Neusatz Monopoly is a board game for the browser, set in Neusatz, the old Austro-Hungarian name of Novi Sad, in the noir mood of the early twentieth century. Two players, or one player against the computer, buy the city, collect rent and bankrupt each other, and every turn plays out in short black-and-white films made for the game. I designed it and built it with Claude Code. It is live at monopoly.neusatz.cc.
The 40 spaces are places from the city's past: Fisherman's Island, Štrand, Klisa Jailhouse, the Almaška Church, Einstein's House and Peterwardein Fortress among them. Each one has its own picture, made from a real photograph in the Neusatz Archive, and prices are in crowns, the currency of the time.
Players pick a character, such as The Lady, The Trader, The Captain or The Teacher. Each belongs to a faction of the old town, and each faction enters the game with a film of its own.
The game plays by the official rules: buying, rent, auctions, Chance and Community Chest, jail, taxes, mortgages, houses and hotels, trading between players, bankruptcy and the win. The rules live apart from the 3D table, and an automated test plays whole games using only the buttons a player sees, so the rules and the interface never drift apart.
535 scenes are written for the game, and more than 600 short films have been made from them with Google's Veo video models. They play when a player lands, buys, goes to jail, draws a card or takes the city. One film bible keeps them together: a single unbroken shot, real physics, period dress, rain and gaslight, real sound, and no text on screen.
Game design, art direction, the film bible, the rules engine and the interface. I built it with Claude Code in React and TypeScript, with three.js for the table and physics for the dice, and it runs on Cloudflare.
The game is one part of Neusatz, my world-building project about the city, next to the Neusatz Archive, the Field Guide and the historical films. The archive's photographs became its spaces, and its films share the archive's look.
A full game takes about 50 minutes. In the one recorded here, The Lady takes the city.
Every prompt in the game, from the turn cards to auctions, jail and bankruptcy, carries an engraved illustration in the game's palette.
