Greed Was Good With Milton Bradley’s Hotel Board Game From ’86!

Friends, there are many elements of the ’80s that were positive – like a lot of the music, cartoons, movies, and other areas of pop culture. But if we are being fair it has also been labeled the Greed decade by some – although that is a title that it seems writers from Forbes and the Los Angeles Time appear to disagree with. At the very least most folks will admit that Oliver Stone seemed to think that was the case with his popular 1987 film Wall Street – which earned Michael Douglas an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Gordon Gekko. I’ve read that the original pass for the script was handled by a friend of Oliver Stone, Stanley Weiser – who also wrote 1987’s Project X and got his start in show business as a PA to Director Brian De Palma on 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise. It was Oliver Stone who appears to have wrote the second attempt at the screenplay to Wall Street and I’ve read that the original actor approached to play the part of Gordon was none other than Warren Beatty. I really do respect Beatty as an actor but I have a very hard time picturing him delivering the “Greed is Good” speech in Wall Street as well as Michael Douglas did.

I would with tongue firmly planted in cheek say that Milton Bradley thought the decade was about greed with their 1986 game entitled Hotel – a real estate empire developing board game. One in which Players travel around the board, upon landing on a ‘purchase square’ – they can buy an open lot if they can afford it, afterwards if they arrive on one of the building squares they can roll a dice to determine if they succeeded in earning approval to build a hotel. Hotel while definitely having more than a few similarities to Monopoly has impressive 3D hotels constructed out of heavy cardboard – after a Player has built the main building they can expand on the hotel by adding additional wings of the hotel – plus facilities. The bigger and more fancier the hotels a Player builds – the more it will cost a rival Player when they have the misfortune of landing on an entrance square to said property. If it turns out that the Player doesn’t have enough revenue to pay up, their own hotels and holdings must be put up for auction… if that fails – they have been crushed and they are out of the game!

For what it might be worth, Hotel has managed to be published over the years in new editions – with the latest being Hotel Tycoon which was released back in 2013 in Europe. In addition it was originally published in 1974 by Denys Fisher Toys – which was eventually bought by Hasbro – who at that time also owned Milton Bradley (I want to thank the Hotel board game fan site for that info!).

I certainly never owned a copy of Hotel but will have to admit that it looks like a great deal of fun – perhaps I’ll take a look on eBay to see if there is an affordable copy. What about yourself though, did you possibly ever play this particular board game?