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Lottery to end Monopoly Millionaires’ game December 26th

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December 16th, 2014 by Ric Hanson

You soon won’t be able to pass go or collect one million dollars from the Iowa Lottery’s Monopoly Millionaires’s Club game. The Iowa Lottery and other states who got together to offer the game have decided to stop selling the game on December 26th. The Iowa Lottery Board discussed the issue at their meeting last week, and spokesperson Mary Neubauer says the decision was made Monday.

“We’ve talked about it over the last week or so, sales in this game just didn’t live up to the projections,” Neubauer says. The game cost five dollars and had multiple tiers that let players win through a weekly lotto drawing, through a separate drawing triggered only when the game’s top prize is won, and on a nationally televised game show.  “And we really thought that the game was doing something that players have repeatedly told us that they wanted to see — and that’s a game that spreads the winnings around more,” Neubauer says. “You know maybe rather than just giving one person a giant jackpot in some game, they said ‘give us a game that spreads the winnings around.’ So that was the concept behind this game, but it just never seemed to get legs after its debut in October. And sales continued below expectations, below projections.”

Neubauer says there are still a lot of questions, such as what will happen with the game show. “I know that the initial tapings of the T-V game show will go forward as scheduled, so those game show trip winners who are already scheduled to travel next month to Las Vegas will attend as planned,” according to Neubauer. Neubauer says they are still trying to determine what the poor showing of the game will cost the Iowa Lottery. Iowa Lottery figures show around 409-thousand dollars worth of the Monopoly Millionaires’s Club tickets were sold in October and November.

(Radio Iowa)