September 8, 2026 • 32 mins
Turns out, the history of board games isn't as simple as passing Go and collecting $200. From the surprising way Abraham Lincoln's beard changed Milton Bradley's career, to the dramatic shift in Monopoly's political orientation, to the ancient Sumerian board game you can play online right now, today Will and Mango go wild game hunting... and come back with plenty of stories to tell.
This episode originally aired on January 6, 2025.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Part-Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what, Will? What's that, Mango? Did you know that
the game Candyland comes from a polio ward?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I have to say, I cannot think of two things
more different than Candyland and polio, Mango.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I know, it sounds entirely insane. But in 1948, a
teacher named Eleanor Abbott invented Candyland during a polio epidemic.
Apparently Abbott got sick and was confined to this hospital
where children were being treated in iron lungs, which, you know,
just sounds horrible. Iron lungs, for those of you who
don't know, were these early types of respirator where the
(00:45):
kids were basically immobilized and mostly they're just lying on
their backs, unable to see anything except the white ceiling
above them. And to counter all of this, Abbott creates
this bright, cheerful game where the only goal, the only
goal is to move around the landscape of treats. And
her original version of the board even showed a boy
(01:05):
in a leg brace starting to walk. Wow, that's that's
pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
And, you know, I almost feel bad admitting this now,
but I always thought Candyland was kind of boring.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Is that controversial to say? I don't know. I mean,
let's be clear, it is super dull. The game basically
requires no effort and has no strategy, but it was
made as mindless entertainment. It was really this way for
kids to imagine again and pass time. But, you know,
reading about Candyland made me wonder about all these colorful
(01:35):
cardboard boxes in family rooms across the country and the
incredible stories hiding inside them, many of which don't involve
deadly diseases.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So let's dive in. Hey there, podcast listeners. Welcome back
(02:08):
to Part-Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always, I'm
here with my good friend, Mangesh Hatikader. And there behind
the booth, that's our amazing producer, Dylan Fagan, who seems
to be wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Haven't seen those in a minute.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
He's got a pipe. I hope the smoke alarm doesn't
go off. And he's waving something at us. Mago, can
you actually tell what that is?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, I think it's a candlestick, which is maybe a
reference to Clue. Oh, my God. It's Professor Fagan in
the booth with a candlestick. That's amazing. So I was
a big fan of Clue, but Will, I'm wondering if
you had to pick, what would you say is your
favorite board game of all time?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
You know, if we're having to stick to board games
versus just like a party game in a box, I
probably would put Clue way up there. I mean, it
is so much fun playing with the family. My daughter
gets so into it and so anxious about one of
us guessing before her, and it just gets real heated,
but in the right kind of way. But if I
had to just say my favorite, like, game in a box,
(03:13):
I'd probably go with something like Taboo. I just love
the element of a timer being there and it being
a word-based game and having to play with a team
and just getting so into it and all the screaming
that starts to happen when it gets really heated.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I don't know. Those would probably be my two favorites.
How about you? Yeah. Yeah, for parties, I like Scattergories,
I think. I think Scattergories is always really, really fun.
Ruby brought home this game called Outfoxed a few years ago,
and it's for younger kids. But there is a fox
who has stolen a pie, and you're trying to figure
(03:49):
out which fox it is, and it's super, super cute
and really, really fun. Oh, that's fun. That's a game
I've been giving to people recently. So many good games
out there.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well, you know, one of the things that surprised me
when I started researching for this topic is just how
many different types of board games there are out there.
In fact, in 1999, a renowned British games historian named
David Parlett, he published a book called The Oxford History
of Board Games. And he divided board games into four
different groups.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
You've got your.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Race games, where the goal is to cross a finish
line or get your pieces home first. You've got your
space games where you need to achieve a certain pattern
or configuration. You've got your chase games where you hunt
down and thwart your opponent's pieces. And then you've got
your displace games where you win by capturing your opponent's pieces.
(04:38):
So I don't know if you've got all those straight now,
but those are the four categories.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I love that games historian is a real job, but
I also love that the height of games historian is
that you make your categories rhyme like that. Right, right.
Isn't it amazing? It's really amazing. Yeah. But I am curious,
where does something like Monopoly fit into the system?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Mango, do not underestimate British games historian David Parlett. So
to address questions just like that one you asked, he
actually added in an informal fifth classification. These are theme games.
So I guess they didn't rhyme with the others, but
it includes, quote, the plethora of modern board games chiefly
categorized by thematic subject matter, such as property trading or
(05:20):
crime detection.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Well, I mean, I do love that someone is taking
such an academic approach to understanding board games. It's really
kind of amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
It's honestly one of my favorite things is when people
have such specific specialties. Like, I really do love that
to be like the guy to go to on stuff
like this. But Anyway, Parlett explains that board games are
a cultural activity. Not unlike music or dance, they've been
part of human civilization for as long as human civilization
has been around. And as a result, they deserve to
(05:50):
be studied.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
I actually wanted to know what the world's first board
game was, and it turns out it's something called Senet.
The game means passing, and it was a popular board
game in ancient Egypt, played by everyday people as well
as royalty. And One of the paintings in Queen Nefertiti's
tomb shows her playing it. And King Tut was actually
buried with five Senate game boxes. So how did the
(06:13):
game work? I mean, the thing is, we don't really
have a definitive account of the rules. What we know
mostly comes from tomb paintings and the few surviving boards.
But basically, the board was a grid of 30 squares
made of three rows of 10. And you start at
the top left corner and move your pieces across the
rows until you get to the bottom right corner. But
what's interesting about it is that while archaeologists think Senet
(06:37):
began as this sort of simple pastime, like something you
played for fun, eventually it took on this greater meaning.
So there's actually a tomb art that shows the deceased
playing Senet against their living relatives. And that suggests the
game had the power to connect the living and the dead.
And some people think the game may represent the soul's
journey through the realm of the dead as they try
(06:59):
to reach the afterlife.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
So maybe a little bit more profound than, say, Hungry
Hungry Hippos. But, you know, I also looked into ancient
board games, and I discovered the story of the Royal
Game of Ur. Now, it was played in Mesopotamia around
4,500 years ago, and Westerners learned all about it in
the 1920s when a British archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley
(07:21):
was exploring the ruins there in Ur that was the
great Sumerian city-state in modern-day Iraq. And so deep in
the royal tombs there, Woolley found these beautiful boards made
from shells and semi-precious stones, but there was nothing to
indicate what the game was exactly or how to play it.
So for decades, the boards just sat there at the
(07:42):
British Museum.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And I'm guessing the story doesn't end there. It does not.
