It’s official — the YouTube generation just can’t sit still long enough to enjoy a competitive board game.

The makers of Monopoly and Scrabble are speeding up their games to make it possible for a winner to emerge before a teenager becomes bored and gives in to the urge to text his mates.

Epic games that could once take a whole evening, and sometimes longer, will now be over in just 20 minutes as Hasbro, the world’s biggest board games company, faces up to the fact that kids aren’t what they used to be.

“Express Games capture the essence of classic games but in a much speedier format,” Hasbro explained yesterday. “Game fans often have only small pockets of spare time through the day.” The games, first promoted at this year’s New York toy fair, go on sale this summer.

The originals, created in the 1930s in the United States, became international bestsellers. Scrabble is sold in 121 countries and in 29 languages, and the Guinness World Records estimates that 750 million people have played Monopoly.

But the games so beloved of parents and grandparents have apparently failed to inspire the latest generation. In an era of instant gratification, with games now more about entertainment than brainpower, an epic four-hour game of Monopoly, involving nothing but cardboard, dice and pewter tokens, has lost its appeal.

The Express games hit the market at a time when dozens of increasingly sophisticated gadgets are being aimed at children.

Fisher-Price, a division of Hasbro’s main rival, Mattel, now sells a “Kid-Tough Digital Camera” for three-year-olds. Hasbro offers a fluorescent portable video player for the same age-range.

“A lot of people like playing games, but they want resolution,” said Jim Silver, editor-in-chief of Toy Wishes magazine. “And that’s why you see some of these quicker games coming out.”

Monopoly Express bears little resemblance to the classic game introduced by Parker Brothers in 1935.

The new board is small and circular and players build their empires by rolling multiple dice labelled with properties. Points are awarded when players collect blocks of same-coloured properties.

At least the game’s top-hatted mascot — Rich Uncle Pennybags, or as he has become known more recently, “Mr Monopoly” — is still waving his stick from the centre of the letter “O” on the box.

Scrabble, introduced in 1938 by an out-of-work American architect called Alfred Butts (he analysed the front page of The New York Times to calculate how frequently each letter of the alphabet was used, thus determining number and associated scores of letters included in the game), gets a similarly radical makeover.

Again, the board shrinks and dice become all-important: a player rolls dice marked with letters to form a word. The second player rolls again and builds a second word from the first one, and so on.

Best of all for busy parents and children, the games are brief and they are packaged differently so that they can be taken along in the car. “It’s analogous to a kid picking up his Gameboy for ten minutes,” said Chris Byrne, a toy consultant based in New York. “Yet it involves the whole family.”

Regardless of shortening attention spans, however, board games are still selling well — largely thanks to efforts to keep them fresh. After an 8 per cent fall in sales to $706 million in 2005, orders were up by 13 per cent last year to $802 million. Hasbro is thought to control just over half the market, according to the market research company NPD.

Sean McGowan, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, said that the Rhode Island company has no choice but to try to win more customers.

“When kids are ten years old, they’re more likely to be texting each other than playing Monopoly,” he said.

“It’s extremely important for Hasbro to do whatever they can to hold on to and grow their games business.”

No hat, no money, no boot

It was billed as “all the fun of Monopoly in 20 minutes . . . for 8 plus”. Forty minutes later, and we were still trying to decipher the rules.

While the passing of the boot, the racing car and the hat might be felt more keenly by stick-in-the-muds than by a new generation, even Monopoly money has been sacrificed: a grave mistake. The thrill of grasping a vast wad in your fist was, as I remember, the sole motivation in a game that did stretch on a bit.

It’s harder to indulge your megalomaniac fantasies with a points system and scoring book. “Great! You have three blue circles,” I announced. “Well, it obviously means I’ve won.” When it comes to board games, they may take our money, but they’ll never take our cunning.

Hattie Garlick

The point of Monopoly is to spend a Christmas evening bonding with relatives. You can eat nibbles, chat, and then — some time after midnight — shaft your younger cousin so mercilessly that the board is thrown in the air and everyone heads to bed.

The point of Express Monopoly is . . . well . . . difficult to tell. The game bears no relation to the original. There is a nod to property acquisition but that, and other references to the game we know and love, are charmlessly shoehorned into little more than the throw of a dice. It is difficult to see how this could compete with PlayStation or draw children to the original.

For something so ultimately brainless, the rules were surprisingly complex.

Tom Whipple

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