Speaker 1: You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Guess what Will? What's that Mango? Did you know that
Speaker 2: the game Candyland comes from a polio ward? I have
Speaker 2: to say, I cannot think of two things more different
Speaker 2: than Candyland and polio Mango. I know it sounds entirely insane,
Speaker 2: but in nineteen forty eight, a teacher named Eleanor Abbot
Speaker 2: invented candy Land during a polio epidemic. Apparently, Abbot got
Speaker 2: sick and was confined to this hospital where children were
Speaker 2: being treated in iron lungs, which you know, it just
Speaker 2: sounds horrible. Iron lungs for those of you who don't know,
Speaker 2: were these early types of respirator where the kids were
Speaker 2: basically immobilized and mostly they're just lying on their backs,
Speaker 2: unable to see anything except the white ceiling above them.
Speaker 2: And to counter all of this, Abbot creates this bright,
Speaker 2: cheerful game where the only goal. The only goal is
Speaker 2: to move around the landscape of treats, and her original
Speaker 2: version of the board even showed a boy in a
Speaker 2: leg brace starting to walk. Wow, that's pretty cool, and
Speaker 2: you know, I almost feel bad admitting this now, but
Speaker 2: I always thought Candyland was kind of boring. Is that
Speaker 2: controversial to say? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, let's be clear, it is super dull. The
Speaker 1: game basically requires no effort and has no strategy. But
Speaker 1: it was made as mindless entertainment. It was really this
Speaker 1: way for kids to imagine again and pastime. But you know,
Speaker 1: reading about candy Land made me wonder about all these
Speaker 1: colorful cardboard boxes and family rooms across the country and
Speaker 1: the incredible stories hiding inside them, many of which don't
Speaker 1: involve deadly diseases. So let's dive in.
Speaker 2: Hey there, podcast listeners, welcome back to Part Time Genius.
Speaker 2: I'm Will Pearson, and as always, I'm here with my
Speaker 2: good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and they're behind the booth.
Speaker 2: That's our amazing producer Dylan Fagan, who seems to be
Speaker 2: wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Haven't seen those
Speaker 2: in a minute. He's got a pipe. I hope the
Speaker 2: smoke alarm doesn't go off, and he's waving something at us. Mego,
Speaker 2: can you actually tell what that is? Yeah? I think
Speaker 2: it's a candlestick, which is maybe a reference to Clue.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, it's Professor Fagan in the booth with
Speaker 2: a candlestick. That's amazing. So I was a big fan
Speaker 2: of Clue. But Will I'm wondering if you had to pick,
Speaker 2: what would you say is your favorite board game of
Speaker 2: all time? You know, if we're having to stick to
Speaker 2: board games versus just like a party game and a box,
Speaker 2: I probably would put Clue way up there. I mean,
Speaker 2: it is so much fun playing with the family. My
Speaker 2: daughter gets so into it and so anxious about one
Speaker 2: of us guessing before her, and it just gets real heated,
Speaker 2: but in the right kind of way. But if I
Speaker 2: had to just say my favorite like game in a box,
Speaker 2: I'd probably go with something like, uh, Taboo. Like I
Speaker 2: just love the element of a timer being there and
Speaker 2: it being a word based game and having to play
Speaker 2: with a team and just getting so into it and
Speaker 2: all the screaming that starts to happen when it gets
Speaker 2: really heated. I don't know that those would probably be
Speaker 2: my two favorites, how about you. Yeah, for parties, I
Speaker 2: like Categories. I think Categories is always really really fun.
Speaker 2: Ruby brought home this game called out Foxed a few
Speaker 2: years ago and it's for younger kids, but there is
Speaker 2: a fox who is stolen the pie and you're trying
Speaker 2: to figure out which fox it is, and it's super
Speaker 2: super cute and really really fun. So that's a game
Speaker 2: I've been giving to people recently. So many good games
Speaker 2: out there. Well, you know, one of the things that
Speaker 2: surprised me when I started researching for this topic is
Speaker 2: just how many different types of board games that are
Speaker 2: out there. In fact, in nineteen ninety nine, a renowned
Speaker 2: British games history I'm named David Parlott. He published a
Speaker 2: book called The Oxford History of Board Games, and he
Speaker 2: divided board games into four different groups. You've got your
Speaker 2: race games, where the goal is to cross a finish
Speaker 2: line or get your pieces home first. You've got your
Speaker 2: space games, where you need to achieve a certain pattern
Speaker 2: or configuration. You've got your chase games where you hunt
Speaker 2: down and thwart your opponent's pieces. And then you've got
Speaker 2: your displaced games, where you win by capturing your opponent's pieces.