I have more to say about that.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And so that's when Irving Finkel, who was a British
Museum curator with the perfect name for a British Museum curator,
Irving Finkel, he enters the scene. Now, he's apparently quite
a character. He's got his huge white beard and bushy eyebrows,
all these things that you knew exactly when I said
his name was Irving Finkel. And he's obsessed with board
games and cuneiform. And this made him uniquely suited to
(08:11):
solve this mystery. So one day in the 1980s, he's
looking at a tablet that had this weird combination of
Sumerian and Babylonian languages on it, and he's just trying
to decipher it. And Finkel figured out it was written
by a Babylonian scribe who was quoting an early Sumerian document.
This was all about the royal game of Ur.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
So... What was he looking at? Like, did he find
directions for the game? He kind of did.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So the tablet Finkel translated had a set of directions
for a gameplay that included fortune telling, like landing on
certain squares apparently predicted your future. But like I said,
this Babylonian guy was quoting an earlier description of the game.
And so that helped Finkel reconstruct the original method of play.
And under David Parlett's classification, it's a race game. So
(08:59):
you move your pieces along the board by rolling dice,
which back in Sumerian times would have been made from
sheep or ox bones. And whoever gets all their pieces
across the finish line wins. Now you can thwart your
opponent by landing on one of their pieces and then
sending them back to the start. And according to Finkel,
special marked squares gave you an extra turn.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
So even some of the little things that you would
see in today's games. Yeah, I know. It feels so
modern in a sense. So can you actually play this
game now? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And so lots of people have made boards modeled after
the ones at the British Museum. You can find them
on Etsy if you want to look at this. But
if you prefer a more digital Sumerian experience, you can
go to royalur.net and play online.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That is amazing to think you can play a game
that Mesopotamians played way back when. But You know, one
thing I learned while researching this episode is that board
game history is really messy and different cultures often developed
similar games and they evolved as people played. So it's
not always easy to trace their lineage. Like you think
(10:03):
about chess, right? Chess was originated in India over a
thousand years ago, but there's also evidence that similar games
were created in China, Pakistan, Russia, and elsewhere. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
And actually for our newer listeners, you know, Mango, didn't
we do an episode about chess a few years ago?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, it was called Why Are Russians So Good at Chess?
And we got into some of that history, so we
don't have to go over it now. But I do
want to tell you about another game with Indian roots
and a complicated family tree. It's called Pachise, and it
goes to show how a single game can leapfrog its
way across the globe. But why don't we get into
that right after this break? Welcome back to Part-Time Genius,
(10:55):
where we're talking about board games, where they come from,
and why we love them. So, Will, I want to
tell you about the game of Parchees.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So, Mango, I know a lot of times we'll have
discussions around pronunciations, given your family roots and my roots
here in Alabama. So, I think what you mean, though,
is Parchees-y, right?
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah. No, I mean Pachis, which is often referred to
as the national game of India. I had no idea.
I've been to India a number of times. I did
not know it was the national game of India. But
the name comes from the Hindi word, which means 25.
And it's a classic chase game played on a board
shaped like a cross. There's a square in the middle.
(11:34):
And the goal is to be the first player to
get all four of your pieces around the board and
into the center. I have to say, Mango, that sounds
a lot like Parcheesi. Yeah, it should, because Parcheesi is
a simplified version of the game that was marketed in
the US in the late 1800s. But there are differences.
So in the Indian version, the pieces start and end
(11:55):
in the center square. In Parcheesi, each player starts their
pieces in one corner and then races to the center. Also,
Parcheesi uses dice. Parcheesi uses cowrie shells. You throw them
and count the number of shells that land with the
open end up. And that determines the number of spaces
you can move. And in most versions of the game,
the highest value you can get from these cowrie shells
(12:16):
is 25, hence the name.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know, the cowrie is, of course, for those that
don't know, it's a small, shiny sea snail, which I've
just discovered is a great tongue twister to say 10
times fast.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Well, what's really interesting is that no one knows exactly
where pachis came from. It may have evolved from games
that began in the 4th century or even earlier. They're
depictions of cross-shaped boards that date back to the 2nd
century BCE. We do know there was an early version
called Chowpar that was popular among mogul royalty in the
(12:48):
16th century, including the Emperor Akbar. And he actually had
a life-size game set up at his palace. And instead
of using tokens, he and his friends played by calling
out their moves to courtesans who walked across the outdoor board.
That's interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
And how did Pachise get turned into Parcheesi for those
of us in America now?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Around 1860, there was a British games company that made
a version called Pachisi for the UK market. A few
years later, a New York man named John Hamilton made
his own version, copyrighted it, and sold it to a
company that became known as Selchow and Ryder, which is
a major games publisher. And that's where it was rebranded
(13:28):
as Pachisi and became a hit.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I do like it when things like this evolve and
sort of bounce around over time. So in this case,
this bounce from India to Britain to America, and I
guess with slightly different names at each stop.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
I mean, what's weird is that there's even a little
bit more back and forth. So in the 1890s, after
Parcheesi took off in the US, the game changed again
in England, and people modified it to a smaller board,
and they used one die instead of two. And that
version was called Ludo, which I'm sure you've heard of.
And strangely enough, in the 20th century, there was a
(14:01):
Ludo craze that swept India. So I mean, it's kind
of amazing to think this board game that started in
India Ends up traveling, evolves, and then comes back to India. Oh,
that's wild. All right.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So for my next fact, I think I'm going to
go back to British games historian David Parlett and his
game classification system. You remember him from the top of
the episode, Mango?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I mean, how could I forget British games historian David Parlett?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I like that every time we're going to mention him,
we're going to have to say in full British games
historian David Parlett.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
It's good branding for him.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
But I want to get into the modern era of
board games here, which is really when we start to
see the rise of what Parlett calls these theme games.
And one of the first themes people applied to board
games was geography.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
And why do you think that was?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Well, in the late 18th century, board games took off
in Europe. Now, this was the age of enlightenment. So
there were all kinds of theories about education and And
people realized that board games could be educational. Now, at
the same time, you have cartographers who were getting into
the game publishing business, creating game boards out of maps.
And these geographic board games mostly followed the same pattern.
(15:09):
So you move from city to city across a map,
learning little facts along the way. And here's an unusual detail.
Most games didn't use dice because dice were associated with gambling.
So instead, people used the spinning top with numbered sides
called teetotem.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
And have you ever heard of this? I actually have.
It kind of looks like a dreidel, right? In fact,
it became the dreidel.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Like European Jews modified it by replacing numbers with Hebrew letters.
So by using a teetotem instead of dice, it made
board games socially acceptable. And back then, travel wasn't as
common as it is now. So geographic board games were
also a way to discover places that you might not otherwise.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Get to know. Oh, that's really fun.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So in 1822, a geographic game called A Traveler's Tour
of the United States became the first board game to
be published in America. And it was created by a
New York mapmaker, and it consisted of a map of
all 24 states at the time. That's all we had
at that point. And so cities on the map were
marked by numbers instead of names. There was a corresponding
(16:10):
list of places. So for example, Trenton, New Jersey was
marked with a 10 on the map. And if you
looked up number 10 on the list, it said Trenton.
