WinniOpoly:

The fun and colorful new game was the idea of Kathy Tognacci. 

How About A Game Of WinniOpoly?

By Thomas P. Caldwell

The game of Monopoly is one of the most familiar board games, dating back more than 100 years, to The Landlord’s Game, designed by Elizabeth Magie. Its modern version, credited to Charles Darrow and now owned by the Hasbro company, appeared in 1935. The game’s popularity has spawned several modifications and updates over the years, with Hasbro announcing in March that it is looking for consumers to help determine new Community Chest cards for yet another version, to be released this fall.

Meanwhile, local versions of the game, typically designed as fundraisers for towns or chambers of commerce, have been produced over the years, including 1985’s Follow The Mount — a Lake Winnipesaukee version based on the ports of call of the flagship MS Mount Washington. With Follow The Mount no longer available, there was an opening for a new local game, and Kathy Tognacci, who owns three gift shops in the Lakes Region, came up with WinniOpoly.

Kathy says she got the idea for WinniOpoly after seeing a Facebook posting about the old Follow The Mount game. “Something just clicked, and I said, ‘Why wouldn’t we have something current?”

Kathy did an online search to find out who makes custom Monopoly games and settled on a company in Georgia that would help her figure out how to set one up.

“It’s just going to be a fun game, featuring Lake Winnipesaukee, and my goal was, let’s get a really cool map of the lake in the middle of the Monopoly board and then all around the board, put all the fun local businesses,” she recalled. “So every morning I would get up with my cup of coffee and I started laying [it] out.”

She needed to secure permission from each business on the board, and started contacting them by email. “The people I picked were people that show up at our stores, people I knew, and businesses that do good deeds in the area, like, for example, Patrick’s” which raises money for the Lakes Region Children’s Auction. “I said, obviously, I would love them on the board; they’re across the street from me [in Gilford] and they bring me a lot of business year-round, so that started the whole process.”

Gathering the commitments and laying out the board took about three months. The game board included such places as Kimball Castle in Gilford, Funspot in Laconia, and the Yum Yum Shop and Molly the Trolley in Wolfeboro. “Molly the Trolley was an awesome fit for one of my railroads,” she said.

In place of “utilities” on the board, Kathy put in two books by Andy Opel, “The Weirs: A Winnipesaukee Adventure” and “The Witches: A Winnipesaukee Adventure.”

“I really made it custom to the lake and made it really fun,” she said.

“So then the board is coming together and I’m thinking the middle of the board, it really, really has to be something that stands out, so it had to be a picture of the lake, and I was trying to do it so it would be fun and colorful.” Her search led her to a Yankee Magazine article on the “magic wonders of Lake Winnipesaukee” which featured a map of the lake by Ryan O’Rourke, a freelance illustrator and associate professor of Art and Design at New England College. She ended up purchasing rights to his lake illustration. “It really makes the whole board,” she said.

In purchasing the rights to Ryan’s map, she also obtained large, signed copies of the illustration that she could frame and sell in her shops. “It’s a great little map and it’s fun,” she said.

It took three months to put the game together, and she decided to upgrade the playing pieces from plastic to pewter “to make it a bit nicer, because we weren’t going to make a cheap game,” she said.

O October 29, after she signed off on the final proof and placed the initial order of 500 games, she thought she had better gauge the public interest. “So right before I closed the store, I shared the proof of the WinniOpoly game on our Facebook page built for the Gilford Country Store. And I said, ‘Coming soon — Who wants one?’ So people were like, ‘Oh, my God, I love it!’ and I just said, ‘Reserve one here.’ … So that was at 6 o’clock. By 6 o’clock in the morning, when I woke up the next morning for my coffee, and I looked at our social media, we had sold all 500 of them in 12 hours.”

While most of the comments about the game were positive, there was one negative comment that “kind of stuck out to us. … ‘How come Alton Bay isn’t on the map?’”

The town had not been included on Ryan’s original map, but Kathy quickly realized what an important omission it was. “So the next day I reached out to Ryan …. ‘What would it take for you to take that map and just put those two words in that spot?’ ” He agreed, and when she ordered the next 1,000 games, Alton Bay became part of the board.

It took 12 weeks of production time for the games to arrive — too late for Christmas — so for those who wanted to give them as gifts, Kathy had small versions of the WinniOpoly board printed and placed them in gold boxes “like the Willy Wonka gold ticket.”

Kathy said, “People came and pre-bought hundreds of games to put in the stocking and give to people.”

She noted that the omission on the first 500 copies of the game made them more valuable to collectors, prompting her to set aside 50 of them for that purpose. Meanwhile, 2,000 games now have commitments and she has shipped WinniOpoly to 20 states.

The game is available at Kathy’s three stores: Gilford Country Store, across from Sawyer’s Dairy Bar on Rt. 11 in Gilford; Nahamsha Gifts at 63 Main Street in Meredith; and Live Love Lake at 15 North Main Street in Wolfeboro.