Ubisoft’s team-based twist fundamentally changes Monopoly’s winning formula, but is it for the better?
I have a strange relationship with Monopoly. On the one hand, I’m ruthlessly competitive and stick to a pretty well-honed strategy of buying everything I land on. On the other hand, I struggle with an attention span that can become sorely lacking if the board doesn’t kick up enough action. I’m in it for a good time, but not for a long time.
This has always been the case, no matter what Monopoly board I’ve found myself on. When I was little, my Dad once made me play Monopoly for so long that I fell asleep onto the board mid-game and awoke with a hotel stuck to my forehead. But that doesn’t mean I’m not fully committed to the competition (I was just small, okay?). Anyway, when I heard Ubisoft were creating a full Monopoly x Star Wars game for the first time in galactic history and equipping it with a Heroes vs Villains strategy, I wondered if maybe my troubles with Monopoly were about to be solved. And boy, did I not expect the curveball Ubisoft was about to throw.
Unsurprisingly, like the gargantuan ever-evolving mass that is the Star Wars franchise, when it comes to Monopoly variants, there’s a shocking abundance to choose from. It’s not a game that’s been recreated once, twice, not even thrice; we’re talking two hands at least. But when it comes to digitalising the franchise, it’s a different story. Aside from a two-month crossover event with the Monopoly Go! franchise in 2025, there’s nowhere you can play a Monopoly Star Wars game on your PC/console on the regular. Until now.
I’ll caveat this review right here because I think it’s important. You might think that you have to love Star Wars to want to play this game, but you don’t. Monopoly has always been highly accessible and family-friendly with its dependable gameplay. Loving Star Wars will of course elevate the experience, but even as a pretty low-tier Star Wars fan myself, I can assure you there’s still plenty to enjoy.
The very basic mechanics behind the game are all still here. You roll the dice, move around the board, buy up property, create a Monopoly on your ownership and upgrade your ownership. A more important point you should be focusing on instead of whether you like Star Wars enough is that while the mechanics still stand strong, the fundamentals of Monopoly in this version have been completely changed.
And that starts with one thing. In this digital overhaul of the classic board game, you play as part of a team. Assembling a 2v2 or 3v3 team of Heroes or Villains depending on what faction you fancy aligning to, or which of the 28 characters to choose from are your personal favourites, is your prerogative. Then, whenever one of your team makes a choice, it affects the whole team and that includes money (known as Credits), property buying, and the much more important (and quite shockingly so) Influence Points.
In Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs Villains, how many Credits you have at the end does not matter. You heard that right. And wait until you hear what I have to say next. You also cannot go bankrupt and you cannot trade locations. Being able to bankrupt your opponents in Monopoly has always felt like a superpower and ultimately it’s how you win the entire game, right? Yet, Credits aren’t the reign supreme here. It’s Influence Points, and you earn them entirely differently.
When you buy property, when you win GO events (more on this shortly), when you battle to defend your spot or win a spot, when you upgrade locations after securing a planet Monopoly and much more, you earn Influence Points. Yet, while you’ll still need your Credits to do some of these things, it just doesn’t matter how much you spend.
Going ‘bankrupt’ just throws you into negative funds until one unfortunate landing from the opposing team on your upgraded location fully loaded with an outpost and you’re back in the credits with no repercussions for having spent it all or lost it all. To win Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs Villains, you have to play out a selected number of GO events triggered anytime a player lands on or passes Go. When all these GO events have been completed, it’s the team with the most Influence Points that wins.
Ultimately, you have to view the board in a totally new light, coordinating your moves as a faction. You’re not trying to bankrupt all your friends. You’re not even trying to bankrupt some of them. You’re just trying to make sure that you’re much more influential on the board than they are.
And then I remembered that everything I was going to do here came down to my entire team, not just me. Since I was playing before it had officially launched, everyone aside from me was entirely AI. And that, for me, was a little unsettling. Ultimately, this new layer of having teammates turned out to be a double-edged sword. While I was happy to feel like I was part of a wider picture, ganging up against the villains or taking down the smug heroes, I was also unnerved by the joint pot of resources we were sharing. Strategically managing our shared grip on the board meant there was more on the line than ever before.
