"Princetonopoly" Hits Local Stores

Forget Boardwalk and Park Place.

Instead, think McCaffrey’s and Henderson Sotheby’s.

This game may bear a passing resemblance to the classic Monopoly board game, but it’s not.

This is Princtonopoly, a game that’s popping up at businesses all over town as a fundraiser for the for Princeton High School Studio Band’s upcoming trip to the 70^th Anniversary Pearl Harbor Memorial Concert Series in Honolulu. 

All 33 members band will travel to Hawaii next month, where the band will perform as the only high school jazz band at the anniversary event. Band parents will pay for their children to travel and stay in Hawaii, but money is needed to fund travel for the trip’s chaperones and to transport the equipment to Hawaii.

If the band sells all 55 cartons of the Princetonopoly games, it will raise about $25,000, enough to pay for the chaperones and equipment, plus other upcoming band travel expenses in the spring, said Deanna Anderson, whose son Alex plays drums in the band.

The limited edition Princetonopoly game is for sale at local businesses including Gloria Nilson Realtors, Chez Alice and J. McLaughlin, among others. It costs $25.

The idea for the game came from Princeton’s Lorrie Costanzo, who has two sons in Studio Band: Spencer, 17, plays tenor saxophone and Kyle, 15, plays trumpet.

“I felt like I have two children in the band now, and I work full- time, but I needed to do something,” Costanzo said. “I heard about this company and presented the idea.”

She worked with Deanna Anderson and a few other parents and together they sold more than 40 spaces on the Princetonopoly board to local businesses, found a sponsor for the board, collected the ready-made ads, designed others, made changes and got approvals.

“It was like we were running an ad agency,” Costanzo said.

Spaces on the Princetonopoly board ranged in price from $50 to $500.

Costanzo said Princeton-area businesses that could afford to buy an ad were responsive to the idea.

“In this downturned economy, a lot of people really simply couldn’t pay for the ad, but for the most part there was a lot of excitement about Princetonopoly and having their name on the board.”

Lorrie’s son Spencer, who has created several websites, created the Princetonopoly website, integrating PayPal into the site and collecting about 70 pre-orders of the game.

That money paid for Pride Distributors in Michigan to manufacture the Princetonopoly game, and all sale proceeds will go directly to the Studio Band, Anderson said.

Once the game is sold out, it’s gone.

“I don’t think we would reproduce this version, but maybe down the road the band would do another one for their next big trip,” Deanna Anderson said.

With the trip less than two weeks away, Spencer Costanzo said the the enormity of the upcoming performance is beginning to sink in.

“At first I was basically excited that I was going to Hawaii,” he said. “Now that we’ve been learning a lot more about it, watching movies and people alive at a time. It makes it a lot more real.”