Mobile recently got its own official version of the classic board game Monopoly, and that’s nice. But frankly, it could have been better.

The version from Top Trumps replaces the familiar color-coded blocks of street names with the names of major attractions. That’s one way to do it, and it puts a lot of familiar places right there on the board: Magic Christmas in Lights, Bienville Square, the Mobile Saenger Theatre and so on.

It’s a viable approach, but one side effect is that doing away with the street names takes the city’s eclectic patchwork of neighborhoods out of the mix. And many of those same touchstones are touched again in the Chance and Community Chest cards.

Representatives of downtown Mobile's Urban Emporium show off their square from a new version of the classic game Monop

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