“It was bought as a gift item, a novelty, a curiosity. “A huge percentage of those games were never taken out of the box,” he says. He corrected himself: Make that “ Trump change.”īreslow was under no illusion that Trump: The Game would ever join Monopoly as a permanent staple in American dens. He picked up the flimsy bills and found a familiar face on every one. The smallest denomination of paper cash is $10 million. As a signed letter from Trump on the back of the rules states, “The player with the most money wins!”įirst they had to hand out the money. The object: Bluff opponents into spending foolishly while you buy low and sweep up big profits. Trump’s game asks players to move T-shaped tokens around the board while they try to buy up luxury hotels, casinos and other big-ticket items.
Many of Donahue’s clients are political nerds, like the customers who volunteered to play her in Trump: The Game - Teddy Woodhouse, a 25-year-old executive assistant, and Shane Russell, a 28-year-old software developer and political card game creator. “I really like mean games,” Donahue said, “because I’m so nice in real life.” Her 11-year-old son, sitting in the corner, rolled his eyes. Its reputation isn’t too different from Trump’s: Winning requires ruthlessness. The shop doesn’t carry the Trump game because it is out of print, but owner Kathleen Donahue had heard about the game. It’s a tempting purchase on eBay - whose friends wouldn’t be impressed? But would the game provide any insight into how the Republican presidential front-runner operates? The Washington Post took the game, bought on the auction site for $28, to some of the capital’s most devoted gaming nerds, at Labyrinth Games & Puzzles on Capitol Hill. Nearly three decades later, Trump: The Game is a collector’s item. What came next was a lightning-fast negotiation, a promotional blitz and the sale of about a million units, giving American consumers an early opportunity to play at the cutthroat gamesmanship that - at least, according to the rules booklet - constituted Trump’s business philosophy. Regulars at Labyrinth Games and Puzzles on Capitol Hill roll the dice with "Trump: The Game," bidding on real estate and trying to muster their inner “Donald.” (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)īreslow, for decades one of the nation’s leading game inventors, was prepared to get down on the floor and pit his strategic wiles against the guy whose picture would be on the box of Trump: The Game, a Monopoly-inspired race to get very rich, very fast.īreslow started to explain his prototype of the game he wanted Trump to endorse, but Trump cut him off: “I like it - what’s next?”