Strange Board Game Origins

I grew up playing all kinds of board games. To this day, I still love a good board game night - Monopoly, Clue, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, and so many more. I don't get as much time to play these days, but when I do get a chance, it's tons of fun. But have you ever considered the origins of some of the best board games. Let's take a look:

The Game of Life

If you've never played this game, you don't know what you're missing.  The game simulates a person's travels through his or her life, from college to retirement, with jobs, marriage, and possible children along the way. The original version of Life was somewhat more pessimistic than the one we play today. Some of the board's original squares included "Disgrace," "Poverty," and "Ruin," as well as "Crime," "Prison," and -- no joke -- "Suicide." 

So who was the psychopath behind this grim game? Milton Bradley himself, who was going through a bit of a rough time when he made it. Bradley was a professional lithographer at the time, and was driven to financial ruin, solely because Abraham Lincoln grew a beard. I'm not making this up. Mr. Bradley was making a good living in 1860 selling lithographs of a then-beardless Abraham Lincoln until a little 11-year-old girl named Grace Bedell sent Honest Abe a letter asking him to grow a beard, which he did. This unprecedented presidential fashion statement basically destroyed Bradley's business after all his unsold portraits of clean-shaven Abe were judged "so yesterday."

At the end of his rope and probably out of alcohol, Mr. Bradley sat down and sketched The Checkered Game of Life. As a result, for decades children throughout the country actually had fun killing themselves in a board game.

Clue

So right away you can see that you can learn a lot about the state of mind of the creator from the finished product. This brings me to one of my favorite board games, Clue. It's a dark subject for a game if you think about it -- some of the murder weapons (i.e., the candlestick) would only work by splashing the brains of the victim all over the floor of the fancy mansion. So under what circumstances would someone think this was an appropriate game for kids?

The game was released in England in 1949 under the name Cluedo, which is an amalgamation of Clue and Ludo (Latin for "I play"). And, while most board games enjoy the reputation as something you save for a rainy day, the rainy days that brought you Clue were rains of Nazi bombs on British households. Clue is the only board game on this list made possible because of Adolf Hitler.

In 1944, Anthony E. Pratt, an English solicitor's clerk, filed for a patent of his invention of a murder/mystery-themed game, originally named "Murder!" The game was originally invented as a new game to play during sometimes lengthy air raid drills in underground bunkers during the war. Shortly thereafter, Pratt and his wife presented the game to game manufacturer Waddingtons's executive, Norman Watson, who immediately purchased the game.

There are some difference between the original game and today's version. Most notably, the weapons not only included the classic gun, rope, knife and three makeshift de-brainers, but also an axe, fireplace poker, syringe, poison, a bomb and a shillelagh (walking stick/cudgel).  That's right, in the original Clue you could totally kill a dude with a bomb. It took a lot to shock that generation, and understandably so.

Monopoly

Released in 1935, Monopoly is the most popular board game in the world behind, well, chess. It has sold more than 275 million copies, been played by more than a billion people, and prompted people such as Wall Streeter Derk Solko to describe it as one of the most amoral experiences in the history of entertainment: Solko stated, "Monopoly has you grinding your opponents into dust. It's a very negative experience. It's all about cackling when your opponent lands on your space and you get to take all their money." I played this game a few months ago and my friend's husband totally cackled as he wiped me off the floor.

The official story according to Hasbro is that during "the height of the Great Depression" an unemployed salesman named Charles Darrow proposed Monopoly to Parker Brothers in 1934, was first rejected, but eventually closed the deal. This is the official legend as told by -- no joke -- Mr. Monopoly, the robber baron on the box.

Since anyone should be suspicious of any company that leaves their official truth-telling to their mascots, several people have smelled a rat big enough to investigate the story. It turns out that, in a strangely appropriate revelation, Monopoly was actually pirated wholesale from a board game called The Landlord's Game which was patented in 1904 by a Quaker named Elizabeth Magie.

This game was very much the Monopoly we all know and hate, except it included a crucial second round designed to teach "just how unfair monopolies can be." That's right, Monopoly is actually supposed to be a lesson on unscrupulous business practices comparable to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, but the monopolistic bastards at Parker Brothers deliberately kept it evil to appeal to the darker angels of our souls.

How did they get away with this? Easy. According to PBS' History Detectives: "a large firm which manufactures games" bought out Ms. Magie's patent for $500.

As for that "legend" on Hasbro's website, that was even easier for Parker Brothers. They just had their fictional spokesperson Mr. Monopoly make it up to better suit their image of a family-friendly monopoly. The fact that they pulled all this off during the Great Depression takes some seriously big balls.

Trivial Pursuit

It's that infuriating family trivia game that your annoying know-it-all uncle always wins.

Long before Trivial Pursuit famously became the bane of George Costanza, its distributors found themselves in the middle of a damning lawsuit. It turned out as many as one third of the questions in the game were lifted from the book Super Trivia, vol. II by Fred L. Worth. You see, Worth deliberately slipped an error into his book to catch any would-be plagiarists. Sure enough, when Trivial Pursuit hit the stores, that one bad answer turned up on the cards (Detective Columbo's first name is Frank, not Philiip). This seemed like a key point to Worth, since, you know, trivia was the entire point of the game. In 1984, he sued the inventors.

Unfortunately for Worth, his clever plan was foiled by the game's creators, Scott Abbott and Chris Haney, who successfully convinced every lower court that being both lazy and stupid was not a crime now that they were rich. Worth took his case all the way to the US Supreme Court, figuring that writing a third of their material for them entitled him to a cut of the game's gargantuan profits.

But the creators' argument (which the court agreed with) was that you can't copyright facts. It's the same reason you can't copyright a phone book -- those numbers belong to everybody, even if somebody else spent hundreds of hours assembling and researching them.

Still, it'd have been nice if they had at least thanked the man.

Chutes and Ladders

A favorite with preschoolers, Chutes and Ladders is billed by Hasbro as a game about "rewards and consequences." Do good deeds and you get to ascend up the board on some ladders. Dick around and down the chutes you go.

For those of you who are British, you may be familiar with the game's foreign incarnation: Snakes and Ladders.

The British Empire was once in the business of terrorizing India and subsequently robbing it of everything good to come out of that country. Snakes and Ladders was one of those things. Over there, the game was known as Vaikuntapaali or Paramapada Sopanam, which meant "the ladder to salvation."

Sure enough, all this "salvation" business has to do with Hinduism, and all those snakes scattered across the board are temptations. Except that, in this version, landing on a snake's head didn't just send you back a few squares. The idea is that for each temptation you land on you die and have to go through life all over again.

Vaikuntapaali was meant to illustrate how even a successful life can be ruined at the zero-hour due to one small screw up. Some of its original squares of "evil" included disobedience, vanity, vulgarity, theft, lying, drunkenness, and debt. As you advance through the game, you have to contend with still greater challenges such as rage, greed, pride, murder, and, yes, lust.

As though the game we know today isn't frustrating enough, in the Indian original, it is virtually impossible to advance to the end without landing on at least several temptations. It's almost as if whoever came up with this fun party game viewed everyone as some kind of a Hell-worthy sinner, especially those with the unfortunate luck to land on temptation after temptation for eternity.