And then there were bonus facts like capital of the
state on the Delaware River, 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia,
population 3,000, stuff like that. And so you spin the T-totem,
look that number of spaces ahead on the map. And
(16:32):
if you can name the town without looking at the list,
you get to move your token there. So if I'm
a number seven, Wilmington, Delaware, and I spin a three,
I can move to number 10, assuming that I know
the spot is Trenton.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Do you follow this? It's a little complicated. I mean,
I do love this like Oregon Trail nature of these
games where you're learning about places along the way. But
this almost sounds painfully educational. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And the goal of the game was to travel from
the East Coast down to New Orleans. But interestingly, the
game was political, too. So an Iowa State professor named
Matthew Wynn-Sivils, he writes this fascinating essay about this in
The Conversation. And he points out that the location descriptions
tell a very specific story about the United States in
(17:20):
1822 and how we wanted to see ourselves. They emphasize
institutions of higher learning, economic prosperity, the industriousness of American citizens.
And they do not, however, mention slavery.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So it's like American exceptionalism, the game, right?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
That's exactly right. But you have to know where Trenton is.
That's the main thing.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah. Fascinating. Well, speaking of things Americans are good at,
I did some research into the creation of the board
game industry. Like, how did these games go from these
faux creations to indie publications to, you know, a billion
dollar business? And it turns out we have a man
named Milton Bradley to thank for it.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
You know, for some reason, I always thought that was
like a law firm name, you know, the partners, last
names that come together to form the name.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, I actually thought so, too. I thought it was
two partners. But Milton was a real person, and he
was born in Maine in this tiny town called Vienna.
His family struggled financially, and they ended up moving to Lowell, Massachusetts,
so his dad could work in a mill. Now, Milton
never finished school, and he had a hard time finding jobs, too.
But in 1860, he started this lithography business. This happened
(18:30):
to be in election year. Abraham Lincoln was running against Democrats.
John C. Breckenridge, and Bradley made a lithograph print of
Lincoln that sold like hotcakes. Actually, I'm just going to
send you a copy so you can take a look
at it.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I mean, that's Abraham Lincoln, but his hair is very
short and he doesn't have a beard.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah, he doesn't have that trademark beard. So, shortly after
Bradley started selling this lithograph, Lincoln actually grew his beard,
which made him look totally different. So, not only did
his stock of prints become worthless overnight, but some people
actually started complaining about this, and Bradley starts giving them
their money back. It almost put him out of business,
and it's all because of this ridiculous beard. Oh, wow.
(19:12):
After this disaster, Bradley pivots. He published a board game
called The Checkered Game of Life. Now, this was probably
inspired by a British game called The New Game of
Human Life, which was weirdly based on a 16th century
game called The Royal Game of Goose, which I feel
like if you've got a game called The Royal Game
of Goose, how can you improve on it? But apparently
(19:34):
they did. But what all these games had in common
was the idea of moving along a path that represented life.
And it had a strict moral code that determined the outcome.
So if you landed on a vice, you'd travel backwards.
If you landed on a virtue, you move forwards. And
players didn't have much agency in the games, much like Candyland.
So wherever your pieces landed, that was kind of your fate.
(19:56):
So what Bradley does is he adds this level of
decision-making to the game. Players spawn a T-Totem, and then
they look at the chart that gave them two to
four options for their move. So some of the spaces
on the board had points, like landing on college or happiness.
That actually gave you five points. And other spaces sent
you back, kind of like snakes and ladders. And weirdly,
(20:17):
Bradley really pulled from all elements of life. So bad
spaces included things like ruin, poverty, disgrace, and most surprising
of all, suicide. Oh, that is horrifying. Yeah, nothing fun
about that. But Bradley's game was an enormous hit for
the time. He sold over 45,000 copies in his first
year alone, which enabled him to build a company named
(20:40):
after himself.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And is this checkered game of life related to the
game life that we played growing up?
Speaker 1 (20:47):
You know, you look at the board and it looks
nothing like it, right? It almost looks more like chutes
and ladders than the game of life, but It is related.
So in 1960, Milton Bradley gave the game to a
designer to retool for the 100th anniversary of the game.
And along with taking out things like Suicide, that's when
they added those little cars and the spinner and the cash,
(21:09):
all to make it more fun. And along the way,
his company became this cornerstone of American board games. They
produced titles like Operation, Battleship, also Candyland. And after 124
years of ownership, by the Bradley family. In 1984, the
company was acquired by Hasbro. And then a few years later,
Hasbro was consolidating things. They buy Bradley's rival, Parker Brothers,
(21:31):
and they merged the two to form Hasbro Gaming.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Actually, I'm glad that you mentioned the Parker Brothers because
I did some research on them. And it's kind of
this heartwarming tale of a teenage prodigy who just wanted
to have fun and make money in the process. So
I'll tell you all about that right after a quick break.
(22:03):
Welcome back to Part-Time Genius, where we're talking board games.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
And I think you're going to tell us about the
Parker brothers, who I didn't realize were real people.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
They were indeed real people. So specifically, the Parker brothers
were George, Charles, and Edward Parker. They were born in Salem, Massachusetts.
And it was George, the youngest, who was into games.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Now, this was in 1883. He was just 16 years old.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
And he created a game called banking. Now, like you
were saying earlier, many games at the time were thinly
disguised lectures or lessons on various things. And so teenage
George was like, absolutely not. Games should just be fun.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
So he made a game called banking.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, I mean, what's more fun than banking? I guess
banking was fun at the time, maybe. Now, the point
of banking was pretty simple. Players competed to see who
could make the most money, which was a little different
than all other games that lectured you about morals. Anyway,
George's family loved the game, and after two publishers rejected it,
his older brother Charles convinced George to just publish it himself.
(23:04):
And he did exactly that, spending $ 40 to make 500 copies.
Can you imagine if you're going to make 500 copies
of a game for $ 40 these days? Anyway, he sold
almost all of them within the year and decided to
launch his own games business. Charles joined the company a
few years later, and they adopted the name Parker Brothers. Eventually, Edward,
the oldest brother, joined too. And it was truly a
(23:26):
family affair. So we have George Parker to thank for
pushing American games in a much more entertaining direction. And
over the years, Parker Brothers launched all these favorites from
Clue to Sorry to Risk, even the Ouija board. So
like some really fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
That's so funny because when I think of Parker Brothers,
I really only think of one game. All right, I'll
take a guess. It's Monopoly. Exactly. And I have to say,
this is one of the most interesting and infuriating stories
I found during my research. So according to Hasbro's official narrative,
Monopoly was invented in 1933 by an out-of-work man named
(24:04):
Charles Darrow. He brought the game to Parker Brothers, which
was struggling during the Great Depression. And of course, the
famous story is that they turn it down at first.
