There are a million different ways you can create this either as a video game or a board game, but the idea is to give players a luck-based chance to buy into materials like iron, wood, bronze, oil, steel, and silicon (like Catan) which you can then leverage to gain monopolies on certain inventions in different industries / sectors over time.

I like how well this would track with real life, as monopolies come and go as new inventions are made and history moves forward in time.

The main decisions players will have to make is whether to take certain opportunities given to them. "When is it too late to invest in iron in the Iron Age?" for instance. I believe the time-based aspect adds a lot of depth to a standard Monopoly game, with the values of certain spaces / assets always fluctuating each turn. This also prevents one player from running away with the game because one player may be an oil baron but they may be late to the game when it comes to electricity, etc.

Each new era adds an x times multiplier to the cash you can earn, just as in real life. Ideally it will be anyone's game up until the end where one player will hit an exponential rate of expansion that allows them to buy out all of their opponents (something like Risk). Also like Risk and in real life, buying out firms will be risky, leaving you exposed, and you could end up expanding too quickly. The skill and strategy will be in that balancing act.

What fascinates me about the business world is how and why companies decide to buy out other companies. Either so that they can leverage that company's assets or to get rid of competition. I'd want to design the game to mimic that experience in an accessible way.

Unlike Risk it would be nice if every player could stay in the game until the end though, so you could either plot an unlikely comeback or help someone else win.

If it were a video game it would be cool to document history as it happens, so that it's almost like you're playing an alternative history simulator. It would be fun to play with friends as one person gets off to an early lead, only to fail miserably as their income starts falling off because they couldn't pivot in time (the same as famous monopolies and kingdoms of the past). The game might start calling your company, "The once-great monopoly of its time," or something. I believe adding news articles could help document history that way as you see in many sim/tycoon games.

Time can reset after a certain time period, or it can end for a quick game.

It kind of reminds me of Offworld Trading Company if you want to go the RTS route, but my initial thought was more of a luck-based, turn-based game, but one that has more strategy than a regular Monopoly game. I like games where you can take your time and plot out an action strategy while others are taking their turns.

So more like Fortune Street.

There's probably already something like this, but it's still a neat concept you can take in multiple different directions.