Monopoly (game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Monopoly has sold an estimated 275 million copies. It has been licensed in more than 113 countries and printed in more than 46 languages. Yet every one of those boards carries the geography of a single seaside city, Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the original street names were found. Players roll dice, buy property, collect rent and try to drive everyone else into bankruptcy. So who first drew the square track that players circle? Why does a game about winning at the expense of others have such a surprising origin? How did a printing company in Leeds turn an American board into a London one? And what did prisoners of war find hidden inside certain copies during World War II?

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• 2. The Landlord's Game

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  In 1903, an American anti-monopolist named Lizzie Magie created a board game with a political purpose. She called it The Landlord's Game. She hoped it would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George, set out in his book Progress and Poverty. The game was meant as an educational tool that showed the harm of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904.

  The patent drawing shows features that any Monopoly player would recognize. A square circuit ran around the board, with a corner square as the starting point and spaces in between. Players went round and round until the goal was reached, and they received money after completing each circuit. Railway stations were hazards that demanded a five-dollar fine. Other board games of the time looked quite different.

  A game called Zohn Ahl, played by the Kiowa and described in a book about games in 1898, had a similarly shaped board but different rules. Magie may have been inspired by it, though that is not definitely known.

  Magie began self-publishing her game in 1906 and wrote two sets of rules for it. In the anti-monopolist set, everyone was rewarded when wealth was created. In the monopolist set, the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Variants based on her concept appeared from 1906 through the 1930s. Cardboard houses were added, and rents rose as houses were placed on a property. She patented the game again in 1923. She also intended the paper money to help children learn to add and subtract.

  In 1932, a dinner party at a Philadelphia home would carry her creation to a man who had never seen it.

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• 3. Darrow's Version

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  Charles Todd of Philadelphia later recalled that evening in 1932 in an advertisement placed in The Christian Science Monitor. His childhood friend Esther Jones had arrived for dinner with her husband, Charles Darrow. After the meal, the Todds introduced Darrow to The Landlord's Game, and they played it several times. The game was entirely new to him. He asked the Todds for a written set of the rules.

  Darrow went on to distribute the game himself under the name Monopoly. His only change was to add symbols for the electricity and water companies and for the railway stations. He made a board from oil cloth, with the artwork drawn by an artist. That board now belongs to The Strong National Museum of Play, which acquired it after a $146,500 bid at Sotheby's in 2010.

  Parker Brothers bought the game's copyrights from Darrow. Then the company learned that he was not the sole inventor. It responded by buying the rights to Magie's patent for $500. Parker Brothers began marketing the game on the 5th of November 1935, with a design contributed by the cartoonist F. O. Alexander. On the 31st of December 1935, a US patent for the board design was issued to Darrow and assigned to Parker Brothers.

  Darrow's board held one more story, written in the spelling of a single street name.

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• 4. Atlantic City Streets

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  The Monopoly board holds forty spaces, and twenty-eight of them are properties. There are twenty-two streets in eight color groups, four railroads and two utilities. The rest are three Chance spaces, three Community Chest spaces, a Luxury Tax space, an Income Tax space and four corners. Those corners are GO, In Jail or Just Visiting, Free Parking and Go to Jail.

  The prices on the board reflect real estate values in Atlantic City in the 1930s. The two cheapest properties, Baltic Avenue and Mediterranean Avenue, sat in a low-income, African-American neighborhood. Pennsylvania Avenue, Park Place and Ventnor Avenue stood in wealthier neighborhoods.

  Marvin Gardens, the farthest yellow property, is a misspelling of Marven Gardens. Charles and Olive Todd introduced the error when they taught the game to Darrow. It was copied into Darrow's board and then into Parker Brothers' version. The Todds also changed Arctic Avenue, a street in Atlantic City, to Mediterranean. They shortened the name of the Shore Fast Line, a streetcar line serving the city, to the Short Line. Parker Brothers did not acknowledge the Marvin Gardens mistake until 1995, when it formally apologized to the residents of Marven Gardens.

