The youngest player was Brittany Page, an 11-year-old sixth-grader at Sprucewood Elementary in Sandy. Her brother is a public relations major at BYU. The student-run Bradley PR Agency got paid for every person it brought to the event.

She played the new World Edition and loved buying pyramids instead of hotels for her two properties, Taipei and Gdynia.

"I like the credit cards," she said of the edition's new feature — no paper money, just electronic cards. "They're cool. They carry all your money so you don't have to."

The World Edition properties are 22 cities selected by 5.6 million online voters. Montreal is the new Boardwalk, and Riga is the new Park Place. Many of the cities have been or will be Olympic hosts — Beijing, Barcelona, Tokyo, Montreal, Rome, Vancouver, Sydney, Athens, London, Paris.

"I've heard of a lot of them, but I've never been to any," young Page said.

The oldest player was Jay Larsen, 54, of Orem, who learned of the event from a newspaper.

A passel of freshmen enjoyed the distraction on their first morning in Provo. The fall semester begins next week, and new-student orientation began Wednesday night.

Caroline Benac, 18, a freshman in microbiology from Dallas, led a game with four male students because she was the only one who knew the rules cold. She played a lot of Monopoly in a family of 11, much of it "late, late into the night" on the floor in the family's garage, converted to an art studio for her sister.

"My dad's pretty intense about it," she said. "He's not fun to play with. He'd mortgage all of his properties, spend all his money on properties. You'd think he was down but he'd come back. It's pretty scary."

The new World Edition was released a week ago. The Boutique Edition was part of an exclusive holiday set of pink games released by Toys R Us last year.

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E-mail: twalch@desnews.com