Gaming trends come and go but whilst the development of video games transformed the way we play games, popular board games are still the most popular games for families to play together. Board games are great because multiple people can play at once, the rules are usually relatively simple and they tend to have just the right balance between luck and skill. The most popular board games are global hits with multi-language versions that are played by millions of people worldwide. But whilst we all know how to play our favorite board games, many of us are unaware of how they came to be developed.
In this article, let us introduce you to the origins of popular family games that will surprise you.
Monopoly
The ultimate game of Capitalism, Monopoly is loved by families all over the world. The earliest version of the game was first thought up by Elizabeth Magie in 1902 who created it in an attempt to popularize her political views on tax reform. Magie wanted to replace all tax and replace it with just one property tax to try and close the wealth gap between landowners and their tenants. Magie called this game The Landlord’s Game and it was designed to highlight how the landowner’s wealth grew as a direct result of the destitution of their tenants.
Unfortunately for Magie, as the game evolved under the ownership of the Parker Brothers, the anti-capitalism message was rejected by consumers, who far preferred the later versions where greed and financial dominance were the entire purpose of the game. These days, this feeling has escalated to the point where studies have shown that players cheat at Monopoly more than any other board game.
Scrabble
Scrabble was first invented by Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938 and was a new version of his earlier board game, Lexiko. Whilst the number of different letters may seem random, Butts calculated it by analyzing how often different letters occurred in a range of sources like The New York Times. Whilst there are many games in which players turned a random selection of letters to words to score, Butts’ game caught the public’s imagination because of the special squares on the board that doubled or tripled the value of words and letters and also because of the ingenious way the words crisscrossed each other.
In 1948, James Brunot bought the rights to Butts’s game and made some slight adjustments to the layout of the board and the rules to simplify gameplay. Brunot also renamed the game, which was originally called Criss-Crosswords; Scrabble, which means “to frantically scratch”. This new version of the game took a little while to get going but when the president of Macy’s Department Store, Jack Strauss played the game whilst on vacation, he was shocked to hear that Macy’s didn’t stock it and immediately placed a large order. After that, the game’s popularity increased rapidly and when the demand got too big for Brunot and his family to handle, they sold the game to the Parker Brothers who took it to the next level. Today, Scrabble is sold in 121 countries across the world in 29 different languages and is beloved by players of all ages.
Clue
The origins of Clue go back to the early years of the twentieth century in Great Britain, where the Sherlock Holmes novels of Arthur Conan Doyle were experiencing a resurgence in popularity. This led to an obsession with crime stories and murder mystery tales which was seized upon by Antony and Elva Pratt who started developing a board game originally titled Murder.
Many popular murder mystery stories at the time were set in big country houses and so the Pratts designed their board game around a similar setting. They changed the original name to Cluedo, which is still the name used in Britain today, but which proved to be difficult to sell overseas. Unfortunately for the Pratts, the president of Parker Brothers initially refused to release the game because of its murder plot but eventually he acquiesced and the game was released in the US in 1949 under the name Clue.
There are some great board games that families all over the world love to play. Whilst we are all so familiar with these games in their modern formats, they have changed and evolved over the years since they were first conceived. The history of the origins of popular family board games is fascinating, especially as they hold such a special place in the hearts of so many of us.
