Monopoly turned 80 this year and whether it’s the electronic version with debit cards or the traditional paper money version, the board game is still played and enjoyed by people around the world.
So how did this “I wanna own lots of property and get rich by bankrupting my friends” board game evolve?
For many years, American Charles Darrow was credited with creating the game during the Great Depression. He sold it to George and Fred Parker (Parker Brothers) in 1934 and a year later it was on the market, ready for playing. Both he and the Parkers became quite wealthy from sales of the game.
But the truth is that Darrow had revamped a board game invented by Elizabeth Magie Phillips decades earlier in 1903 called The Landlord’s Game.
The Landlord’s Game
Phillips was a fan of an economist of the day, Henry George, who proposed that landowners should pay taxes on their huge properties and not pass costs onto tenants, which could eventually reduce or eliminate sales tax. Phillips designed the game as a way to show the negative consequences of monopolistic land ownership by men like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
Originally The Landlord’s Game had two set of rules: an anti-monopolist scenario in which wealth was shared, and an alternative where each player would try to gain a monopoly and then win by bankrupting all the other players. Phillips wanted the game to show the moral superiority of the first set of rules and hopefully result in real reforms. She applied to patent the game in 1903.
However, it was the monopolist rules that took off when Monopoly was marketed. It became a capitalist game in which the winner has the lion’s share of the properties on the board and, one by one, eliminates all the other players.
