The board game provides the following franchise examples:
Accidental Aesop: The game as a whole is great at this in hindsight.
This game inadvertently warns you about the dangers of unplanned pregnancies, since you have no control over when you have kids and they do little more than eat a hole in your wallet.
While going to college can significantly increase your chance of overall success, it's still entirely possible to be outdone by a salaryman who skipped college.
Game-Breaker: Stock in the classic version; an initial $50,000 investment opened up a whole slew of Bonus Spaces, several of which paid out $480,000 (nearly ten times the maximum pay day) or even $600,000 for landing on a space allowing you to sell it near the very end of the game, with only a couple of extra spaces forcing you to pay. Good luck winning the game without it, especially if your salary is anything less than $50,000.
Has been demoted to almost Joke Item status in the current version. The price is still $50,000 (unless you get a free one via the "Stock Market Zooms" tile), but all it allows you to do is collect $10,000 every time someone spins the number on your certificate (which means you have to notice when someone spins your number five times just to break even). On top of all that, you can lose it by landing on one of the two "Stock Market Slumps" tiles.
The LIFE tiles in the 1991 version could be worth anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000 and in most cases decides who wins. The 2005 revision reduces their values to $10,000-$50,000.
In the 2005 revision, if the players are prone to often throw the spinner off its base or getting it stuck, the computer consultant can get ridiculously rich off the $50,000 bonus they get each time for "fixing" it.
A couple of the careers in the 2005 revision allow you to obtain the $100,000 salary card by fulfilling a condition: the athlete can exchange 4 LIFE tiles for the card and the entertainer can acquire it by two consecutive spins of an 8, 9 or 10.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Arguably more popular in Japan than the United States, with Japan having its own exclusive series of versions and often releasing multiple new versions per year.
Good Bad Bugs: Landing on "You're a grandparent!" without having any children. This can be true in Real Life, usually if you are older and your spouse already had adult children when you got married.
Values Dissonance: College giving you career and salary choices has become very dated since the 2010s, where it became less and less important for the average person, due to both throwing you into ever-increasing debt that takes a decade to pay off at the least, and the shrinking amounts of positions available, to the point where it's rarer for someone to be able to choose where they end up, both with and without a specialized degree.
Harsher in Hindsight: Landing on one of the Taxes Due tiles may give you a static image of a "National Debt Cauldron" burning money with a NPC character commenting about the lost money. This was 10 years before the worldwide financial crisis of 2008 that led later to increasing national debt in the US.
