Screenshot: Google Maps view of Mayfair in London with Monopoly pieces, from Monopoly City Streets.

3:41 a.m.
Monopoly City Streets is a free online mashup of Google Maps and the venerable analog board game Monopoly. (The U.K. division of Pawtucket-based gamemaker Hasbro is behind this; its ad agency did the heavy coding with help from Google.)

Pick any street in any city in the world found on Google Maps; you can buy it, and build not only houses and hotels but also football stadiums, castles and skyscrapers. "Chance" cards will let others lower your property values by building prisons and trash dumps on your street, but you can also draw a card that lets you bulldoze those eyesores.

Launch was planned for today at 2 p.m. EDT, according to the blog, but actually happened at 8:15 a.m. There's a FAQ. And a fan forum.

The Daily Mail reports,

Players start the free game with three million Monopoly dollars and can buy Downing Street for $231,000, while Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where the White House stands, costs $2 million.

Rent is paid automatically each day, from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.

Hasbro said: 'It's a chance to escape the harsh reality of recession and enjoy building up an empire.'

Guardian games blogger Adam Gabbatt tried a preview of it: New online Monopoly game is streets ahead.

... If you get in first, you can buy the street straight away. If you're beaten to it, you can make the owner an offer. If they don't reply in seven days, this offer is automatically accepted, no matter how contemptible it may be. (Cue the obligatory "So make sure you log in everyday!" order in the instructions that accompany the game).

He warns,

I was in a rather benevolent mood when I was invited to flatten a fellow player's property - how many people own a castle, after all? - but for the purposes of research destroyed a magnificent 15m-Monopoly-dollar property recently constructed in Blackpool by an erstwhile opponent.

This is all very well, and the satisfying graphic of a demolition ball swiftly assuaged any guilt, whilst cementing my position as the top property-dog in Lancashire.

But the problem is the game shows players exactly who has been trying to ruin their empire. I now have an enemy. A rich enemy...

As conceptual art, I love it. (It's an interactive antisocial network: Collect enemies by merely clicking rather than friends by merely offering up their email addresses.)

Practically, do I want to log in every day from now until Jan. 31 to defend my streets? Probably not. Expect a lot of abandoned virtual property. You'll be able to scoop whole cities up for a song if you can guess who'll abandon their lands and who'll spend football season buying up the world one street at a time.

But wait, there's more: Design your own MONOPOLY Building Competition Launches "Use Google SketchUp to design a 3D building, then upload your dream structure to the Google 3D Warehouse to enter it into the competition."

Updated 8:56 a.m. Game is live, earlier than expected, servers are overwhelmed. After several attempts, I got in, and am looking at Providence maps of downtown and the East Side. There is no game overlay, only a list of available streets, all in South Providence. A message below the zoomed Google street map reads, "Um... Our servers are down. We're trying to find out if the building with them has been demolished. Best give us some time and come back a bit later."

A bit later: I almost bought Hope St., but my registration failed. Now I'm back to unresponsive clicking.

Updated 11:03 a.m. I finally got to buy a street, Thayer St. on the East Side near Brown, for $675k. I seem to have bought it twice, since my original $3 million dropped to $1.6 million. Bug! How do I get my money back?

Updated 11:27 a.m. Patience paid off. Despite excruciatingly slow servers, I just bought Fountain St., where the Journal Building is. I can now charge my employer rent. That's what i call a fringe benefit.

Updated 11:42 a.m. I now own Hope St., and have only enough money left to put a few houses down, thanks to the game charging me twice for Thayer.

I can't view my properties -- I tried for a half-hour -- so I can't build on them. My profile says I own four streets and lists three. Can't report the bug.

It's too slow to try to do anything else today.

Updated 3:20 p.m. From the game's blog, afew hours ago (The biggest land grab of 2009...): "We are in the process of increasing our firepower and expect to be running more smoothly within the next several hours."

A survey there now asks, "Should we reset the game once we have our new hardware in place?" Results have been consistently running about 85 percent "Yes," 15 percent "No," probably reflecting the ratio of the locked out to the squeaked in.

The survey has a cutoff time of noon Thursday, suggesting that's when the upgrade will happen.