The property trading game is older than most people think. Long before anyone put it in a box with a top hat on it, a woman in the United States designed a board game about land, and patented it in 1904. Property Rush, an independent Monopoly alternative I build, belongs to the same family. Here is the story in order, as the sources I read tell it.
1902 to 1904: a game with a lesson
Elizabeth Magie, known as Lizzie, designed The Landlord's Game in 1902 and 1903 and tried it out in Arden, Delaware. She meant it as a practical demonstration of what she called land grabbing, and she based it on the ideas of Henry George, a thinker who argued that rent enriches landowners and impoverishes tenants. She wanted children who played it to carry a sense of that unfairness into adult life.
In 1904 she received United States patent 748,626 for the first version.
1906 to the 1920s: spreading by hand
A version was published in 1906 by the Economic Game Company, formed in New York by followers of George. But much of the spread was informal. Quakers in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, especially college students and economics professors, copied and adapted the board. In Atlantic City, brothers Jesse and Eugene Raiford renamed its properties after local streets. Variants appeared under names such as Finance and Auction.
A second patent was filed in 1923 and issued in 1924, number 1,509,312.
1913 and 1932: other editions
A British edition appeared in 1913 under a very different name, Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit. In 1932 the Adgame Company published the 1924 version as Landlord's Game and Prosperity.
1935: a sale for 500 dollars
Parker Brothers had rejected Magie's game around 1909 as too complicated. In 1935 it bought her 1923 patent for $500, at a time when it was already selling a similar game bought from another inventor. It printed a very small run of hers and put it aside by 1936. In that year she gave interviews and showed copies of the original board to argue about who had invented the game.
What stayed the same?
The core is a loop of properties around a board, each with a price and a rent, dice to move you, and the pleasure and pain of owning land. The first board even showed the price and rent printed on each property, as Property Rush does.
What changed?
Magie's game came with two sets of rules: one in which wealth was shared and one in which players tried to ruin each other. Modern versions kept only the second. And boards moved from New York names to local ones, and then to whatever the publisher chose.
Property Rush uses a new board with eight countries and forty tiles. The structure is the one Magie began; the content is mine.
Where can you play it now?
The free table at Boardit starts a property trading game in a minute, and you can play with friends, up to six of them, online from their own devices. It is a board game online free of charge, about 45 minutes long, in a browser with no download.
What does the history teach?
That good game ideas travel through people. A game designed to teach about land became the most familiar family game in the world, because players kept copying and changing it. Every version since is a small act of that tradition.
Where the record is uncertain
The story of who invented what is argued over, and I rely on one summary. Where the sources disagree, I have kept to what is stated for the patents and dates and left out the rest.
Ahmed Moaz builds Boardit, a free browser game site.
Boardit is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro.