Hasbro, the manufacturers of Monopoly, is holding an online poll to decide which of five new pieces – a diamond ring, guitar, robot, helicopter or cat – should be introduced to a new edition of the game. To boost the PR-appeal of the poll, a second vote will be held to determine which piece should be removed to make room for the new one.

"When we decided to replace one of the tokens in the game, we knew we had to involve our fans in the process," said Hasbro's Eric Nyman. But what's interesting is quite how many times the tokens in monopoly have changed before. Using data from World of Monopoly, I drew up a quick chart to see. I obviously excluded themed sets, but deluxe editions, vintage editions and so on were included. One large caveat: the dataset is for the US edition, not the UK, which explains the presence of two interlopers, the Cannon and Cowboy. Click on it for a larger version:

Only one piece has been in every edition of Monopoly: the lowly top hat. Which means, obviously, that it's the one that should go. No gods, no kings, no top hats! REBEL!