Monopoly, that board game that so many people have at home, is a true ode to capitalism. Each player competes to be the richest, but above all, to ruin everyone else. They buy streets, houses, hotels, the water and electricity company, train stations, the worst thing that can happen to you is to pay taxes… and you can even get out of jail if you pay.
Perhaps the best-selling game in history, the game was created by Charles Darrow, a home heater salesman who was unemployed because of the Great Depression. He made it by hand in his house, with the help of his wife and his son, with pieces of rubber and cardboard. Those first versions were so successful that he had to commission the production to a Pennsylvania printer, already with his classic cardboard board. He patented the idea in 1935. And that same year, after several attempts, he sold the rights to the Parker Brothers toy company, now owned by Hasbro.
The Guinness Book of Records says that more than 500 million people have played Monopoly in the world. And Darrow did indeed end up becoming filthy rich. An unemployed worker who becomes a millionaire, a story of overcoming perfect as an epilogue to talk about capitalism.
The Landlord’s Game
If it weren’t for the fact that Monopoly is actually inspired, or copied, from ‘The Landlord’s Game’, . And the spirit of that game was the opposite.
Lizzie Maggie was an inventor, poet, feminist and very much on the left, and in 1903 she launched ‘The Landords Game’. Her goal was to show the dangers of accumulating large sums of money at the expense of others, the problems that income inequality created.
For this, the game consisted of a board with a circuit, something very new for the time, full of streets for sale, and developed two regulations, one anti-monopoly, and the other monopolistic. With the first, every time a player bought one of those streets, he had to pay taxes, and that money was distributed among the rest of the players. And the game ended when the player who had started with less money managed to double it. Everyone won!
With the second regulation, the monopolist, the players had to buy properties and charge everyone who fell into them, and the winner was the one who managed to ruin the rest of the players. Yes, this regulation coincides with that of Monopoly.
The objective, explained Maggie herself, was for the players to live in their own flesh a practical demonstration of the land grabbing system, as well as its results and consequences. And that they understood the consequences that different approaches to property could cause.
“Men and women will find they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller have more than they know what to do with”
It must be taken into account that we are talking about . In this sense, in an interview, Maggie herself expressed her desire that “in a short time, men and women discover that they are poor because Rockefeller and, perhaps, have more than they know what to do with it.”
With the game, Maggie was actually trying to reflect and spread the ideas of Henry George, a very left-wing economist at the time, whom she met through a book her father gave her, also a prominent antitrust activist. The basis of George’s theory was the defense of the importance of collecting taxes, and reinventing what was collected for the common good.
The game ended up having relative success, especially among the intellectuals of the East Coast and the great universities of the country. So much so that different versions of it ended up being made. In the 1930s, Darrow discovered one of those versions in a meeting with friends. He was so impressed with the game that he ended up developing his own version of it, which he called Monopoly, and it’s the one he ended up selling to Parker Brothers.
Versions of ‘The Landlord’s Game’ also reached other countries. In Spain, for example, El Palé was very successful, with the streets of Madrid. The publishing company ended up in court with the owners of the rights, which was resolved with the arrival in Spain of the original Monopoly, at the hands of Borrás. based on the streets of other cities in Spain, another based on all the cities of the European Union… any country worth its salt has its own edition.
Cuba developed a version in which the objective is not to buy streets, but to defeat the IMF
Even Cuba had its own apocryphal version, called Eternal Debt, where the players did not play businessmen looking to get rich, but rather played the role of governments of third world countries, whose objective was to defeat the IMF.
As if that were not enough, and if Maggie had not had enough trouble with what has ended up being her work if she had lived to see it, there have been versions of film sagas, companies…
Nowadays . In fact, during the pandemic, their purchase skyrocketed. There is no trace of Maggie’s original idea in it, it has no pedagogical spirit, and the winner is the one who manages to ruin the rest.
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