After making it to the wildcard race, Internet voters worldwide will determine in the next week whether Taipei will appear on the world edition of the popular board game "Monopoly" released later this year.
The Hasbro company, the creator of "Monopoly," launched an online vote in January to select the 22 cities that will feature on the new "Monopoly" world edition.
In the first stage of the process ending yesterday, Internet users were asked to choose 20 of the 68 candidate cities.
WILDCARD
Aside from voting on the 20 main cities, Internet users could also suggest their own cities for a wildcard vote.
Through campaign efforts by Internet users in Taiwan and a Web site titled "Let the kids around the world know about Taiwan," Taipei managed to maintain its ranking in the wildcard race between No. 3 and No. 1.
HELPING
"I've been playing `Monopoly' since I was little and I never imagined I could help put Taipei on the game just by voting on the Internet," Crane Lee (李鶴婷), an Internet user, told the Taipei Times.
After learning about the vote in an online forum, Lee launched her own campaign by "forwarding the message to all my friends, asking them to go nominate each time they get online. I also included the message in the screen name on my MSN messenger and in the signature file of my outgoing e-mails."
After the first phase of the vote closed yesterday, Taipei had made it to the top 20 on the wildcard list and thus qualified to be a wildcard candidate city.
The second phase of the voting, which ends on Mar. 9, will determine which two cities, among the wildcards, will appear on the board game.
As of yesterday, Taipei was in the lead.
The results for the 20 main cities will be released later this year along with the two wildcard cities, the "Monopoly" Web site (www.monopolyworldvote.com/en_US/world) said.
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