The Landlord’s Game

The Landlord’s Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie? as a teaching tool for the land-value-tax philosophy of the economist Henry George?, and the direct antecedent of the game later marketed as Monopoly.¹⁶¹⁷ Magie designed it as “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” using play money, deeds, mortgages, rents, and taxes to model the accumulation of wealth in the real world.⁷¹⁶ Its board, gameplay, and iconography — a continuous track around a square board divided into named properties, railroads, utilities, a jail, and a “Go to Jail” space — are recognizably those of the game that became a global commercial hit.²⁶

Design and purpose

Magie, known to friends as Lizzie, was a stenographer, writer, actress, and outspoken feminist in the Washington, D.C., area who had been introduced to Henry George’s ideas by her father, the abolitionist newspaper publisher James Magie.⁵ James Magie had run for office on an anti-monopoly ticket and had accompanied Abraham Lincoln as he debated Stephen Douglas across Illinois in the late 1850s, and he shared a copy of George’s Progress and Poverty with his daughter.⁵ George, in that 1879 book, argued that no individual could truly “own” land and advocated a “single tax” on land values, shifting the tax burden onto wealthy landowners such as Andrew Carnegie? and John D. Rockefeller?.²⁵ Magie built her game to dramatize this doctrine, at a time when fewer than one percent of U.S. patent applicants were women.³⁵

The board featured a path allowing players to circle it continuously — a departure from the linear-path design common in games of the era — with corners for the Poor House, the Public Park, and the Jail.³ In place of Monopoly’s “Go” was a space reading “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages,” and each circuit of the board earned a player wages of $100.³⁶ Players who ran out of money were sent to the Poor House, where others could charge them exorbitant interest, while those who trespassed on land held out of use — one large tract owned by “Lord Blueblood, of London, England,” representing foreign ownership of American soil — were sent to Jail until they threw a double or paid a $50 fine.⁷ Magie described the “rallying and chaffing of the others” when a player landed in jail or the poor house as “a large part of the fun and merriment of the game”.⁷

The 1906 version included railroads, public utilities such as the “Soakum Lighting System” and “Slambang Trolley,” a “luxury tax” of $75, and Chance cards bearing quotations from Thomas Jefferson (“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living”), John Ruskin, and Andrew Carnegie.² Its most valuable properties were New York City’s Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Wall Street.² Each trip around the board represented labor performed, and a full game continued until every player had completed ten rounds, with each round taking forty moves.⁷

Magie’s most distinctive feature was a dual rule set. One set of rules was anti-monopolist, rewarding all players when wealth was created and channeling land rent into a common pot so that, as Magie later wrote, “Prosperity is achieved”; the other was monopolist, in which players sought to build monopolies and drive opponents into financial ruin.⁹⁵ Under the cooperative rules, players could vote at any time during a game — by agreement of at least two of them — to “put the single tax into operation”.¹⁴ The two rules were a teaching device meant to demonstrate the moral superiority of the cooperative version, but it was the cutthroat monopolist rules that caught on.⁵¹⁴

Patents and publication

Magie filed her patent application on March 23, 1903, and the patent (No. 748,626) was granted on January 5, 1904.³⁴ She had earlier described the invention in the Autumn 1902 issue of The Single Tax Review, calling it a game “played with checkers and dice as is parcheesi” and reporting that children of nine or ten could easily understand it.⁷ She developed the design in collaboration with friends in her Brentwood, Maryland, community and refined it during visits to the single-tax enclave of Arden, Delaware? around 1903.⁴ She first self-published a small run sold to friends, then in 1906 helped establish the Economic Game Company of New York, which published the game.⁴¹⁷

In 1910 Magie married the businessman Albert Phillips, and under her married name of Elizabeth Magie Phillips she patented a new edition (No. 1,509,312) in 1924.⁴ That edition, published in 1932 by the Washington, D.C., firm Adgame Company, added named streets, a second alternative rule set, and a second name, Prosperity.⁴

The game spread informally for close to three decades, played under names such as “Monopoly,” “Finance,” and “Auction,” and copied by hand onto linen or oilcloth.⁹⁸ Among single taxers it was considered a point of honor not to sell the design to a commercial manufacturer, since it had been worked out collectively.⁸ As students and players altered the rules, they introduced the auction of properties on landing, grouped properties by color, and allowed buildings to be added that raised rents.⁸ It was especially popular among Quaker communities in Atlantic City and Philadelphia and among economics professors and students; the Wharton economist Scott Nearing? used it in his teaching at the University of Pennsylvania until his 1915 dismissal for criticizing industrial capitalism, and it was played at Princeton, Haverford, Harvard, and Columbia.⁹⁸¹⁶¹⁷ Players in Atlantic City, led by the Quaker teacher Ruth Hoskins, added that resort’s street names, producing the version that would become familiar.¹⁸ In 1913 a Liberal committee in the Scottish village of Newbie licensed a British edition retitled Brer Fox an’ Brer Rabbit, casting David Lloyd George as the reformer Brer Fox and the unscrupulous landlord as Brer Rabbit; it flopped, but predated the Waddingtons London edition of Monopoly by more than two decades.¹²

Appropriation as Monopoly

The chain of transmission ran from Nearing’s students through fraternity players and Quaker teachers to Ruth Hoskins in Atlantic City, and thence to Charles Todd, who taught the game to Charles Darrow? and his wife Esther around 1932.¹⁷³ Todd, who had never seen written rules and never knew any existed, wrote them up at Darrow’s request; the version Darrow learned even preserved the misspelling of “Marven Gardens” as “Marvin Gardens”.⁸¹⁷ Darrow, an unemployed heater salesman in Philadelphia, drew his own copy on a round piece of oilcloth, secured a copyright for his edition in 1933, sold it to Parker Brothers?, and was granted a patent on December 31, 1935.⁴¹⁷¹⁶ Monopoly sold just over two million copies in its first two years, made Darrow a wealthy man, and likely saved Parker Brothers from bankruptcy.² Included in Monopoly boxes for decades was the story that Darrow had invented the game while tinkering in his basement, which he described as “a freak,” “entirely unexpected and illogical”.³¹⁷

As part of a strategy to absorb games that threatened Monopoly’s monopoly — among them Easy Money, Finance, and Inflation — Parker Brothers bought up rival titles, and in November 1935 George Parker visited Magie and purchased her patent, reportedly for $500 and without royalties.¹⁷⁵¹⁶ Parker promised to market The Landlord’s Game and to develop two further games of Magie’s design, King’s Men and Bargain Day, though all fared poorly; Parker Brothers issued a version of The Landlord’s Game in 1939.¹⁷¹⁹ Magie, then elderly, protested Darrow’s appropriation in 1936 interviews with The Washington Post and the Evening Star, holding up her own boards for photographers to prove she was the true creator; the Evening Star noted the game had likely cost her more in fees than she ever made from it.⁵ She died in 1948 in relative obscurity, a childless widow whose headstone and obituary made no mention of her role.⁵

Magie’s authorship resurfaced in the 1970s when the economist Ralph Anspach?, a professor at San Francisco State University sued by Parker Brothers over his game Anti-Monopoly, uncovered the earlier history while researching his defense; the resulting legal battle ran for about a decade and reached the U.S. Supreme Court.¹¹⁶²² Journalist Mary Pilon later documented the full account in her 2015 book The Monopolists.¹¹⁹ One 2016 scholarly analysis argued that The Landlord’s Game derived structurally from the Native American game Zohn Ahl, as documented in Stewart Culin’s ethnographic study Chess and Playing-Cards.¹⁰