It breaks all their rules. But then they change their
mind and Monopoly becomes a sensation, selling millions of copies
and making Darrow and Parker Brothers a ton of money. Today,
it's a bestseller in over 100 countries with at least
(24:26):
a billion copies sold, which is insane to me.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Now, there was something about the way you said official
narrative that makes me think there's a more interesting story here.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, well, it turns out that in 1903, and this
is three decades before Darrow patented monopoly, there was a
Maryland woman named Lizzie McGee, and she created a monopoly prototype.
She called it the landlord's game, and she actually had
an agenda with this. She wanted to spread the belief
of a philosopher named Henry George, and George believed that
(24:55):
private land ownership would ruin society. So McGee released her
game in 1906, and it caught on even among people
who weren't interested in this philosophy. It was just really
fun to play. And do you play it in the
same way you play Monopoly today? Not quite. The goal
of avoiding bankruptcy was the same, but McGee made a
rule that allowed players to cooperate. You could vote to
(25:17):
pay rent into a common bank instead of paying the
title holder of the property. And I actually love this detail.
Instead of that square that says go, McGee had a
square that read, quote, labor upon Mother Earth produces wages. Yeah.
Which is kind of a mouthful. Yeah. The card that says,
do not pass labor upon Mother Earth produces wages. Do
(25:40):
not collect $ 200. Yeah, that's a little long. Not as catchy.
But McGee's game became popular with socialists and Quakers and
also university students. And in keeping with her beliefs, she
didn't profit from this. Like it was an open source
public domain free for people to play and modify game. Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
So I'm curious, though, how did this socialist experiment turn
into a billion-dollar commodity?
Speaker 1 (26:06):
So Harper's Magazine actually did this incredible investigation of this.
And according to that article, a professor at the Wharton
School used the game to teach his classes, quote, the
wickedness of land monopoly... Which is just amazing to think of, right?
Wharton teaching the wickedness of land monopoly. But it catches
on and the students spread it across Pennsylvania to summer camps.
(26:26):
It gets to the Poconos. People are playing it at
like Columbia and Harvard and lounges there. And before long,
people were calling it monopoly, but with a lowercase m.
So kind of the way you'd refer to dominoes or chess.
And then during the Great Depression, these two brothers in
Atlantic City, Jesse and Eugene Rayford, they learned the game
(26:46):
from this Indianapolis woman they'd met. The Rayfords were Quakers
and they shared it with their community, but they replaced
the usual pawns in the game with household objects. So
you've got things like thimbles that suddenly are added into
the mix. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
And so this was still in its open source, kind
of free to the public stage though too, right?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah. Yeah, and people were free to modify the rules,
so they actually made one other major change. Originally, properties
were sold at auction when players landed on them, but
the Rayfords thought that was too complicated, so they put
sale prices on the board and changed property names to
reflect places in Atlantic City. And they showed their version
(27:26):
of the game to a friend who showed it to
a friend of his, and that friend ended up being
Charles Darrow. Who I think is the alleged inventor of Monopoly, right? Yeah,
so it seems what Darrow really did was copy McGee's game,
stripped out the socialist elements, capitalized the M in Monopoly,
and passed this version off as his original game. And
(27:48):
in doing so, he made himself fantastically wealthy.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I mean, it's kind of like he won the biggest
real-life game of Monopoly, if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
He really did. But the question today is, who's going
to win the fact off? I don't know, but there's
only one way to find out. OK, so in the past,
board games were used to teach everything from geography to morality.
But did you know there's growing evidence that games have
a positive impact on brain activity? For instance, a study
(28:19):
showed that playing the game Go can improve symptoms of
depression and anxiety in patients with Alzheimer's. Some experts think
that Go can help kids with ADHD, too, because it
can help improve executive function. All right.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Well, I think we both know trivia keeps the brain sharp.
So here's a fact about Trivial Pursuit. Did you know
that Trivial Pursuit was the focus of a strange lawsuit?
The game was invented in 1979 by Canadian journalists Chris
Haney and Scott Abbott, and it was an overnight success.
But in 1994, a Nova Scotia man sued the pair,
(28:51):
saying that in 1979, Haney had picked him up while
he was hitchhiking. He claimed that during the ride, he
had described the idea for Trivial Pursuit, and Haney stole it.
Haney said in his defense that he'd never picked up
a hitchhiker. A judge ruled in the journalist's favor in 2007.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Lizzie has a family friend who claims that she sat
next to Lee Iacocca on a plane in Coach and
mentioned that he should make an affordable car called the Eon.
And all he did was add the letter N. Wow,
that is amazing. So I know we talked about life
and Milton Bradley earlier, but one thing I hadn't realized
(29:31):
was what a marketing genius the game designer was. So
during the Civil War, he realized that soldiers needed things
to de-stress. So he started bundling a game set with chess, checkers, dominoes,
and his game, the early version of life. And he
made it tiny enough that you could mail it anywhere.
So according to Mental Floss, during Christmas, he advertised it as, quote,
(29:54):
just the thing to send to members of the armed forces.
And that's how the game really took off. That's so classy.
All right. So for my last fact, Mango, do you
know what copypasta is? I mean, I know it's kind
of like a meme-ish thing, but remind me what it is.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
All right. Copypasta is a horror story that's spread around
the internet, getting copied and pasted over and over across
the internet. And one of the weirdest copypastas of all
time is about a 90s board game. It's been shared
thousands and thousands of times. The anonymous author claims that
they were terrorized by a demonic VHS tape of Rap Rat,
(30:30):
a character in a bizarre board game also called Rap Rat. Now,
that story, like most copypastas, is fake, but Rap Rat
is real. The game was released in 1992, and it
really did come with a VHS tape featuring a rapping rodent,
so players would compete to assemble puzzles before Rap Rat
eats all the cheese on the TV screen. Now, in
(30:50):
between nibbles, he shouts off instructions, and of course, he raps.
And the whole thing is totally nuts. And the best
part is I found an actual 1992 commercial for Rap Rat.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
It's VHS. It's A-OK. It's kids entertainment that's here to stay.
The video board game. Rap Rat, Rap Rat. So get mellow,
get yellow, get the video board game, Rap Rat. He
ain't no ghost. He's the most. The video board game,
Rap Rat. OK, that is amazing. For Rap Rat alone,
I think you have to take the trophy. Congratulations.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It is possible that this entire episode was an excuse
for me to play some rap rap for you, but
there you go.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I'm going to look for it on Spotify now. That's
it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening
from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself. We are so
excited to be making shows in the new year and
can't wait for you to hear all of them. Part-time
(32:02):
genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show
is hosted by Will Pearson and me, Mangesh Hatikler, and
researched by our good pal, Mary Phillips Sandy. Today's episode
was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with
support from Tyler Clank. The show is executive produced for
iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Allie Perry, with social media
(32:25):
support from Sasha Gay Trustee, Dara Potts, and Vaini Shori.
