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Fountain Street, with a big futuristic Providence Journal building surrounded by cottages, in Monopoly City Streets, an online game mashup by Hasbro U.K. using the venerable Monopoly and GoogleMaps.

Updated 8:20 a.m. Monopoly City Streets has relaunched. The Blog reports registration issues.

Updated 1:39 a.m. Friday: When Monopoly Streets restarts, there'll be some Changes... to the gameplay. Taxes will be introduced.

The first 5 streets that you own are tax-free. The current tax rate is 3% per street. For example, if you own 15 streets your tax will be 30% of your total rent collected every day. If you own 25 streets your tax will be 60%, etc.

I'll be glazing over with the next new thing, but there'll be a land grab for long streets in that game. The Changes... don't seem to expand the user experience or augment the game. They just make business rules. And add "For Sale" signs.

The tone is no longer playful:

Forced Repossession of Streets

10:26 AM Thurday, Sept. 17

Monopoly City Streets launched Sept. 9, and promptly crashed. Many couldn't register. Persistent folks like me -- determined to blog it -- did, but found bugs -- I bought Thayer Street and found it had charged me for it twice. When I roamed the empty streets of Providence at the end of launch day, I was one of only three people on the Local Leaderboard.

The game has gotten heftier servers and some of the first reported bugs were fixed. Early adopters like me will find our patience and persistence were in vain. They're going to start over.

Monopoly City Streets: RESTART DATE SET.

To prepare for the restart, we will be taking down the game on THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 at 15:00 GMT. We anticipate that the game will be down for 12 to 24 hours as we reset and test the game. When the site comes back live, the game will restart.

This restart does mean that everyone will be starting over with $3 million to spend and will need to register again.

I won't be among them. But I will share what I've learned from the experience.

Buy streets, any streets. They can be sabotaged so you collect no rent, but you still have them. I've had three offers for Thayer Street, which is always getting sabotaged by nasty buildings that halt rent collection, but they can't take it away from me.

I also own Hope Street, which was sabotaged by a sewer plant, but just as I was out of money one night I got a Chance card that would let me demolish any building. I left the game open in a Firefox tab, came back the next night and removed the sewage plant. I refreshed my streets list and got the money to fill Hope Street with 38 houses and a stadium. There's no room for someone to put a prison or a factory on it, and I collected rent again, but a day later it was sabotaged again, the allegedly protective stadium demolished. I never got another Chance card allowing me to remove the second sewage plant.

Some people have bought only a few streets, protected them with Bonus Buildings (such as parks and stadiums, freebies that also come by Chance) and bought big buildings -- the array of ugly skyscrapers available is the most built-out part of the game. But you can get a lot of rent from small houses on many streets, too.

While you may sabotage and demolish others' property, I think it just makes enemies and invites retaliation. After a few turns, I began to discard them. It's unfortunate that's it really the only action and interaction in the game.

There have been allegations of cheating at the game's blog - some people have created multiple accounts and made good deals with themselves. With only one account I've been legitimately in the top 3 in the Local Leaderboard since the start, and it only made me a target.

The overlay of real streets is a little disturbing. I don't want a prison on Hope Street, but somebody else put one there. And there was no way to find the person who did it when I had a prison of my own to place. The leaderboard is short, and he/she/it wasn't on it. I built a stadium, then a school (screenshot at right) at the corner of Smith St. and Academy Ave., where LaSalle Academy is in real life, but both were demolished by others. The game seems weighted towards trashing neighborhoods rather than improving them.

Buying property is tedious. Once the novelty wears offer, the prospect of waiting to build merely larger buildings lacks delight. Twice in one turn, in recent days when I was among the wealthier local developers, Chance slapped me with fines of more than $1 million, and I didn't really care.

Sabotaging others seems a waste of time. Turns are short, and you run out of money quickly, with no good way to get more until your rent comes in, automatically, at 8 p.m. EDT the next day.

After I bought Hope and Thayer, put one giant building surrounded by cottages on Fountain St. (home of the actual Journal building), bought the neighborhood I grew up in (Cathedral Ave.) and where I live now, waterfront property and many random small streets which could be easily defended while building houses that might trigger delivery of a Chance card, the thrill was gone. Not so much "no more worlds to conquer," but nothing interesting left to do.

It's a flat map, not a society. There's a lot missing -- more cards giving you a broader range of random surprises, and especially more whimsical and realistic goals: Run for office, letting you remove more eyesores if you're successful, perhaps; block a persistent saboteur (Aren't these terrorists? Where's the outrage?) for a few turns, trade a house for a park or a restaurant (there are no businesses, just buildings), have the fates of your businesses matter. Have burglars and philanthropists, fires and fairs, rave reviews and back-to-school sales.

There are far more interesting possibilities than putting increasingly ugly, more expensive skyscrapers on leafy residential streets.