Speaker 2: So I don't know if you've got all those straight now,
Speaker 2: but those are the four categories. I love that games
Speaker 2: historian is a real job, but I also love that,
Speaker 2: like the height of games historian is that you make
Speaker 2: your categories rhyme like that, right, right, yeah, but I'm curious, like,
Speaker 2: where does something like Monopoly fit into the system? Mango,
Speaker 2: do not underestimate British games history and David Parlott so
Speaker 2: to address questions just like that one you asked, he
Speaker 2: actually added in an informal fifth classification these are theme games,
Speaker 2: so I guess they didn't rhyme with the others, but
Speaker 2: it includes quote the plethora of modern board games chiefly
Speaker 2: categorized by a thematic subject matter, such as property trading
Speaker 2: or crime detection.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I do love that someone is taking
Speaker 1: such an academic approach to understanding board games.
Speaker 2: It's really kind of amazing. It's honestly one of my
Speaker 2: favorite things is when people have such specific specialties, like
Speaker 2: I really do love that to be like the guy
Speaker 2: to go to on stuff like this. But anyway, Parlotte
Speaker 2: explains that board games are a cultural activity, not unlike
Speaker 2: music or dance. They've been part of human civilization for
Speaker 2: as long as human civilization has been around, and as
Speaker 2: a result, they deserve to be studied.
Speaker 1: I actually wanted to know what the world's first board
Speaker 1: game was, and it turns out it's something called senate.
Speaker 1: The game means passing, and it was a popular board
Speaker 1: game in ancient Egypt, played by everyday people as well
Speaker 1: as royalty, and one of the paintings in Queen Nevertid's
Speaker 1: tomb shows her playing it, and King tut was actually
Speaker 1: buried with five Senate game boxes.
Speaker 2: So how did the game work?
Speaker 1: I mean, the thing is, we don't really have a
Speaker 1: definitive account of the rules. What we know mostly comes
Speaker 1: from tomb paintings and the few surviving boards. But basically,
Speaker 1: the board was a grid of thirty squares made of
Speaker 1: both three rows of ten, and you started the top
Speaker 1: left corner and move your pieces across the roads until
Speaker 1: you get to the bottom right corner. But what's interesting
Speaker 1: about it is that while archaeologists think Senate began as
Speaker 1: this sort of simple pastime, like something you played for fun,
Speaker 1: eventually it took on this greater meaning. So there's actually
Speaker 1: tombart that shows the deceased playing Senate against their living relatives,
Speaker 1: and that sug just the game had the power to
Speaker 1: connect the living and the dead, and some people think
Speaker 1: the game may represent the soul's journey through the realm
Speaker 1: of the dead as they try to reach the after life.
Speaker 2: So maybe a little bit more profound than say, hungry,
Speaker 2: hungry hippos. But you know, I also looked into ancient
Speaker 2: board games and I discovered the story of the royal
Speaker 2: game of er. Now. It was played in Mesopotamia around
Speaker 2: four five hundred years ago, and Westerners learned all about
Speaker 2: it in the nineteen twenties when a British archaeologist named
Speaker 2: Sir Leonard Woolley was exploring the ruins there and that
Speaker 2: was the great Samerian city state in modern day Iraq,
Speaker 2: and so deep in the royal tombs there, Woolly found
Speaker 2: these beautiful boards made from shells and semi precious stones,
Speaker 2: but there was nothing to indicate what the game was
Speaker 2: exactly or how to play it. So for decades the
Speaker 2: boards just sat there at the British Museum. And I'm
Speaker 2: guessing the story doesn't end there. It does not, I
Speaker 2: have more to say about that. And so that's when
Speaker 2: Irving Finkel, who was a British museum curator with the
Speaker 2: perfect name for a British museum curator, Irving Finkel, he
Speaker 2: enters the scene. Now, he's apparently quite a character he's
Speaker 2: got his huge white beard and bushy eyebrows, all these
Speaker 2: things that you knew exactly when I said. His name
Speaker 2: was Irvan Finkel, and he's obsessed with board games and
Speaker 2: cuneiform and this made him uniquely suited to solve this mystery.