  The railroads hold their own surprise. The B&O Railroad never served Atlantic City. A booklet with a reprinted 1935 edition says the four railroads that did were the Jersey Central, the Seashore Lines, the Reading Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The real electric and water services were Atlantic City Electric Company and the Atlantic City Municipal Utilities Authority.

  The real map has drifted away from the board. Atlantic City's Illinois Avenue was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the 1980s. St. Charles Place no longer exists, because the Showboat Atlantic City was built where it once ran. The editing never stopped. In 2025, Hasbro renamed Oriental Avenue as Rhode Island Avenue, another real Atlantic City street.

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• 5. Across the Atlantic

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  Early in 1935, before Monopoly had even gone into production in the United States, Parker Brothers sent a copy to a printing company in Leeds. John Waddington Ltd., known as Waddingtons, had branched out into packaging and playing cards. It had recently sent the card game Lexicon to Parker Brothers, hoping to interest the American company in publishing it.

  Victor Watson, the managing director of Waddingtons, gave the game to his son Norman to test over a weekend. Norman headed the card games division. He was impressed and persuaded his father to telephone Parker Brothers on Monday morning. Transatlantic calls were then almost unheard of. The call produced a license to make and sell the game outside the United States.

  The four railway stations on the British board do not point in four compass directions. All of them had belonged to the same company, LNER, before nationalisation. It has been suggested that Waddingtons chose LNER stations because that company served Leeds, where the firm was based.

  In 1941, the British Secret Intelligence Service turned to Waddingtons, which could also print on silk. It asked for a special edition for prisoners of war held by the Nazis. Hidden inside were maps, compasses, real money and other objects useful for escape. The games reached prisoners through fake charity organizations created by the British Secret Service.

  Peacetime brought a different test. In December 1998, a company called Winning Moves sold new UK city editions in just a few W H Smith stores. Almost 50,000 games sold in the four weeks before Christmas, and Winning Moves still produces new city and regional editions every year.

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• 6. Courtroom Battles

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  In 1973, the economics professor Ralph Anspach published a game called Anti-Monopoly. Parker Brothers sued him for trademark infringement in 1974, and the case went to trial in 1976. Anspach won on appeal in 1979, when the 9th Circuit Court decided that the trademark Monopoly was generic and therefore unenforceable. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

  Congress reversed that outcome in 1984 with the passage of Public Law 98-620. Parker Brothers and its parent company, Hasbro, continue to hold valid trademarks for Monopoly. Anti-Monopoly was exempted from the law, and Anspach later reached a settlement with Hasbro. He then marketed his game under license from the company.

  Hasbro acquired Parker Brothers, and with it Monopoly, in 1991. Before that, Parker Brothers acted as a publisher and issued only two versions at a time, a regular and a deluxe. Hasbro moved to create and license many more, and it sought public input on variations. In 1994, it granted USAopoly a license to publish a San Diego Edition. More than a hundred further licensees followed, including Winning Moves Games and Winning Solutions, Inc.

  The year 2003 brought a national tournament on a chartered train from Chicago to Atlantic City. It also brought a Hasbro lawsuit against the maker of Ghettopoly over trademarks and copyrights, which Hasbro won. In February 2005, Hasbro sued RADGames over Super Add-On, an accessory board game that fitted in the center of the board. A judge issued an injunction on the 25th of February 2005 to halt production and sales. In April 2005, the judge ruled in favor of RADGames.

  A dispute over dice ended differently. The 1999 Millennium Edition came with two jewel-like dice, and Michael Bowling, owner of the dice maker Crystal Caste, sued over them. Hasbro lost in 2008 and had to pay $446,182 in royalties. Later printings returned to ordinary six-sided dice.

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• 7. Tokens and Votes

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  After wooden tokens appeared in prints from 1937, a set of eight metal tokens was introduced. Two more were added in late 1937, and the tokens changed again in 1942. During World War II, they went back to wood. Many early metal pieces came from companies such as Dowst Miniature Toy Company, which made tokens designed for charm bracelets. The battleship and cannon were also used briefly in the Parker Brothers war game Conflict, released in 1940. When that game failed, the premade pieces were recycled for Monopoly.

