The Surprising Origin of Monopoly (Encore)
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The following is an Encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. One of the most popular board games in the world is Monopoly. Millions of copies of the game have been sold and thousands of different versions have been published. However, the origins of the game are not what most people think. In fact, the game was originally designed not as a way for people to win by amassing properties, but rather to demonstrate why that was a bad idea.

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I'm going to assume that most of you listening to this episode are familiar with the board game Monopoly. I don't know how popular board games are anymore, but when I was growing up, it seemed like every family had a Monopoly game stashed somewhere in the closet. For those of you who aren't familiar with the game or need a refresher, Monopoly is a board game where players buy, trade, and develop properties on a board that is supposed to kind of resemble a city.

The goal is to strategically accumulate wealth by collecting rent from opponents who land on your properties, making shrewd decisions on property purchases and trades, and managing your finances wisely. The game combines elements of luck, strategy, and negotiation as players move around the board, aiming to bankrupt their opponents while avoiding bankruptcy themselves. All in a race to become the wealthiest player in the game.

Believe it or not, the origins of Monopoly actually go back to a game that was trying to teach people the exact opposite of what the modern game is about. If you've previously heard anything about the history of Monopoly, there is a good chance that what you've heard is either completely wrong or woefully incomplete. The history of the game actually starts in the early 20th century with a woman by the name of Lizzie McGee.

Born in 1866 after the U.S. Civil War, McGee came from a family of abolitionists. She was very intelligent, having a patent on a superior way for paper to get through the rollers of a typewriter. She was an outspoken advocate for women to get the right to vote, and for the purpose of this story, she was a Georgist, a follower of Henry George. Henry George and Georgism was an economic ideology that held there should be a single tax on rent from land and all other natural resources.

Labor and trade should not be taxed. So Georgists were against income taxes, sales taxes, and tariffs and thought that they should all be replaced with forms of property taxes. They felt that this was the most efficient, fair, and equitable way to finance the government and run an economy. And there was an odd mix of socialists and free market capitalists that have historically supported Georgist ideas on taxation. But that's another story.

Lizzie McGee felt that speeches and pamphlets weren't the most effective way to demonstrate Georgist ideals. She thought that a game could demonstrate how rents made property owners rich and impoverished tenants. So, in 1903, she created The Landlord Game. The Landlord Game is played on a square board. Players move around the board and land on properties that you could buy. Each property had different values, with the top properties being Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Wall Street.

There were also spaces for railroads and a space for jail. If all of this sounds shockingly familiar, that's because it is. The game had two sets of rules that you could play by, monopolist or anti-monopolist. With the monopolist set of rules, you win by bankrupting everyone else. In the anti-monopolist, also known as prosperity set of rules, the game was over when the player with the least amount of money doubled their wealth.

The game was granted a U.S. patent in 1904, and in 1906, she and other Georgists created a company to publish the game known as the Economic Game Company. In 1909, they pitched the game to the board game company Parker Brothers to have them publish it, but they declined, saying that the rules were too confusing. The game developed a niche following in the Northeast United States amongst intellectuals, college professors, and Quakers. The game was mainly spread by word of mouth, with some people making their own boards and creating their own rules.

The patent on the Landlord game expired in 1921, and later Lizzie McGee applied for another patent which was granted in 1924. The 1924 game had small changes to the rules, including the ability to charge higher rents when you owned all the properties of a certain type, and the ability to improve properties with tokens. She again went to George Parker of Parker Brothers about publishing the game, and he again turned it down, saying it was too political. However, he was the one who encouraged her to get another patent.

Different versions and homemade boards kept popping up everywhere. Daniel W. Lehman produced a version of the game called Finance, which included spaces and cards for things like Chance and Community Chest. In the early 1930s, a woman by the name of Ruth Hoskins learned the game in Indianapolis where she was a teacher and took it back home to Atlantic City, New Jersey. There, she made a new board using the names of the streets in Atlantic City.

Hoskins taught the game to another Quaker by the name of Eugene Rayford, who taught it to his friend, Charles Todd, who in turn taught it to a woman named Esther Darrow. Esther Darrow was the wife of Charles Darrow. After Charles Darrow played the game for the first time, he asked Charles Todd if he had a written set of rules. Todd found the request odd, as there really were no written rules for the game. And that was the last time that Charles Darrow ever spoke to Charles Todd.

Soon afterward, Charles Darrow began selling a board game that he called Monopoly, complete with all of the Atlantic City street names from the version he played with Charles Todd. In fact, on Todd's board, he misspelled Marvin's Gardens using an I instead of an E. And on Darrow's game, he kept the same misspelling, copying it almost exactly.

