Monopoly began as a game designed to show why landlords win.
In 1904 Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord's Game, a board game meant to teach players how rent enriches property owners and impoverishes tenants. Players copied and reworked it for decades. Parker Brothers later bought her patent for just 500 dollars, while selling Monopoly under another man's name.
Elizabeth Magie designed her game in 1902 and 1903 and playtested it in Arden, Delaware. She was a follower of Henry George, the economist who argued that land should carry a single tax, and she wanted a practical demonstration of what she called the present system of land grabbing. She hoped children playing it would feel the unfairness and remember it as adults.
The set came with two sets of rules. Under the anti-monopolist rules everyone gained as wealth was created, and the game ended when the poorest player had doubled their starting money. Under the monopolist rules, the aim was to build monopolies and drive opponents out. Her patent was also among the first for a game played around a continuous track rather than from a start to a finish.
The game spread by hand. An economics professor at the Wharton School taught it to his students, college players drew their own boards, and Quakers in Atlantic City renamed the properties after local streets. Versions circulated under names such as Monopoly, Finance and Auction. Parker Brothers had rejected the game in 1909 as too complicated.
In 1935 the company, by then selling Monopoly bought from Charles Darrow, who claimed to have invented it, paid Magie 500 dollars for her 1924 patent. It printed only a small run of her game to secure the rights, and by 1936 had set it aside. Magie gave newspaper interviews showing her original board to prove Darrow was not the inventor. It is a neat irony: the monopolist rules she built as a warning became the game the world plays.
Source: Wikipedia — The Landlord's Game · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