For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Radio, visit the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
You're listening to Part-Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what, Will? What's that, Mango? Did you know that
the game Candyland comes from a polio ward?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I have to say, I cannot think of two things
more different than Candyland and polio, Mango.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I know, it sounds entirely insane. But in 1948, a
teacher named Eleanor Abbott invented Candyland during a polio epidemic.
Apparently Abbott got sick and was confined to this hospital
where children were being treated in iron lungs, which, you know,
just sounds horrible. Iron lungs, for those of you who
don't know, were these early types of respirator where the
(00:45):
kids were basically immobilized and mostly they're just lying on
their backs, unable to see anything except the white ceiling
above them. And to counter all of this, Abbott creates
this bright, cheerful game where the only goal, the only
goal is to move around the landscape of treats. And
her original version of the board even showed a boy
(01:05):
in a leg brace starting to walk. Wow, that's that's
pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
And, you know, I almost feel bad admitting this now,
but I always thought Candyland was kind of boring.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Is that controversial to say? I don't know. I mean,
let's be clear, it is super dull. The game basically
requires no effort and has no strategy, but it was
made as mindless entertainment. It was really this way for
kids to imagine again and pass time. But, you know,
reading about Candyland made me wonder about all these colorful
(01:35):
cardboard boxes in family rooms across the country and the
incredible stories hiding inside them, many of which don't involve
deadly diseases.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So let's dive in. Hey there, podcast listeners. Welcome back
(02:08):
to Part-Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always, I'm
here with my good friend, Mangesh Hatikader. And there behind
the booth, that's our amazing producer, Dylan Fagan, who seems
to be wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Haven't seen those in a minute.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
He's got a pipe. I hope the smoke alarm doesn't
go off. And he's waving something at us. Mago, can
you actually tell what that is?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, I think it's a candlestick, which is maybe a
reference to Clue. Oh, my God. It's Professor Fagan in
the booth with a candlestick. That's amazing. So I was
a big fan of Clue, but Will, I'm wondering if
you had to pick, what would you say is your
favorite board game of all time?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
You know, if we're having to stick to board games
versus just like a party game in a box, I
probably would put Clue way up there. I mean, it
is so much fun playing with the family. My daughter
gets so into it and so anxious about one of
us guessing before her, and it just gets real heated,
but in the right kind of way. But if I
had to just say my favorite, like, game in a box,
(03:13):
I'd probably go with something like Taboo. I just love
the element of a timer being there and it being
a word-based game and having to play with a team
and just getting so into it and all the screaming
that starts to happen when it gets really heated.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I don't know. Those would probably be my two favorites.
How about you? Yeah. Yeah, for parties, I like Scattergories,
I think. I think Scattergories is always really, really fun.
Ruby brought home this game called Outfoxed a few years ago,
and it's for younger kids. But there is a fox
who has stolen a pie, and you're trying to figure
(03:49):
out which fox it is, and it's super, super cute
and really, really fun. Oh, that's fun. That's a game
I've been giving to people recently. So many good games
out there.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well, you know, one of the things that surprised me
when I started researching for this topic is just how
many different types of board games there are out there.
In fact, in 1999, a renowned British games historian named
David Parlett, he published a book called The Oxford History
of Board Games. And he divided board games into four
different groups.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
You've got your.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Race games, where the goal is to cross a finish
line or get your pieces home first. You've got your
space games where you need to achieve a certain pattern
or configuration. You've got your chase games where you hunt
down and thwart your opponent's pieces. And then you've got
your displace games where you win by capturing your opponent's pieces.
(04:38):
So I don't know if you've got all those straight now,
but those are the four categories.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I love that games historian is a real job, but
I also love that the height of games historian is
that you make your categories rhyme like that. Right, right.
Isn't it amazing? It's really amazing. Yeah. But I am curious,
where does something like Monopoly fit into the system?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Mango, do not underestimate British games historian David Parlett. So
to address questions just like that one you asked, he
actually added in an informal fifth classification. These are theme games.
So I guess they didn't rhyme with the others, but
it includes, quote, the plethora of modern board games chiefly
categorized by thematic subject matter, such as property trading or
(05:20):
crime detection.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Well, I mean, I do love that someone is taking
such an academic approach to understanding board games. It's really
kind of amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
It's honestly one of my favorite things is when people
have such specific specialties. Like, I really do love that
to be like the guy to go to on stuff
like this. But Anyway, Parlett explains that board games are
a cultural activity. Not unlike music or dance, they've been
part of human civilization for as long as human civilization
has been around. And as a result, they deserve to
(05:50):
be studied.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
I actually wanted to know what the world's first board
game was, and it turns out it's something called Senet.
The game means passing, and it was a popular board
game in ancient Egypt, played by everyday people as well
as royalty. And One of the paintings in Queen Nefertiti's
tomb shows her playing it. And King Tut was actually
buried with five Senate game boxes. So how did the
(06:13):
game work? I mean, the thing is, we don't really
have a definitive account of the rules. What we know
mostly comes from tomb paintings and the few surviving boards.
But basically, the board was a grid of 30 squares
made of three rows of 10. And you start at
the top left corner and move your pieces across the
rows until you get to the bottom right corner. But
what's interesting about it is that while archaeologists think Senet
(06:37):
began as this sort of simple pastime, like something you
played for fun, eventually it took on this greater meaning.
So there's actually a tomb art that shows the deceased
playing Senet against their living relatives. And that suggests the
game had the power to connect the living and the dead.
And some people think the game may represent the soul's
journey through the realm of the dead as they try
(06:59):
to reach the afterlife.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
So maybe a little bit more profound than, say, Hungry
Hungry Hippos. But, you know, I also looked into ancient
board games, and I discovered the story of the Royal
Game of Ur. Now, it was played in Mesopotamia around
4,500 years ago, and Westerners learned all about it in
the 1920s when a British archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley
(07:21):
was exploring the ruins there in Ur that was the
great Sumerian city-state in modern-day Iraq. And so deep in
the royal tombs there, Woolley found these beautiful boards made
from shells and semi-precious stones, but there was nothing to
indicate what the game was exactly or how to play it.
So for decades, the boards just sat there at the
(07:42):
British Museum.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And I'm guessing the story doesn't end there. It does not.
I have more to say about that.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And so that's when Irving Finkel, who was a British
Museum curator with the perfect name for a British Museum curator,
Irving Finkel, he enters the scene. Now, he's apparently quite
a character. He's got his huge white beard and bushy eyebrows,
all these things that you knew exactly when I said
his name was Irving Finkel. And he's obsessed with board
games and cuneiform. And this made him uniquely suited to
(08:11):
solve this mystery. So one day in the 1980s, he's
looking at a tablet that had this weird combination of
Sumerian and Babylonian languages on it, and he's just trying
to decipher it. And Finkel figured out it was written
by a Babylonian scribe who was quoting an early Sumerian document.