Darrow and his son created handmade versions of the board and cards, until eventually hiring a printer. Many of the features of the board, including the red car and free parking, the lightbulb and faucet on the utilities, and the black locomotives on the railroads, were all created at this time. In 1934, Darrow took the game first to Milton Bradley, who rejected it, and then to Parker Brothers, who, again, rejected it for the same reasons they rejected the original Landlord game. They thought it was too complicated.

There was, however, one thing that made Parker Brothers change their mind. Money. Darrow sold the printed version of his game at FAO Schwartz in New York and Philadelphia, and it sold very well over the Christmas season. Parker Brothers came back after Christmas, and in March they purchased the rights to the game and helped Darrow take out a patent on it. However, despite adamantly insisting that he was the inventor of the game, Parker Brothers soon learned that he wasn't the inventor of the game and that he basically got it from the Landlord game.

To cover themselves, Parker Brothers purchased the rights to Lizzie McGee's 1924 patent and all the copyrights of the game that she held for $500. And they likewise also purchased the rights to the game, Finance. Parker Brothers began selling the game in 1935. They added the metal game pieces, which were originally a battleship, a cannon, a clothes iron, a shoe, a top hat, and a thimble.

Very soon after the game was released, in December 1935, Parker Brothers received a transatlantic call from Victor Watson Sr. of Waddington Games in Great Britain. Transatlantic calls were very rare and expensive at the time, and it made a big impression on the people at Parker Brothers as to the importance of the call. Watson loved the game and ended up purchasing the rights to publish the game in Europe and other Commonwealth countries other than Canada.

The first thing they did was change the names of the properties to places in London. The top properties, instead of Boardwalk and Park Place, became Mayfair and Park Lane. The game became a hit in both the UK and France. However, the game was soon banned in Nazi Germany. Joseph Goebbels said that it was banned due to its, quote, However, after the war was discovered, the real reason it was banned was because so many high-ranking Nazi officials lived on the streets with the highest value in the game.

The game went on to become a massive global hit, arguably the most popular board game of all time, excluding such games as Chess and Checkers. When Parker Brothers told the story of the creation of Monopoly, they completely omitted everything that happened before Charles Darrow, and claimed that he had been the sole inventor of the game. It wasn't until the 1970s in a lawsuit that the story of Lizzie McGee and the Landlord game came to light, based on the existing copies of her game that survived, as well as the patents she filed.

Monopoly has gone on to sell an estimated 275 million copies worldwide, having been printed in 37 languages. And there have been an estimated 7,500 different versions of Monopoly created for different regions, as well as special events, as well as different versions of the game over time. The largest collection of Monopoly games has over 3,500 different games in it. There's been a world champion of Monopoly held since 1973, however, it's held pretty infrequently.

The last championship was held in 2015 in Macau, and it was won by Niccolo Falcone from Italy. I'd like to end this episode with some practical advice. The next time you play Monopoly, what strategy can you use to win? Monopoly is a non-deterministic game. That means there is no one strategy you can use to win because the dice offer a random element that you have no control over. The best you can do is increase your odds of winning.

So with that, the first thing you can do, which will significantly increase your odds of winning, is to simply go first. Assuming you play a rational strategy, which I'll get to in a bit, your odds of winning are always greatest, no matter how many players, if you go first. In a two-player game, whoever goes first has a 53.5% chance of winning. And in a three-player game, you have a 37.2% chance of winning. Once the game has started, your best strategy is to buy as many properties as you can, as quickly as you can.

There's obviously an element of luck here, but even lower-valued properties can have value later on when conducting trades. Moreover, if you buy it, nobody else can buy it. And the exception to this rule is utilities, which should always be avoided. The most valuable properties on the board are the orange and red properties. These are the ones immediately before and after free parking. The reason is that the most frequently visited square on the board is jail.

Given the odds of dice rolls, these properties will be visited more frequently than any other properties on the board. Most players assume that the blue properties are the best ones to own. They're nice, but you should be willing to trade a blue property to get one or two other monopolies. The other thing you should do is build houses as soon as you can. In particular, you want to have at least three houses on each property as soon as possible, as three is the number that has the largest inflection point in terms of rent increases.

Also, according to the rules, there are a limited number of houses and hotels that can be built in the game. The quicker you get them, the fewer there are for other players. And these strategies were developed over millions of computer-generated Monopoly games using what's known as a Monte Carlo simulation. Monopoly is a game where players are encouraged to amass properties to charge exorbitant rents to their opponents to bankrupt them.

But what most people don't know is that the game actually had its origins over 120 years ago as an educational tool whose goal was the exact opposite of what the game ended up becoming. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day.

And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.