the_sage•1mo agoTop Commenter

That time I learned Monopoly was originally a protest game

I was reading this article on board game history last night and found out Monopoly was actually invented by a woman named Lizzie Magie in 1903 to show how rent systems are unfair. She called it The Landlord's Game and it had two sets of rules, one where everyone wins and one where one person crushes everyone. Has anyone else looked into the real origins of their favorite games and found something surprising?

2 comments

2 Comments

wilson.emma1mo ago

Oh, that old chestnut again. Lizzie Magie definitely created The Landlord's Game and had some clever ideas, but Monopoly as we know it today is really more Charles Darrow's baby. People love to bring up the protest angle, but the game has been about crushing your friends financially for decades, and that's why it's fun.

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henry1011mo agoMost Upvoted

Actually, Darrow didn't create Monopoly by himself. He copied the rules almost entirely from Magie's game, including the board layout and the whole concept of properties and rent. Parker Brothers bought it from him and then bought her patent for a token amount to clear the rights. The irony is her game was designed to show how monopolies hurt people, and now it's the most popular game about being a greedy landlord.