This was all about the royal game of Ur.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
So... What was he looking at? Like, did he find
directions for the game? He kind of did.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So the tablet Finkel translated had a set of directions
for a gameplay that included fortune telling, like landing on
certain squares apparently predicted your future. But like I said,
this Babylonian guy was quoting an earlier description of the game.
And so that helped Finkel reconstruct the original method of play.
And under David Parlett's classification, it's a race game. So
(08:59):
you move your pieces along the board by rolling dice,
which back in Sumerian times would have been made from
sheep or ox bones. And whoever gets all their pieces
across the finish line wins. Now you can thwart your
opponent by landing on one of their pieces and then
sending them back to the start. And according to Finkel,
special marked squares gave you an extra turn.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
So even some of the little things that you would
see in today's games. Yeah, I know. It feels so
modern in a sense. So can you actually play this
game now? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And so lots of people have made boards modeled after
the ones at the British Museum. You can find them
on Etsy if you want to look at this. But
if you prefer a more digital Sumerian experience, you can
go to royalur.net and play online.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That is amazing to think you can play a game
that Mesopotamians played way back when. But You know, one
thing I learned while researching this episode is that board
game history is really messy and different cultures often developed
similar games and they evolved as people played. So it's
not always easy to trace their lineage. Like you think
(10:03):
about chess, right? Chess was originated in India over a
thousand years ago, but there's also evidence that similar games
were created in China, Pakistan, Russia, and elsewhere. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
And actually for our newer listeners, you know, Mango, didn't
we do an episode about chess a few years ago?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, it was called Why Are Russians So Good at Chess?
And we got into some of that history, so we
don't have to go over it now. But I do
want to tell you about another game with Indian roots
and a complicated family tree. It's called Pachise, and it
goes to show how a single game can leapfrog its
way across the globe. But why don't we get into
that right after this break? Welcome back to Part-Time Genius,
(10:55):
where we're talking about board games, where they come from,
and why we love them. So, Will, I want to
tell you about the game of Parchees.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So, Mango, I know a lot of times we'll have
discussions around pronunciations, given your family roots and my roots
here in Alabama. So, I think what you mean, though,
is Parchees-y, right?
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah. No, I mean Pachis, which is often referred to
as the national game of India. I had no idea.
I've been to India a number of times. I did
not know it was the national game of India. But
the name comes from the Hindi word, which means 25.
And it's a classic chase game played on a board
shaped like a cross. There's a square in the middle.
(11:34):
And the goal is to be the first player to
get all four of your pieces around the board and
into the center. I have to say, Mango, that sounds
a lot like Parcheesi. Yeah, it should, because Parcheesi is
a simplified version of the game that was marketed in
the US in the late 1800s. But there are differences.
So in the Indian version, the pieces start and end
(11:55):
in the center square. In Parcheesi, each player starts their
pieces in one corner and then races to the center. Also,
Parcheesi uses dice. Parcheesi uses cowrie shells. You throw them
and count the number of shells that land with the
open end up. And that determines the number of spaces
you can move. And in most versions of the game,
the highest value you can get from these cowrie shells
(12:16):
is 25, hence the name.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know, the cowrie is, of course, for those that
don't know, it's a small, shiny sea snail, which I've
just discovered is a great tongue twister to say 10
times fast.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Well, what's really interesting is that no one knows exactly
where pachis came from. It may have evolved from games
that began in the 4th century or even earlier. They're
depictions of cross-shaped boards that date back to the 2nd
century BCE. We do know there was an early version
called Chowpar that was popular among mogul royalty in the
(12:48):
16th century, including the Emperor Akbar. And he actually had
a life-size game set up at his palace. And instead
of using tokens, he and his friends played by calling
out their moves to courtesans who walked across the outdoor board.
That's interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
And how did Pachise get turned into Parcheesi for those
of us in America now?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Around 1860, there was a British games company that made
a version called Pachisi for the UK market. A few
years later, a New York man named John Hamilton made
his own version, copyrighted it, and sold it to a
company that became known as Selchow and Ryder, which is
a major games publisher. And that's where it was rebranded
(13:28):
as Pachisi and became a hit.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I do like it when things like this evolve and
sort of bounce around over time. So in this case,
this bounce from India to Britain to America, and I
guess with slightly different names at each stop.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
I mean, what's weird is that there's even a little
bit more back and forth. So in the 1890s, after
Parcheesi took off in the US, the game changed again
in England, and people modified it to a smaller board,
and they used one die instead of two. And that
version was called Ludo, which I'm sure you've heard of.
And strangely enough, in the 20th century, there was a
(14:01):
Ludo craze that swept India. So I mean, it's kind
of amazing to think this board game that started in
India Ends up traveling, evolves, and then comes back to India. Oh,
that's wild. All right.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So for my next fact, I think I'm going to
go back to British games historian David Parlett and his
game classification system. You remember him from the top of
the episode, Mango?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I mean, how could I forget British games historian David Parlett?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I like that every time we're going to mention him,
we're going to have to say in full British games
historian David Parlett.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
It's good branding for him.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
But I want to get into the modern era of
board games here, which is really when we start to
see the rise of what Parlett calls these theme games.
And one of the first themes people applied to board
games was geography.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
And why do you think that was?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Well, in the late 18th century, board games took off
in Europe. Now, this was the age of enlightenment. So
there were all kinds of theories about education and And
people realized that board games could be educational. Now, at
the same time, you have cartographers who were getting into
the game publishing business, creating game boards out of maps.
And these geographic board games mostly followed the same pattern.
(15:09):
So you move from city to city across a map,
learning little facts along the way. And here's an unusual detail.
Most games didn't use dice because dice were associated with gambling.
So instead, people used the spinning top with numbered sides
called teetotem.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
And have you ever heard of this? I actually have.
It kind of looks like a dreidel, right? In fact,
it became the dreidel.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Like European Jews modified it by replacing numbers with Hebrew letters.
So by using a teetotem instead of dice, it made
board games socially acceptable. And back then, travel wasn't as
common as it is now. So geographic board games were
also a way to discover places that you might not otherwise.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Get to know. Oh, that's really fun.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So in 1822, a geographic game called A Traveler's Tour
of the United States became the first board game to
be published in America. And it was created by a
New York mapmaker, and it consisted of a map of
all 24 states at the time. That's all we had
at that point. And so cities on the map were
marked by numbers instead of names. There was a corresponding
(16:10):
list of places. So for example, Trenton, New Jersey was
marked with a 10 on the map. And if you
looked up number 10 on the list, it said Trenton.
