So I just found out the original Monopoly game was meant to be an anti-capitalist teaching tool

I was reading some old forum posts about game design history last night, and I stumbled onto something that totally threw me. Apparently the woman who first created Monopoly back in 1903, Lizzie Magie, designed it specifically to show how rent and land ownership could crush regular people. She called it The Landlord's Game and had two sets of rules - one where everybody shares the profits and another where one person hogs everything. The greedy version is what Parker Brothers eventually bought and turned into the game we all know. I always thought Monopoly was just about being the rich jerk on the board, not some sly lesson about economics. Makes me wonder how many other board games started out with a totally different purpose that got stripped away. Anyone else ever dig into the origins of a classic game and find something unexpected?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa_wilson8728d ago

Oh wow, that's wild. I actually did dig into this a while back when I was trying to find a new board game to play with my family. There's one called "The Game of Life" that started as a kind of morality lesson about making good choices and avoiding bad ones, not just a money race. The original had you land on spaces about marriage and career and even had a "ruin" space. But somewhere along the line it got simplified into just go to college, get a job, buy stuff. Kind of a bummer how the original message gets lost.

rosek7328d ago

Oh I remember playing the old version of Life with my cousins in the '80s. That ruin space actually kept things interesting because you never knew if you'd hit a bad turn and have to start over. We always had more fun with those older rules than the modern version.