The History of Monopoly 101: Lesser-Known Facts

So we all know that Charles Darrow invented the iconic game of Monopoly back during the Great Depression, which later became a household staple. But have we heard the whole story? A recent article in Business Insider called Hardly Anyone Realizes the Classic Board Game Monopoly Started as an Early Feminist's Attack on Capitalism discusses the lesser-known story of a woman named Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, a suffragist, Georgist, and daughter of an abolitionist.  Magie desired to reveal to society the evils of land-grabbing by showing them how it works.  She decided to accomplish this through a game called The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904, which allowed players to play with either anti-monopolist rules or monopolist rules. Although the game was very popular, due to difficulty is mass-production, the game became circulated mostly as a folk game, in which the rules changed throughout its circulation.  By the time Magie repatented the game in 1924, the game had mostly settled into its new identity, in which players primarily played as land-grabbing monopolists (as it was much more fun to be the monopolists than the anti-monopolists, after all). The game was extremely popular with the Quakers in Atlantic City, and before long, a man named Charles Darrow played the game with some friends... Interested is reading more?  Visit the full article at business insider.com.