coming soon/rumors

Diner Dash Family Style is a new deluxe game coming soon to Pogo. It’ll have six badges and winnable mini items available for Club Pogo members. The mini items will be full outfits in the form of costumes, backgrounds, and goodies. We’ll give you a sneak peek at some of the winnable items this week!

Here are the requirements for the not-yet-active secret badges in Monopoly:

Big Roller Badge
Roll double-sixes three times on the same turn

Jail Bird Badge
Get out of jail, only to re-enter jail on the same turn

Getting Crowded Here Badge
Have all four players land on the same space

As we said, they’re not available to be earned…yet. Perhaps these secret badges will be worked into the game at the same time the mini items are.

(Special thanks to RJ and Mary for their super sleuthing!)

Hey Club Pogo members, check this out! We don’t know how this slipped past us — perhaps it was a little too much summer vacation and not enough super-sleuthing on our part — but soon you’ll be able to earn exclusive Mini items from Monopoly!

Perceptive Pogo fans will recognize a few of these mini items — the second and fourth examples — from other games (the images are probably just a placeholder for now or just showing the other great things we can earn), but rest assured Pogo is working hard to create all kinds of new backgrounds, outfits, and goodies for us. In addition to the ones on the above-linked page, we’ve seen a bunch of ‘movers’: animated car, kangaroo, and tuk-tuk (which is totally hilarious); and non-animated elephant, mountie, penguin, and sumo wrestler.

It looks as if some of the in-game “earnable” movers will be featured as a “Mystery Mover Mystery” (yeah, we’re pretty sure this mini-site is still in development) in the Community News. They’ll be posting stories which will contain a clue which may reveal how to unlock special Club Pogo-only movers in the game.

Here are the badges and rank requirements for the upcoming Hasbro/Pogo release Party Yahtzee. We assume “rank points” will be replaced with actual rank requirements, and those requirements will probably be similar to those of Dice City Roller.

Wild, Wild, Dice Badge
Earn 100 rank points to achieve Wild, Wild, Dice rank (rank 10) and earn this badge.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll Badge
Earn 300 rank points to achieve Shake, Rattle, and Roll rank (rank 20) and earn this badge.

Disco Dice Badge
Earn 1000 rank points to achieve Disco Dice rank (rank 30) and earn this badge.

High Rollers
Earn 2000 rank points to achieve High Rollers rank (rank 40) and earn this badge.

Cool Dice Badge
Earn 3000 rank points to achieve Cool Dice rank (rank 50) and earn this badge.

It looks as if there will be three secret badges for Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition, in addition to the five Game Award badges we told you about earlier. At this point, because they are true secret badges, we don’t yet know what the requirements are to earn these; it may be that we’ll all have to wait for the game’s release and play for hours on end to figure it out. As soon as we know, we’ll fill you in!

Do you ever get the feeling that the Letters to the Editor are made up just for marketing purposes, to “leak” some news about upcoming events? We sure do. It seems these days that the Letters to the Editor always contain a few obligatory letters asking (out of the blue to some) for new games, mini items, special badges, or mini pets and — oh shocker! — the Editor always seems to have the right answer, that these items are in fact coming soon.

For example, the badge to the right was just created by Pogo’s artists and obviously will be given out to Club Pogo members to celebrate Club Pogo UK’s 1st birthday (September 25, btw). Shortly thereafter, out comes this week’s UK Letters to the Editor which has a very perceptive and inquisitive Martin asking “Seeing as Pogo UK is going from strength to strength and we now have a Club Pogo UK, will we be able to have a UK birthday badge as well as the USA one?” Coincidence? We think not. At least we know from the Editor’s response that the badge will be given to all Club Pogo members on Club Pogo UK’s 1st birthday, not just our friends across the pond.

With that said, there will probably also be a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and some UK-related mini items coming with the special badge around the end of September.

If you’ve ever wanted to link directly to your Pogo.com profile, you’ll be able to do that soon! In addition, Pogo is revamping their profiles with a whole page of information showing your profile stats, your mini, your favorite games, badges, and a lot more. This should be released next Tuesday with maintenance, but if you can’t wait, take a look at Pogo’s Check it Out!

We updated our last post about Monopoly’s release date with some new information we found in a Hasbro press release. It looks like Pogo’s version “will be available on September 3rd”. (Which could mean the game will be put into “Sneak Peek” mode next Tuesday the 26th, or the following Tuesday on the 2nd, or just released on Wednesday. With Pogo, nobody ever really knows!)

In addition, here’s some information about the 22 cities that will be around the game board, listed from highest rent to lowest rent:

Dark Blue: Montreal, Riga
Green: Cape Town, Belgrade, Paris
Yellow: Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Beijing
Red: London, New York, Sydney
Orange: Vancouver, Shanghai, Rome
Magenta: Toronto, Kyiv, Istanbul
Light Blue: Athens, Barcelona, Tokyo
Brown: Taipei, Gdynia

…like next-week soon! According to this marketing page on Pogo.com, Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition is coming soon. But according to this Hasbro Monopoly Page, all versions of the game will be released simultaneously next week in order for users to break a World Record on multiple formats: the board game, online, or on your mobile phone or video game console.

According to the Pogo page, the game will be available to both Club Pogo and non-Club Pogo members (although Club members will get exclusive ‘movers’ — their word for ‘pieces’ — which will feature Pogo characters). You’ll be able to play with up to 3 human or computer opponents with four sets of customizable game rules. The best news to us is that we’ll be able to play a full game in just 30 minutes!

Look for this game to be released probably next Tuesday (the 26th) with maintenance so that Pogo.com may feature their version for the World Record event on the following day.

Update 8/20: According to this press release (which also lists the cities which will be featured in the game), Monopoly “will be available for download on mobile phones or free online at www.Pogo.com starting September 3, 2008.”