  By 1943, there were ten tokens: the Battleship, Boot, Cannon, Horse and Rider, Iron, Racecar, Scottie Dog, Thimble, Top Hat and Wheelbarrow. They stayed the same until the late 1990s. In 1998, a Hasbro advertising campaign asked the public to vote on a new piece. The candidates were a bag of money, a biplane and a piggy bank. The bag won 51 percent of the vote, while neither rival passed 30 percent. It joined the set in 1999, bringing the total to eleven.

  A second poll in 1998 asked which token people liked best. The Race Car led with 18 percent, followed by the Dog at 16 percent, the Cannon at 14 percent and the Top Hat at 10 percent. The Wheelbarrow was least favorite at 3 percent. The Cannon and the Horse and Rider were retired in 2000, and the money bag was retired in 2007. That left eight tokens.

  A Facebook vote ran from the 8th of January to the 5th of February 2013. The choices were a guitar, a diamond ring, a helicopter, a robot and a cat. The cat took the top spot with 31 percent. The iron proved the least popular classic piece, so it was retired and the cat took its place.

  In January 2017, Hasbro ran another vote with 64 options. By the 17th of March 2017, the thimble, wheelbarrow and boot had been retired. A penguin, a Tyrannosaurus rex and a rubber duck replaced them. In April 2022, Hasbro let fans choose a retired token to bring back. The Thimble returned in regular sets starting in 2023, and the T-Rex was dropped. A refresh in 2025 replaced the battleship with the old money bag.

  The tokens that lost the 2017 vote did not disappear. Hasbro released all of them in a 64-token limited edition called the Monopoly Signature Token Collection.

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• 8. Rules and Endless Games

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  Each player begins with $1,500 and a token on GO. The highest roll goes first, and play moves clockwise. Rolling doubles earns another turn, but three doubles in a row send a player straight to jail. Passing GO pays $200. Landing on an unowned property lets a player buy it. If the player declines, the bank auctions it to everyone, including the player who landed there.

  Jail has three entrances. A player can land on the Go to Jail space, roll three consecutive doubles, or draw a card that says to go there. To leave, a player pays a $50 fine, uses a Get Out of Jail Free card or rolls doubles. Three failed attempts force the fine or the card. A jailed player can still trade, mortgage, collect rent and bid at auctions.

  Owning every property in a color group doubles the rent on its unimproved properties. It also allows building, and houses must go up evenly across the group. After four houses, a player can swap them for a hotel. The supply is finite, with 32 houses and 12 hotels in a standard set. When the last houses run out, the bank auctions them to the highest bidder. A mortgage pays half the purchase price, and repaying it costs 10 percent interest. A player who cannot pay a debt is bankrupt. The winner is the last player left.

  Before 2008, the Income Tax space offered a choice. A player could pay a flat $200, or $300 in some editions, or 10 percent of total net worth. Nobody could calculate the percentage before choosing, and no one could reverse a bad decision. The 2008 rules removed the option, and the Luxury Tax rose from $75 to $100.

  House rules have piled up around the game. The best known is the Free Parking jackpot, where money from taxes and cards goes to the center of the board. It can begin with an extra $500, and a player who lands on Free Parking takes the whole pile. Such rules hand out cash regardless of strategy, so they can lengthen the game considerably.

  Jim Slater argued in The Mayfair Set that the orange property group is the best to own. Chance cards send players there often, so they land on it more than most. Illinois Avenue, New York Avenue, the B&O Railroad and the Reading Railroad are the most frequently landed-upon spaces.

  Edward P. Parker, a former president of Parker Brothers, described the problem with the ending. He is quoted as saying: "We always felt that forty-five minutes was about the right length for a game, but Monopoly could go on for hours. Also, a game was supposed to have a definite end somewhere. In Monopoly you kept going around and around." Hasbro states that the longest game ever played lasted 70 days.

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