And then there were bonus facts like capital of the
state on the Delaware River, 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia,
population 3,000, stuff like that. And so you spin the T-totem,
look that number of spaces ahead on the map. And
(16:32):
if you can name the town without looking at the list,
you get to move your token there. So if I'm
a number seven, Wilmington, Delaware, and I spin a three,
I can move to number 10, assuming that I know
the spot is Trenton.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Do you follow this? It's a little complicated. I mean,
I do love this like Oregon Trail nature of these
games where you're learning about places along the way. But
this almost sounds painfully educational. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And the goal of the game was to travel from
the East Coast down to New Orleans. But interestingly, the
game was political, too. So an Iowa State professor named
Matthew Wynn-Sivils, he writes this fascinating essay about this in
The Conversation. And he points out that the location descriptions
tell a very specific story about the United States in
(17:20):
1822 and how we wanted to see ourselves. They emphasize
institutions of higher learning, economic prosperity, the industriousness of American citizens.
And they do not, however, mention slavery.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So it's like American exceptionalism, the game, right?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
That's exactly right. But you have to know where Trenton is.
That's the main thing.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah. Fascinating. Well, speaking of things Americans are good at,
I did some research into the creation of the board
game industry. Like, how did these games go from these
faux creations to indie publications to, you know, a billion
dollar business? And it turns out we have a man
named Milton Bradley to thank for it.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
You know, for some reason, I always thought that was
like a law firm name, you know, the partners, last
names that come together to form the name.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, I actually thought so, too. I thought it was
two partners. But Milton was a real person, and he
was born in Maine in this tiny town called Vienna.
His family struggled financially, and they ended up moving to Lowell, Massachusetts,
so his dad could work in a mill. Now, Milton
never finished school, and he had a hard time finding jobs, too.
But in 1860, he started this lithography business. This happened
(18:30):
to be in election year. Abraham Lincoln was running against Democrats.
John C. Breckenridge, and Bradley made a lithograph print of
Lincoln that sold like hotcakes. Actually, I'm just going to
send you a copy so you can take a look
at it.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I mean, that's Abraham Lincoln, but his hair is very
short and he doesn't have a beard.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah, he doesn't have that trademark beard. So, shortly after
Bradley started selling this lithograph, Lincoln actually grew his beard,
which made him look totally different. So, not only did
his stock of prints become worthless overnight, but some people
actually started complaining about this, and Bradley starts giving them
their money back. It almost put him out of business,
and it's all because of this ridiculous beard. Oh, wow.
(19:12):
After this disaster, Bradley pivots. He published a board game
called The Checkered Game of Life. Now, this was probably
inspired by a British game called The New Game of
Human Life, which was weirdly based on a 16th century
game called The Royal Game of Goose, which I feel
like if you've got a game called The Royal Game
of Goose, how can you improve on it? But apparently
(19:34):
they did. But what all these games had in common
was the idea of moving along a path that represented life.
And it had a strict moral code that determined the outcome.
So if you landed on a vice, you'd travel backwards.
If you landed on a virtue, you move forwards. And
players didn't have much agency in the games, much like Candyland.
So wherever your pieces landed, that was kind of your fate.
(19:56):
So what Bradley does is he adds this level of
decision-making to the game. Players spawn a T-Totem, and then
they look at the chart that gave them two to
four options for their move. So some of the spaces
on the board had points, like landing on college or happiness.
That actually gave you five points. And other spaces sent
you back, kind of like snakes and ladders. And weirdly,
(20:17):
Bradley really pulled from all elements of life. So bad
spaces included things like ruin, poverty, disgrace, and most surprising
of all, suicide. Oh, that is horrifying. Yeah, nothing fun
about that. But Bradley's game was an enormous hit for
the time. He sold over 45,000 copies in his first
year alone, which enabled him to build a company named
(20:40):
after himself.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And is this checkered game of life related to the
game life that we played growing up?
Speaker 1 (20:47):
You know, you look at the board and it looks
nothing like it, right? It almost looks more like chutes
and ladders than the game of life, but It is related.
So in 1960, Milton Bradley gave the game to a
designer to retool for the 100th anniversary of the game.
And along with taking out things like Suicide, that's when
they added those little cars and the spinner and the cash,
(21:09):
all to make it more fun. And along the way,
his company became this cornerstone of American board games. They
produced titles like Operation, Battleship, also Candyland. And after 124
years of ownership, by the Bradley family. In 1984, the
company was acquired by Hasbro. And then a few years later,
Hasbro was consolidating things. They buy Bradley's rival, Parker Brothers,
(21:31):
and they merged the two to form Hasbro Gaming.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Actually, I'm glad that you mentioned the Parker Brothers because
I did some research on them. And it's kind of
this heartwarming tale of a teenage prodigy who just wanted
to have fun and make money in the process. So
I'll tell you all about that right after a quick break.
(22:03):
Welcome back to Part-Time Genius, where we're talking board games.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
And I think you're going to tell us about the
Parker brothers, who I didn't realize were real people.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
They were indeed real people. So specifically, the Parker brothers
were George, Charles, and Edward Parker. They were born in Salem, Massachusetts.
And it was George, the youngest, who was into games.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Now, this was in 1883. He was just 16 years old.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
And he created a game called banking. Now, like you
were saying earlier, many games at the time were thinly
disguised lectures or lessons on various things. And so teenage
George was like, absolutely not. Games should just be fun.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
So he made a game called banking.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, I mean, what's more fun than banking? I guess
banking was fun at the time, maybe. Now, the point
of banking was pretty simple. Players competed to see who
could make the most money, which was a little different
than all other games that lectured you about morals. Anyway,
George's family loved the game, and after two publishers rejected it,
his older brother Charles convinced George to just publish it himself.
(23:04):
And he did exactly that, spending $ 40 to make 500 copies.
Can you imagine if you're going to make 500 copies
of a game for $ 40 these days? Anyway, he sold
almost all of them within the year and decided to
launch his own games business. Charles joined the company a
few years later, and they adopted the name Parker Brothers. Eventually, Edward,
the oldest brother, joined too. And it was truly a
(23:26):
family affair. So we have George Parker to thank for
pushing American games in a much more entertaining direction. And
over the years, Parker Brothers launched all these favorites from
Clue to Sorry to Risk, even the Ouija board. So
like some really fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
That's so funny because when I think of Parker Brothers,
I really only think of one game. All right, I'll
take a guess. It's Monopoly. Exactly. And I have to say,
this is one of the most interesting and infuriating stories
I found during my research. So according to Hasbro's official narrative,
Monopoly was invented in 1933 by an out-of-work man named
(24:04):
Charles Darrow. He brought the game to Parker Brothers, which
was struggling during the Great Depression. And of course, the
famous story is that they turn it down at first.
