicated your set of manoeuvres, the higher a score you'd have to roll on a six-sided die to pull off the whole shebang. You would need a rulebook (and a lot of brainpower) to figure out if someone sideswiped you or T-boned you, according to the game's FAQ. It could take hours to play out a few seconds of car-crashing action.

Depending on the size of the map you were playing on, you could use little game counters, Hot Wheels toys, or 1/25th scale miniatures to represent your super-cars.

The game spawned a lousy imitation, Batlecars, as well as a card game version and a computer game, Autoduel.

In the 2002 reissue of the game (which went nowhere), Steve Jackson reduced the amount of moves per second from ten to three, in an attempt to speed up the gameplay and make it less calculated. (And maybe a tad more realistic. Most people don't sit there and go, "Yeah, this second I'm going to honk my horn, and fire my rocket launcher, and turn 15 degrees to the left, and, uh...") The 2002 revision also tried to become quicker because you can only take four hits before your car is toast. But it was too late to bring people back to a dice-based game with mini-cars bashing the hell out of each other. Sadly.

First, while you can't blame the forward-looking makers of What Shall I Be? for including astronaut as a career path, there weren't any female astronauts when the game came out in 1976. Six women were among the 35 members of NASA's class of 1978—they were the first female astronauts. Among them was Sally Ride, who became the first American woman in space in 1983. (The Commies beat us to it by 20 years; Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova blasted into orbit in 1963, while NASA was still dithering over whether space travel would affect a woman's "special"—as in "gimme a tampon"—physiology.)

Second, the astronaut on the What Shall I Be? box was depicted walking on the lunar surface—something no woman has done. Shuttle commander Eileen Collins almost certainly would have been the first to do so had there been an active lunar program at NASA when she was flying space missions in the 1990s. It's a technicality perhaps, but the fact remains: it's 2008 and a woman has yet to walk on the moon.