This post covers the 2011 edition of the McDonald’s Monopoly game. For 2012, click here.

The McDonald’s Monopoly game will be kicking off its 2011 edition early this year, starting on September 20th (last year the game started in October). This year they adjusted the prizes, keeping many of the dollar prizes but adding a few more contests and upping the number of giveaway cars. As there has been since the dawn of time, the million dollar prize remains the belle of the ball but she’ll some competition from several inclusive vacations to Beaches Resorts, the McDonald’s High School All-American game, and even a trip to London for the 2012 Olympic Games.

The game itself has remained the same. The goal of the game is to collect game pieces you can find on specially marked food products. Those game pieces will come in pairs where you’ll win either instantly or get a property that you need to match with others. Collect all the property from a colored monopoly and win that prize. In each set of properties, there will be a rare piece that basically wins you the prize. Get that rare piece and the prize is basically yours.

The online $10,000 CASHstakes will start on September 20th but the full game won’t begin until September 27th, 2011. Below, we’ll take a look at what you will need to learn in order to win the McDonald’s Monopoly game for 2011.

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MacDonald’s Monopoly game for 2010 has ended but here is the latest McDonald’s Monopoly guide!

McDonald’s announced that this year’s Monopoly game will start on October 5, 2010 and end on November 1, 2010 (official rules)

Every year McDonald’s runs its very popular Monopoly game where you get a Monopoly property sticker/game piece with selected items. If you get all the properties in a color group, you get to win that cash prize. In addition to these properties, you can get instant win stickers as well for free Wi-Fi time, Wal-Mart gift cards, McDonald’s food, and even a 2011 Shelby. The cash prizes range from $5 up to $1 million!

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When it comes to games, Monopoly is probably one of the most iconic. While I haven’t played a game of Monopoly in years (the last time was on a cruise to Bermuda many years ago), the game and its rules are still fresh in my mind. Nowadays all the board games we play are slightly more complicated than Monopoly (games like Settlers of Catan or Dominion) but Monopoly still holds a special place in my heart.

If, however, you were to look back at the game itself and compare it to real life, you’d find a lot of differences. Some of the differences are inconsequential, like the prices for properties ($400? $120?) because they reflect both and earlier time and a need to improve playability (no sense having people count out $50,000 in $500 increments, a bill that itself doesn’t exist anymore). Others are more subtle and, if a child were to use Monopoly as a proxy for the real world, really misrepresent the world. They, in short, lie.

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MacDonald’s Monopoly game has started for 2010!

McDonald’s announced that this year’s Monopoly game will start on October 6th and end on November 2nd. If you go now before the game starts, you can get a pre-promotion code good for one property and entry into their pre-promotion contest.

Every year McDonald’s runs its very popular Monopoly game where you get a Monopoly property sticker/game piece with selected items. If you get all the properties in a color group, you get to win that cash prize. In addition to these properties, you can get instant win stickers as well for free Wi-Fi time, or gift cards, or McDonald’s products. The cash prizes range from $50 up to $1 million!

(Click to continue reading…)

A CNN Money article made it sound like Monopoly was going to get a complete overhaul with the old version was going to go the way of the dinosaur. Actually, Hasbro is just putting out another edition, called Here & Now, where everything would be updated to reflect the current times. I’m glad they aren’t replacing the classic, just putting in another edition to join the hundreds of other college themed, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, blah blah editions out there. I think it’d be nice if they took the originally edition and simply updated the graphics, keeping everything else the same (like buying property for a hundred bucks).

If you want, you can vote on what cities will be where (the more popular, the higher the value, i.e. 1st place gets to be Boardwalk and Park Place). It’ll be fun to see how it all shakes out. Voting ends on May 12th.