It all began back in the late 1980s, when the Brookfield Chamber of Commerce was sent a letter by Michael Glenn Productions of Allen Park, Mich., asking if the chamber might be interested in having a Game of Brookfield created. The chamber could then sell these locally oriented games and use the profits to raise funds for future projects.

"[Former chamber Secretary] Florence Rooney said it sounded like a good idea," remembers Paul Szachnitowski, who was a new member of the chamber at the time. So it was further discussed and voted on, and the Michael Glenn Company was contacted.

Before the game went into production, several things needed to be done. Local businesses had to be contacted to see if they'd like to get in on this, and give a little money towards sponsoring a square on the game board. This square would serve as an advertisement for their business. Also, other financial sponsors had to be found, who would have their names listed on the game board under the heading "Noble Subjects of the Realm."

The game was also called Wheeler-Dealer, and described itself as being "a fast-paced, action-packed game of skill, strategy, and the 'luck of the dice,' where two to six players 'wheel and deal' their way around their own town, buying up, trading and selling local business properties that actually exist."

Many people wondered if it was something like a Parker Brother's Monopoly game, but it only had a few similarities. You could buy properties, but you couldn't put little green houses or bigger red hotels on them. Or, as some Brookfielders might say today, you couldn't put condos or townhomes on them. In the Game of Brookfield, you invested in Commodity Futures, where your fortunes might turn from good to bad, or from bad to good, with a single roll of the dice.

Like Monopoly, here you could collect and trade properties, getting all of one kind of color group. You could even charge rent. Monopoly's "Community Chest" and "?" cards were replaced here by one set of Wheeler-Dealer cards. Do you remember that Monopoly card that read the mildly amusing "You win second prize in a beauty contest, collect $15"? Its less amusing Wheeler-Dealer counterpart reads "Sell fireworks to China; Collect $42,000 commission."

I guess that's supposed to sound like "selling refrigerators to Eskimos." Isn't that a laugh riot?

Everybody likes to hear the words "tax audit," right? Right? Of course not. Of the 50 Wheeler-Dealer cards, eight will have you facing one. In real life, taxpayers wish tax audits wouldn't even exist, and the mere mention of the words can cause shivers and shudders. Who would like to be forced to deal with audits, even in a game situation? Talk about unpopular cards!

Even the game money was different. While Monopoly's bank notes ranged from $1 to $500, the Game of Brookfield's dollar bills were in the amounts of $100 to $50,000. Over $2,500,000 in Wheeler-Dealer money was included in each game set.

One final difference between the Game of Brookfield and Monopoly, is that a large, browned, parchment-like "History of Brookfield" sheet was included with each game. This history was created by using a combination of the "Brookfield Heritage" section in the chamber's "Welcome to Brookfield" booklets, and the pamphlet "Historically Yours, the Grossdale Station." The latter also briefly described the early history of the village, and went into four printings.

As soon as the games were delivered, the boards themselves were inspected. Since Brookfield was the home to a famous zoo, silhouettes of animals dotted the game board. The Brookfield Chamber of Commerce logo looked good, too, being set in the upper left hand corner.

"At first they sold real well, and then not," said Szachnitowski, a former chamber president. "We sold them for $10, I think. Then we cut the price to $5. We had lots of them left. We were giving them away for prizes."

The failure of this game to sell well-affected many future chamber fund-raising decisions. The late Florence Rooney told me in the 1990s that whenever some new fundraising idea was brought up, members wondered if this was going to be another Game of Brookfield fiasco.

I'm sure you've all played board games where you floundered through the rules, and, coming to the end of the game at last, boxed it up and consigned the whole thing to gather dust in some closet. This turned out to be one of those games.

Assuming the players managed to muck through reading the two long pages of rules, winning the game must've come as a relief. There were three ways to win or end the game.

The first way was for the game to be played until only one player was left, all others having gone bankrupt.

"This remaining player," stated the rules, "has 'Taken Over the Town,' and is declared the winning Wheeler-Dealer. However, depending on the play of the game, playing down to one victor many take many hours, and is not recommended for the fainthearted!"

But this was not the official way to end the game, only a suggested method.

The "official" way to end play was when the last Wheeler-Dealer card was picked, after going through the deck once. Then came time for all the players to become accountants, figuring out how much money and property each player had, so that a winner could be found. Though this was, in seeming, a much shorter method of playing the game, the number-crunching sometimes made it seem a whole lot longer!

The third way to end the game was to end it after a certain playing period, say, two hours, was agreed on, at the very beginning.

Well, there was a fourth way, un-officially, that stated that if everybody became so fed up with trying to follow the rules, and figuring out who owed what to whom, and who was in debt, and so on, they could agree, by vote, to shove the game back in the box and never play it again. Game over!

Playing the Game of Brookfield probably had just the reverse effect on the participating businesses named on the board. Let's say someone had a really bad "wheeling-dealing" experience on the Ralph's Restaurant and Lounge space. When they came to the real business on the street, they'd remember it from the game, and might say, "Let's go eat somewhere else, instead."

Since the 1980s, I have been to many rummage sales, estate sales, and garage sales and cannot recall ever having seen a copy of the Game of Brookfield up for sale. Surely some must have been, somewhere, but I never found any. I can only guess that those people who still own them see them as being true local historical artifacts. Why not? Among the businesses on the game board, gone from the village, are Talman Home Savings and Loan, at 8922 Fairview Ave.; Mylon Fisher's Pharmacy at 8900 Fairview Ave.; Brookfield Foods at 9021 W. Ogden Ave.; Bambino's Best Fast Food at 8863 Ogden Ave. and Frank Buresh's Lobster House at 8906 31st St.

There is one business on the Game of Brookfield board that is not in Brookfield, and that is the McNeal Hospital, at 3249 S. Oak Park Ave., in Berwyn: "Everything You Ever Wanted Your Hospital to Be."

Nobody I talked to seems to remember how it got a place on the game board. It surely must've paid for the privilege.

Since it first began selling these special board games in 1980, Michael Glenn Productions of Michigan is still in the "Wheeler-Dealer" business, 27 years later. The company has created these games for many other communities in the United States, such as Marlin, Texas; Chesterfield, Mo.; Santa Catalina, Calif.; and LaGrange, Ill.

I wonder how well any of them sold? Currently you can get some of these used games on eBay, for as cheap as $7.50. By the way, on boardgamegeek.com, one review calls the Wheeler Dealer games "Monopoly on Steroids." Seems an apt description.

So, do you have a Game of Brookfield hidden away somewhere? Even if you shudder at the thought of playing it again, at least you have some consolation in knowing that you have a true piece of the village's historical past.