Speaker 2: So one day in the nineteen eighties, he's looking at
Speaker 2: a tablet that had this weird combination of Sumerian and
Speaker 2: Babylonian languages on it, and he's just trying to decipher it,
Speaker 2: and Finkel figured out it was written by a Babylonian
Speaker 2: scribe who was quoting an early Sumerian document. This was
Speaker 2: all about the royal game of er. So what was
Speaker 2: he looking at? Like, did he find directions for the game?
Speaker 2: He kind of did. So the tablet Finkel translated had
Speaker 2: a set of directions for a gameplay that included fortune telling,
Speaker 2: like landing on certain squares apparently predicted your future. But
Speaker 2: like I said, this Babylonian guy was quoting an earlier
Speaker 2: description of the game, and so that helped Finkel reconstruct
Speaker 2: the original method of play, and under David Parlot's classification,
Speaker 2: it's a race game. So you move your pieces along
Speaker 2: the board by rolling dice which back in Sumerian times
Speaker 2: would have been made from sheep or ox bones. And
Speaker 2: whoever gets all their pieces across the finish line wins.
Speaker 2: Now you can thwart your opponent by landing on one
Speaker 2: of their pieces and then sending them back to the start,
Speaker 2: and according to Finkel, special mark squares gave you an
Speaker 2: extra turn. So even some of the little things that
Speaker 2: you would see in today's games.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, it feels so modern in a sense.
Speaker 1: So can you actually play this game now?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And so lots of people have made boards modeled
Speaker 2: after the ones at the British Museum. You can find
Speaker 2: them on Etsy if you want to look at this.
Speaker 2: But if you prefer a more digital Sumerian experience, you
Speaker 2: can go to royal ur dot net and play online.
Speaker 1: That is amazing to think you can play a game
Speaker 1: that Mesopotamian's played way back when.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One thing I learned while researching this episode is that
Speaker 1: board game history is really messy, and different culture has
Speaker 1: often developed similar games, and they evolved as people played,
Speaker 1: so it's not always easy to trace their lineage like
Speaker 1: you think about chess. Right, Chess was originated in India
Speaker 1: over a thousand years ago, but there's also evidence that
Speaker 1: similar games were created in China, Pakistan, Russia and elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, And actually, for our newer listeners, you know Mango,
Speaker 2: didn't we do an episode about chess a few years ago? Yeah?
Speaker 2: It was called why are Russians So Good at Chess?
Speaker 2: And we got into some of that history. So we
Speaker 2: don't have to go over it now. But I do
Speaker 2: want to tell you about another game with Indian roots
Speaker 2: and a complicated family tree. It's called Pachis and it
Speaker 2: goes to show how a single game can leap frog
Speaker 2: its way across the globe. But why don't we get
Speaker 2: into that right after this break? Welcome back to Part
Speaker 2: Time Genius, where we're talking about board games, where they
Speaker 2: come from, and why we love them so well. I
Speaker 2: want to tell you about the game of Pachise, So, Mengo.
Speaker 2: I know a lot of times we'll have discussions around pronunciations,
Speaker 2: given your family roots and my roots here in Alabama.
Speaker 2: So I think what you mean though, is Parcheesi, right? No?
Speaker 1: I mean pachie swhiches often revirred to is the national
Speaker 1: game of India. I had no idea of been the India.
Speaker 1: A number of times. I did not know it was
Speaker 1: the national game of India. But the name comes from
Speaker 1: the Hindi word which means twenty five. And it's a
Speaker 1: classic chase game played on a board shaped like cross.
