In fact, it didn’t even have the same name. The original dice were made from a variety of materials including wood, stones and even carved knuckle bones. The original Monopoly game was released in 1906, and it looked very different from the version on your shelf today.

Related gaming: 20 of our favorite brain games. Similar discoveries have been made in regions around the Nile, suggesting that the origin of the oldest board games begins somewhere in the Middle East. Learn more about the history of the board game Monopoly. Curiously, the patent for this second commercial game was the patent Parker Brothers purchased in 1935 for its newly acquired Monopoly game. Monopoly is derived from The Landlord’s Game, which was created by Elizabeth Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy which rewards wealth creation is better than one in which monopolists work under few constraints and to promote the economic theories of Henry George and in particular his ideas about taxation.Ī fella named Charles Darrow revised the game and sold it to Parker Brothers as his own, and now we all play something very close to his version. This TicToc by Bloomberg video explains Monopoly’s surprising origins, which includes a set of rules where “players all shared money when someone purchased a piece of land.” From Wikipedia: Rid the time warp into the past and play on almost the same type of game equipment created by the real inventors of Monopoly. Around the 1970s the legend of American inventor, Charles Darrow, founding the game Monopoly is passed around. It’s a classic American game with many popular versions… including an original version that was created to teach people how to prosper through sharing within their community. There were many board games in the early 20th century that deals with land trading, in 1933 a precursor of Monopoly game came into existence and was refined. In Monopoly, you try to buy land, build properties, and get rich while bankrupting your opponents.

Monopoly board game origin