Board Games Are Sexy. No, Really

Fresno — the largest inland city in California. You wouldn’t think this arid place had much to recommend it, and you probably wouldn’t be wrong, but that’s precisely why its denizens are so cool. Observe this treasure discovered by a Fresno resident under his bedroom carpet: a secret, life-sized Monopoly game board.

Nyeland Newel was renovating his 1930s bungalow in 2010 when he discovered this hidden jewel. Striking on its own, the most fascinating aspect of the board was the modifications. Instead of Community Chests — the places on the board that call for a player to draw a Community Chest card and execute its directives — Newel found stylized silhouettes of women not unlike the sort we might see at a strip joint.

Newel believes that these images signal the game’s real purpose. Talking with the New York Daily News, he speculated that the board must have been used for playing risque party games, like strip Monopoly. He contacted the previous owners who’d lived in the house before he bought it in 2003, but never did figure out the rules of this adult-version of the game.

He told the Daily News he played one game on the board before his then-wife started to pressure him to paint it over. They compromised by painting over most of it, leaving the “naked lady squares” and the wedding ring square.

“She wanted a classic look,” Newel said about his ex-wife. “That’s probably why we divorced. We never got over the floor.”

He jokes that to restore order to the universe, he’s going to paint a gameboard on the floor of his new home in Palm Desert.

He’s partial to Scrabble. Word-smiths — you’re now tasked with developing the adult version of the game.