And playing with AI meant I couldn’t speak to my teammates. When I’ll eventually play with friends, it’ll transform Monopoly into a conversational game, discussing how best to spend and what to try and grab. When you’re playing with AI, you can only trust that it has learnt what a normal Monopoly player might do, and while I was hoping it was as ruthless as me, fortunately, it was.
So, the strategy is entirely different, but what about the game board? Play Monopoly enough of any board type and you’ll learn the crescendoing worth of the board’s locations tied in with its rankings from brown to dark blue. For Star Wars, there are already so many physical game boards in existence, yet they’re all incredibly different. Easily done when Star Wars has such a rich history. For Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs Villains then, I’m pleased to say this is also still very much the case. Handily, though, they’ve split each colour into a planet made up of smaller areas. So, from Dagobah to Hoth to Endor, the gang’s all here.
Ubisoft is also not a novice in the Monopoly tabletop experience, creating New Monopoly in 2024. I may be immersing myself in the locations of Star Wars on the board, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also feel like I’m playing in the galaxy. Or, at least the Cantina. From the get-go, I was pulling up a chair on a futuristic gameboard cased in metal and flickering with digital avatars. An animated diorama played out in the middle of the board, akin to that of Ubisoft’s famed changing city in New Monopoly, creating a visually upgraded game board to what you’d get at home.
I’ve always found the concept of playing a board game on the computer a tad strange. I feel like there’s fate in rolling your own dice that’s taken away when a computer does it for you. Don’t get me wrong, I do get it; gathering all your friends in one place to play is a hard task. You then have to make sure said friends are invested enough to pummel countless hours of game time into the board and as I’ve already admitted, I’m part of that problem.
Yet, when it comes to Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs Villains, Ubisoft does plenty to keep you locked in. GO events increase the pace of the game tenfold. The maximum you can go for is 8 and that’s around a 60-80 minute game. And aside from GO events, a lot of the usual Monopoly spaces have also been transformed. You can visit Canto Bight for a quick dice-rolling gamble, hop forward dramatically in Hyperspace, hope for a lucky card pull from the Destiny pack, and even pay for a potentially game-changing move at the Cantina.
And, by playing as a team, each character you pick can ultimately transform the outcome. How? Well, they’re not just a little old boot or smug-looking Scottish terrier, they have abilities that can come into play as you play. These abilities, both passive and active, make room for opportunity to reduce the costs of property, activate Stormtroopers in surrounding spaces, and so much more. After all, if you’re battling as the finery of Star Wars, it’s a lovely bit of fun to be able to harness their powers with a Monopoly twist.
Another way to fight it out is through Ubisoft’s battle system, integrated into dice-rolling matches when your ownership is contested or your presence on a space needs defending. In Monopoly Star Wars: Heroes vs Villains, the property you have bought is never safe and that’s as disarming as when Darth Maul rocks up to your square and starts trying to battle with you.
Not only is this super interesting from a tactical perspective, unlocking a new level of gameplay that breathes new life into the tried-and-tested Monopoly formula, but it also has the ability to change the game up every time you play.
What’s clear in this Monopoly x Star Wars collab is that each turn means something. At one point, I was down by an embarrassing amount of Influence Points that it felt like any attempt to make a difference would be futile. Yet in one move, I was back in the game. And that feels like a true testament to Ubisoft’s decision to make Monopoly different, slicing in cut scenes, having a bit of fun and even managing to wrangle in some combat into a game that’s known for being pretty chilled most of the time (unless you’re trying to negotiate a trade). But does it work?
I’d be happy to say it does, as long as you know what you’re getting into. If you’re expecting your day-to-day Monopoly, you might find yourself disappointed. But, then again, there’s plenty of that formula already available to play. If you’re looking for something a little more exhilarating than accumulating train stations or trying to roll perfectly to finish up a set, like me, you’ll be impressed.
Throwing in new ways to play, like the GO events that’ll totally make or break your game, adds a jeopardy to Monopoly that feels only right to be linked to the Star Wars franchise. Pumped with action and disputes, this game makes winning Monopoly much harder, but ultimately much faster. It’s a never-ending circle of swapping and changing, building and battling, and with the fate of the Galaxy resting on your shoulders, Monopoly might well have found its next evolutionary stage.