Speaker 1: There's a square in the middle and the goal is
Speaker 1: to be the first player to get all four of
Speaker 1: your pieces around the board and into the center.
Speaker 2: I have to say, mango, that sounds a lot like Parcheesi.
Speaker 1: Yeah it should, because Parchiesi is a simplified version of
Speaker 1: the game that was marketed in the US and the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds, but there are differences. So in the
Speaker 1: Indian version, the pieces start and end in the center square.
Speaker 1: In PARCHIESI, each player starts their pieces in one corner
Speaker 1: and races to the center. Also, Parchiesi uses dice, putchies
Speaker 1: uses Cowrie shells. You throw them and count the number
Speaker 1: of shells that land with the open end up and
Speaker 1: that determines the number of spaces you can move. And
Speaker 1: in most versions of the game, the highest value you
Speaker 1: can get from these cowri shells is twenty five.
Speaker 2: Hence the name you know, the cowori is of course
Speaker 2: for those that don't know, it's a small, shiny sea snail,
Speaker 2: which I've just discovered is a great tongue twister to
Speaker 2: say ten times fast.
Speaker 1: Well, what's really interesting is that no one knows exactly
Speaker 1: where Putchies came from. It may have evolved from games
Speaker 1: that began in the fourth century or even earlier. There
Speaker 1: are depictions of cross shaped boards that date back to
Speaker 1: the second century BCE. We do know there was an
Speaker 1: early version called chowpar that was popular among Mogul royalty
Speaker 1: in the sixteenth century, including the Emperor Akbar, and he
Speaker 1: actually had a life sized game set up at his
Speaker 1: palace and instead of using tokens, he and his friends
Speaker 1: played by calling out their moves to courtesans who walked
Speaker 1: across the outdoor board.
Speaker 2: It's interesting, and how did pacice get turned into Parcheesi?
Speaker 2: For those of us in America now around eighteen sixty,
Speaker 2: there was a British games company that made a version
Speaker 2: called Pachisi for the UK market. A few years later,
Speaker 2: a New York man named John Hamilton made his own version,
Speaker 2: copyrighted it, and sold it to a company that became
Speaker 2: known as Cell Chaw and Writer, which you know is
Speaker 2: a major games publisher, and that's where it was rebranded
Speaker 2: as PARCHIESI and became a hit. I do like it
Speaker 2: when things like this evolve and sort of bounce around
Speaker 2: over time. So in this case, this bounced from India
Speaker 2: to Britain to America, and I guess with slightly different
Speaker 2: names at each stop.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's weird is that there's even a little
Speaker 1: bit more back and forth. So in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: after Parcheesi took off in the US, the game changed
Speaker 1: again in England and people modified it to a smaller
Speaker 1: board and they used one die instead of two, and
Speaker 1: that version was called Ludo, which you know, I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've heard of, And strangely enough, in the twentieth century
Speaker 1: there was a Ludo craze that swept India. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's kind of amazing to think this board game that
Speaker 1: started in India ends up traveling, evolves and then and
Speaker 1: then comes back to India.
Speaker 2: Oh that's wild, all right. So for my next fact,
Speaker 2: I think I'm going to go back to British Games Historium,
Speaker 2: David Parlott and his game classification system. You remember him
Speaker 2: from the top of the episode Mango. I mean, how
Speaker 2: could I forget British Games historian David Parlotte. I like
Speaker 2: that every time we're going to mention and we're going
Speaker 2: to have to say in full British games historian David Parlott.
Speaker 2: But it's good, good branding for him. But I want
Speaker 2: to get into the modern era of board games here,
Speaker 2: which is really when we start to see the rise
Speaker 2: of what Parlot calls these these theme games. And one
Speaker 2: of the first teams people applied to board games was geography.
Speaker 2: And why do you think that was? Well, in the
Speaker 2: late eighteenth century, board games took off in Europe. Now
Speaker 2: this was the age of Enlightenment, so there were all
Speaker 2: kinds of theories about education and people realize that board
Speaker 2: games could be educational. Now at the same time, you
Speaker 2: have cartographers who were getting into the game publishing business,
Speaker 2: creating game boards out of maps. And these geographic board
Speaker 2: games mostly followed the same pattern, so you moved from
Speaker 2: city to city across a map, learning little facts along
Speaker 2: the way. And here's an unusual detail. Most games didn't
Speaker 2: use dice because dice were associated with gambling. So instead
Speaker 2: people use this spinning top with numbered sides called teetotem.
