Communist Monopoly via Polish National Remembrance group

[Impulse97]

The group National Remembrance launched a game based on monopoly to illustrate how bad life was under Communism. Game play involves waiting in long lines and going without. Getting scarce supplies by knowing a government member and starving if you don't. It's meant to bridge the gap between those who are too young to remember it and explain how horrible it was.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,740587,00.html

It's rather disheartening to see things like this, because you just know that millions of gullible kids are gonna gobble this up like the gospel. One government gets corrupted and fucks up and now millions of kids will have warped ideas of Communism, just like their parents.

[Aurorus Ruber]

I recall seeing a thread on this already somewhere. Someone pointed out a game based on standing in line for hours on end would be really boring.

[Vendetta]

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[Kamos]

I have an idea! Capitalist monopoly! Just like the Monopoly we all know, except that if you have a certain amount of money or more, you get a bonus percentage to all income and a reduction to all expenses! You can also draw Chance cards which allow you to move with another player's avatar; if he has to pay, he pays it, and if he gets money, it goes to you! Finally, be careful not to step on the "you're screwed" field, or you lose immediately - there is always a chance the state turns against you and you lose everything, after all.

I say it's realistic and represents today's world well enough.

[praxis1966]

You know what the funny bit is? The original Monopoly game is thought to have been a socialist teaching tool. I saw this thing on The History Detectives (PBS Show) which explained how the oldest versions of it that can be found were actually designed to show kids how capitalism is vile. There are even some versions of the story that theorize (it's impossible to prove one way or the other) that Mother Jones may have been involved in developing it. Eventually, Milton-Bradley got a hold of it, put a copyright on it, and redesigned the whole damned board and it morphed into something else: an indoctrination device, lol. The rest is history.

[Red Commissar]

You know what the funny bit is? The original Monopoly game is thought to have been a socialist teaching tool. I saw this thing on The History Detectives (PBS Show) which explained how the oldest versions of it that can be found were actually designed to show kids how capitalism is vile. There are even some versions of the story that theorize (it's impossible to prove one way or the other) that Mother Jones may have been involved in developing it. Eventually, Milton-Bradley got a hold of it, put a copyright on it, and redesigned the whole damned board and it morphed into something else: an indoctrination device, lol. The rest is history.

Wikipedia has an article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monopoly) which goes over the History of Monopoly- it mentions what you said from the History Detectives show that the earliest version of monopoly was actually a game having players act as landlords and show them how bad the rent system is for the tenants while only benefiting the landlords themselves. Much of the original creator's idea was influenced by the thought of Henry George (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism).


In 1903, the Georgist Lizzie Magie applied for a patent on a game called The Landlord's Game with the object of showing that rents enriched property owners and impoverished tenants. She knew that some people would find it hard to understand the logic behind the idea, and she thought that if the rent problem and the Georgist solution to it were put into the concrete form of a game, it might be easier to demonstrate. She was granted the patent for the game in January 1904. The Landlord's Game became one of the first board games to use a "continuous path," without clearly defined start and end spaces on its board. A copy of Magie's game, dating from 1903–1904, was discovered for the PBS series History Detectives. This copy featured property groups, organized by letters, later a major feature of Monopoly as published by Parker Brothers.

Although The Landlord's Game was patented, and some hand-made boards were made, it was not actually manufactured and published until 1906. Magie and two other Georgists established the Economic Game Company of New York, which began publishing her game. Magie submitted an edition published by the Economic Game Company to Parker Brothers around 1910, which George Parker declined to publish. In the UK it was published in 1913 by the Newbie Game Company under the title Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit. Shortly after the game's formal publication, Scott Nearing, a professor in the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, began using the game as a teaching tool in his classes. His students made their own boards, and taught the game to others. After Nearing was dismissed from the Wharton School, he began teaching at the University of Toledo. A former student of Nearing's, Rexford Guy Tugwell, also taught The Landlord's Game at Wharton, and took it with him to Columbia University.

A shortened version of Magie's game, which eliminated the second round of play that used a Georgist concept of a single Land value tax, had become common during the 1910s, and this variation on the game became known as "Auction Monopoly.". Magie moved back to Illinois, married and moved to the Washington, D.C. area with her husband by 1923, and re-patented a revised version of The Landlord's Game in 1924 (under her married name, Elizabeth Magie Phillips). This version, unlike her first patent drawing, included named streets (though the versions published in 1910 based on her first patent also had named streets). Magie's first patent had expired, and she sought to regain control over the plethora of hand-made games. For her 1924 edition a couple of streets on the board were named after Chicago streets and locations, notably "The Loop" and "Lake Shore Drive." This revision included a special "Monopoly" rule and card that allowed higher rents to be charged when all three railroads and utilities were owned, and included "chips" to indicate improvements on properties. Magie again approached Parker Brothers about her game, and George Parker again declined. Apart from commercial distribution, it spread by word of mouth and was played in slightly variant homemade versions over the years by Quakers, Georgists, university students (including students at Smith College, Princeton, and MIT), and others who became aware of it.

In the 1920s, the game became popular around the community of Reading, Pennsylvania. Another former student of Scott Nearing, Thomas Wilson, taught the game to two brothers, Louis and Ferdinand Thun. After the Thuns learned the game and began teaching its rules to their fraternity brothers at Williams College, Daniel W. Layman, in turn, learned the game from the Thun brothers (who later tried to sell copies of the game commercially, but were advised by an attorney that the game could not be patented, as they were not its inventors).Layman later returned to his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, and produced a version of the board based on streets of that city. This he sold under the name The Fascinating Game of Finance (later shortened to Finance), beginning in 1932.Layman first produced and sold the game with a friend in Indianapolis, who owned a company called Electronic Laboratories. Layman soon sold his rights to the game, which was then licensed, produced and marketed by Knapp Electric.The published board featured four railroads (one per side), Chance and Community Chest cards and spaces, and properties grouped by symbol, rather than color.

It was in Indianapolis that Ruth Hoskins learned the game, and took it back to Atlantic City. After she arrived, Hoskins made a new board with Atlantic City street names, and taught it to a group of local Quakers. It has been argued that their greatest contribution to the game was to reinstate the original Lizzie Magie rule of "buying properties at their listed price" rather than auctioning them, as the Quakers did not believe in auctions. The Atlantic City board was the one taught to Charles Todd, who in turn taught Esther Darrow, wife of Charles Darrow. Todd had shortened the name Shore Fast Line to Short Line, and also introduced the infamous "Marvin Gardens" misspelling, both of which Darrow reproduced. After learning the game, Darrow then began to distribute the game himself as Monopoly. Darrow initially made the sets of the Monopoly game by hand with the help of his first son, William Darrow, and his wife. Their new sets retained Charles Todd's misspelling of "Marvin Gardens". Charles Darrow drew the designs with a drafting pen on round pieces of oilcloth, and then his son and his wife helped fill in the spaces with colors and make the title deed cards and the Chance cards and Community Chest cards. After the demand for the game increased, Darrow contacted a printing company, Patterson and White, which printed the designs of the property spaces on square carton boards. Darrow's game board's designs included elements later made famous in the version eventually produced by Parker Brothers, including black locomotives on the railroad spaces, the car on "Free Parking," the red arrow for "Go," the faucet on "Water Works" and the light bulb on "Electric Company" and the question marks on the "Chance" spaces, though many of the actual icons were created by a hired graphic artist. While Darrow received a copyright on his game in 1933, its specimens have disappeared from the files of the United States Copyright Office, though proof of its registration remains.