Most popular
board game in world,
thanks to Germantown man
by JIMMY J. PACK JR.
To some, Monopoly is only a board game that you take out of the hall closet when there’s nothing else to do. To others, it’s a game so compelling that it requires the strategy of chess and the game-face of poker. Either way there’s no refuting the fact that Monopoly is the world’s most popular board game.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the version of the game known around the world. The creator of this game, Charles Brace Darrow, was a resident of Germantown whose job was, like many others, lost in the sweep of the Great Depression. And though Darrow gets the credit for creating the Monopoly game we know today, he was not the person who deserves the credit for conceptualizing the game. And the roots of Monopoly also have a stronger connection to Philadelphia than just the man who brought it to us; we can thank the Quakers for that, and one Quaker in particular, named Elizabeth Magie Phillips.
Phillips was a woman inspired by socially conscious thought, and when she invented Monopoly in its first incarnation, it was called “The Landlord’s Game.” Phillips’ intentions were to show players the dangers of capitalism. Her version of the game was not to bankrupt players, but to show the abuses of landowning. The game focused on helping the poor and creating an even economic playing field.
Phillips’ ideas were inspired by a 19th century economist/lecturer named Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty, published in the late 1800s, explained that “land was a gift of nature,” so that everyone has an equal right to its use. George didn’t want the improvements on land taxed, but only the land itself. Because the value of land is created from our economic activity and not based solely on the land itself, then any improvements made to the land should not be taxed. If taxes were raised gradually, then the person who owned the property would have an incentive to make his land more productive and therefore defray the costs of a higher tax.
From this, Phillips created her Landlord’s Game and earned her first patent in 1904. The game was homemade on cloth. Properties had no names, and the starting point was not the big, fat red “GO” we’re so familiar with, but a round globe with the words “Mother Earth.”
As people started introducing friends to the Phillips’ game, one of those players, a University of Pennsylvania professor, Scott Nearing, a social economist and anti-capitalist, brought the game to his university, after which it found itself moving to other college campuses in America; but the rules were slowly being changed by the students playing the game looking for a more thrilling victory. The properties were placed into groups and then given higher rents if all were owned by a single player. Then, as the properties were improved, the rents would increase — exactly what George and Phillips were against.
In 1924, after Phillips married and moved to Chicago, she obtained a second patent and gave the properties names familiar to Chicagoans, such as The Loop and Lake Shore Drive. She also enforced her theme of the game — the danger of the abuses of landowning. She then contacted the founder of Parker Brothers, George Parker, wanting to have the game mass distributed to teach the public the dangers of capitalism. She was, of course, turned down.
As the game continued to make the rounds and continued to morph into something completely different, enter Germantown’s Charles Darrow, who changed the look of the game and centered the properties around one of Philly’s vacation hot spots — Atlantic City. Darrow also brought the game to Parker Brothers who again rejected the game, claiming it was too long, had complicated rules and had no clearly defined ending. Darrow, realizing the personal economic gains to be made on the game, produced a bunch of sets on his own and sold them to Wanamaker’s here in Philadelphia and New York.
Fate of course intervened when the wife of Parker Brothers president, Robert Barton, was shown the game by a friend. Barton, who discovered Darrow’s small success agreed to patent the game with Parker Brothers in 1935, and with the marketing and distribution of Parker Brothers, both Darrow and the company entered game board history.
Today the game is licensed in 32 countries and published in 19 different languages. There are local and national Monopoly tournaments, and in 1973 the Monopoly World Championship was created. The winner takes home a Monopoly silver trophy and $10,000. There’s a lot of serious business when playing Monopoly. Remember that the next time you think it’s merely a child’s board game.
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