It breaks all their rules. But then they change their
mind and Monopoly becomes a sensation, selling millions of copies
and making Darrow and Parker Brothers a ton of money. Today,
it's a bestseller in over 100 countries with at least
(24:26):
a billion copies sold, which is insane to me.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Now, there was something about the way you said official
narrative that makes me think there's a more interesting story here.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, well, it turns out that in 1903, and this
is three decades before Darrow patented monopoly, there was a
Maryland woman named Lizzie McGee, and she created a monopoly prototype.
She called it the landlord's game, and she actually had
an agenda with this. She wanted to spread the belief
of a philosopher named Henry George, and George believed that
(24:55):
private land ownership would ruin society. So McGee released her
game in 1906, and it caught on even among people
who weren't interested in this philosophy. It was just really
fun to play. And do you play it in the
same way you play Monopoly today? Not quite. The goal
of avoiding bankruptcy was the same, but McGee made a
rule that allowed players to cooperate. You could vote to
(25:17):
pay rent into a common bank instead of paying the
title holder of the property. And I actually love this detail.
Instead of that square that says go, McGee had a
square that read, quote, labor upon Mother Earth produces wages. Yeah.
Which is kind of a mouthful. Yeah. The card that says,
do not pass labor upon Mother Earth produces wages. Do
(25:40):
not collect $ 200. Yeah, that's a little long. Not as catchy.
But McGee's game became popular with socialists and Quakers and
also university students. And in keeping with her beliefs, she
didn't profit from this. Like it was an open source
public domain free for people to play and modify game. Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
So I'm curious, though, how did this socialist experiment turn
into a billion-dollar commodity?
Speaker 1 (26:06):
So Harper's Magazine actually did this incredible investigation of this.
And according to that article, a professor at the Wharton
School used the game to teach his classes, quote, the
wickedness of land monopoly... Which is just amazing to think of, right?
Wharton teaching the wickedness of land monopoly. But it catches
on and the students spread it across Pennsylvania to summer camps.
(26:26):
It gets to the Poconos. People are playing it at
like Columbia and Harvard and lounges there. And before long,
people were calling it monopoly, but with a lowercase m.
So kind of the way you'd refer to dominoes or chess.
And then during the Great Depression, these two brothers in
Atlantic City, Jesse and Eugene Rayford, they learned the game
(26:46):
from this Indianapolis woman they'd met. The Rayfords were Quakers
and they shared it with their community, but they replaced
the usual pawns in the game with household objects. So
you've got things like thimbles that suddenly are added into
the mix. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
And so this was still in its open source, kind
of free to the public stage though too, right?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah. Yeah, and people were free to modify the rules,
so they actually made one other major change. Originally, properties
were sold at auction when players landed on them, but
the Rayfords thought that was too complicated, so they put
sale prices on the board and changed property names to
reflect places in Atlantic City. And they showed their version
(27:26):
of the game to a friend who showed it to
a friend of his, and that friend ended up being
Charles Darrow. Who I think is the alleged inventor of Monopoly, right? Yeah,
so it seems what Darrow really did was copy McGee's game,
stripped out the socialist elements, capitalized the M in Monopoly,
and passed this version off as his original game. And
(27:48):
in doing so, he made himself fantastically wealthy.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I mean, it's kind of like he won the biggest
real-life game of Monopoly, if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
He really did. But the question today is, who's going
to win the fact off? I don't know, but there's
only one way to find out. OK, so in the past,
board games were used to teach everything from geography to morality.
But did you know there's growing evidence that games have
a positive impact on brain activity? For instance, a study
(28:19):
showed that playing the game Go can improve symptoms of
depression and anxiety in patients with Alzheimer's. Some experts think
that Go can help kids with ADHD, too, because it
can help improve executive function. All right.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Well, I think we both know trivia keeps the brain sharp.
So here's a fact about Trivial Pursuit. Did you know
that Trivial Pursuit was the focus of a strange lawsuit?
The game was invented in 1979 by Canadian journalists Chris
Haney and Scott Abbott, and it was an overnight success.
But in 1994, a Nova Scotia man sued the pair,
(28:51):
saying that in 1979, Haney had picked him up while
he was hitchhiking. He claimed that during the ride, he
had described the idea for Trivial Pursuit, and Haney stole it.
Haney said in his defense that he'd never picked up
a hitchhiker. A judge ruled in the journalist's favor in 2007.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Lizzie has a family friend who claims that she sat
next to Lee Iacocca on a plane in Coach and
mentioned that he should make an affordable car called the Eon.
And all he did was add the letter N. Wow,
that is amazing. So I know we talked about life
and Milton Bradley earlier, but one thing I hadn't realized
(29:31):
was what a marketing genius the game designer was. So
during the Civil War, he realized that soldiers needed things
to de-stress. So he started bundling a game set with chess, checkers, dominoes,
and his game, the early version of life. And he
made it tiny enough that you could mail it anywhere.
So according to Mental Floss, during Christmas, he advertised it as, quote,
(29:54):
just the thing to send to members of the armed forces.
And that's how the game really took off. That's so classy.
All right. So for my last fact, Mango, do you
know what copypasta is? I mean, I know it's kind
of like a meme-ish thing, but remind me what it is.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
All right. Copypasta is a horror story that's spread around
the internet, getting copied and pasted over and over across
the internet. And one of the weirdest copypastas of all
time is about a 90s board game. It's been shared
thousands and thousands of times. The anonymous author claims that
they were terrorized by a demonic VHS tape of Rap Rat,
(30:30):
a character in a bizarre board game also called Rap Rat. Now,
that story, like most copypastas, is fake, but Rap Rat
is real. The game was released in 1992, and it
really did come with a VHS tape featuring a rapping rodent,
so players would compete to assemble puzzles before Rap Rat
eats all the cheese on the TV screen. Now, in
(30:50):
between nibbles, he shouts off instructions, and of course, he raps.
And the whole thing is totally nuts. And the best
part is I found an actual 1992 commercial for Rap Rat.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
It's VHS. It's A-OK. It's kids entertainment that's here to stay.
The video board game. Rap Rat, Rap Rat. So get mellow,
get yellow, get the video board game, Rap Rat. He
ain't no ghost. He's the most. The video board game,
Rap Rat. OK, that is amazing. For Rap Rat alone,
I think you have to take the trophy. Congratulations.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It is possible that this entire episode was an excuse
for me to play some rap rap for you, but
there you go.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I'm going to look for it on Spotify now. That's
it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening
from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself. We are so
excited to be making shows in the new year and
can't wait for you to hear all of them. Part-time
(32:02):
genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show
is hosted by Will Pearson and me, Mangesh Hatikler, and
researched by our good pal, Mary Phillips Sandy. Today's episode
was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with
support from Tyler Clank. The show is executive produced for
iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Allie Perry, with social media
(32:25):
support from Sasha Gay Trustee, Dara Potts, and Vaini Shori.
For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Radio, visit the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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