Volunteer Boulevard, Neyland Drive, and Cumberland Avenue are not traditionally found on a Monopoly board, but UT senior Jamie Beaudin is the lucky owner of a one-of-a-kind edition, made by her fiancé, which includes these and a lot of other special spaces.
Beaudin’s fiancé, Clay Carrell, created a Monopoly-like game board, deemed the Beaudin-Carrell Edition, that illustrates the couple’s journey from their first date to their wedding scheduled for this summer.
“Clay has always been thoughtful, surprising me with flowers, sweet notes, and occasionally a small wooden project,” says Beaudin. “I definitely wasn’t expecting such an intricate, beautiful, well-thought-out gift. Every time I look at it, I get to remember every special moment we’ve had together so far.”
UT and Knoxville get lots of spaces on the Monopoly board since Beaudin was a student when they began dating. For the first year of their relationship, the couple was separated by 150 miles (the distance between Murfreesboro and Knoxville), prompting Carrell to commute to Knoxville on a regular basis.
Other places of significance on the board are Market Square—where the parking garage became the “free parking” spot on the board—and I-40 East, the route Carrell took when visiting Beaudin at UT.
“Jamie and I have always been board and card game kind of people,” says Carrell. “I wanted to create something that embodied our time spent together as a couple and how each place we visited and every moment we shared meant something to me.”
Carrell crafted the unique board from plywood and pallet wood. He commissioned vinyl stickers and designed the board spaces and cards with InDesign and Photoshop, even personalizing the Chance and Community Chest cards with fun phrases like “You watched Fixer Upper and caught the DIY bug—For each house pay $25, for each hotel pay $100.”
For the final touch, Carrell replaced Park Place with Tsali Notch Vineyard in Madisonville, Tennessee, where he proposed to her. And Boardwalk is now the historic Ramsey House in Knoxville, where they will be married this summer.