Was Monopoly invented by a woman to criticise landlords?

Monopoly is the game of buying up streets, building hotels and bankrupting your family. It might be the most capitalist thing ever sold in a box. So it is wonderfully ironic that the game it grew out of was designed to warn people about exactly that kind of behaviour.

The short answer

Yes. The game that became Monopoly was created by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie, who received US patent number 748,626 on 5 January 1904 for The Landlord’s Game. She designed it to show how rents made property owners rich while making tenants poorer.

The real story

Magie was a follower of the economist Henry George, whose 1879 book Progress and Poverty argued for a single tax on land values. Her game was a teaching tool. It came with two sets of rules: one where players tried to grab everything and crush their rivals, and another, later called the Prosperity rules, where everyone gained when wealth was created. The point was to show that the second way was better.

She offered the game to Parker Brothers in 1910, and they turned it down. A British version was even sold in 1913 under the title Brer Fox an’ Brer Rabbit, but it sold poorly. Meanwhile, players across the US started making their own home-made boards and changing the rules. One, made by a Quaker named Ruth Hoskins, used Atlantic City street names, and it was passed from friend to friend.

That is how Charles Darrow came across it, learning the game from a home-made set. He produced his own version, and in 1935 Parker Brothers, which had rejected him the year before, bought it. For decades, the box and the company’s marketing told the story of Darrow as the lone inventor.

The twist: Parker Brothers also quietly bought Magie’s updated patent. She received just $500 and no royalties. Monopoly, meanwhile, went on to become a household name.

Magie was a bold character in other ways too. Struggling on a stenographer’s wage of $10 a week, she once placed a newspaper advert offering herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder.

Why people get it wrong

The Darrow story was simply a better sales pitch: a jobless man during the Great Depression invents a game and makes a fortune. It was printed in the game’s own materials and repeated for years. Magie’s role only came back into the spotlight after the game designer Ralph Anspach fought Parker Brothers in court over his Anti-Monopoly game and dug up the history along the way.

“She built a game to teach people that landlords were the baddies. They turned it into a game about becoming one. Classic.”