Speaker 2: Now have you ever heard of this? I actually have
Speaker 2: it kind of looks like a Dradel right. In fact,
Speaker 2: it became the Dradal like European Jews modified it by
Speaker 2: replacing numbers with Hebrew letters, so by using a teetotem
Speaker 2: instead of dice, it made board games socially acceptable. And
Speaker 2: back then travel wasn't as common as it is now,
Speaker 2: so geographic board games were also a way to discover
Speaker 2: places that you might not otherwise get to know. Oh
Speaker 2: that's really fun. So in eighteen twenty two, a geographic
Speaker 2: game called a Traveler's Tour of the United States became
Speaker 2: the first board game to be published in America, and
Speaker 2: it was created by a New York map maker, and
Speaker 2: it consisted of a map of all twenty four states
Speaker 2: at the time, that's all we had at that point,
Speaker 2: and so cities on the map were marked by numbers
Speaker 2: instead of names. There was a corresponding list of places. So,
Speaker 2: for example, Trenton, New Jersey, was marked with a ten
Speaker 2: on the map, and if you looked up number ten
Speaker 2: on the list, it said Trenton. And then there were
Speaker 2: bonus facts like capital of the state on the Delaware River,
Speaker 2: thirty miles northeast of Philadelphia, population three thousand, stuff like that.
Speaker 2: And so you spin the teetotem, look that number of
Speaker 2: spaces ahead on the map, and if you can name
Speaker 2: the town without looking at the list, you get to
Speaker 2: move your token there. So if I'm a number seven Wilmington,
Speaker 2: Delaware and I spent a three, I can move to
Speaker 2: number ten, assuming that I know the spot is Trenton.
Speaker 2: You're following this, it's a little complicated.
Speaker 1: I mean, I do love this like Oregon Trail nature
Speaker 1: of these games where you're learning about places along the way,
Speaker 1: but this almost sounds painfully educational.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the goal of the game was to travel
Speaker 2: from the East Coast down to New Orleans. But interestingly
Speaker 2: the game was political too, so an Iowa State professor
Speaker 2: named Matthew winn Sivils he writes this fascinating essay about
Speaker 2: this in the conversation, and he points out that the
Speaker 2: location descriptions tell a very specific story about the United
Speaker 2: States in eighteen twenty two and how we wanted to
Speaker 2: see ourselves. They emphasize institutions of higher learning, economic prosperity,
Speaker 2: the industriousness of American citizens, and they do not, however,
Speaker 2: mention slavery. So it's like American exceptionalism the game, right,
Speaker 2: that's exactly right. But you have to know where Trenton is.
Speaker 2: That's the main thing.
Speaker 1: Fascinating. Well, speaking of things Americans are good at. I
Speaker 1: did some research into the creation of the board game industry,
Speaker 1: like how did these games go from these folk creations
Speaker 1: to indie publications to you know, a billion dollar business.
Speaker 1: And it turns out we have a man named Milton
Speaker 1: Bradley to thank for it.
Speaker 2: You know, for some reason, I always thought that was
Speaker 2: like a law firm name, you know, the partner's last
Speaker 2: names that come together to form the name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually thought so too. I thought it was
Speaker 1: two partners. But Milton was a real person, and he
Speaker 1: was born in Maine, in this tiny town called Vienna.
Speaker 1: His family struggled financially and they ended up moving to Lowell, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: so his dad could work in a mill. Now, Milton
Speaker 1: never finished school and he had a hard time finding
Speaker 1: jobs too. But in eighteen sixty he started this lithography business.
Speaker 1: This happened to be an election year. Abraham Lincoln was
Speaker 1: running against Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Bradley made a
Speaker 1: lithograph print of Lincoln that sold like hotcakes. Actually, I'm
Speaker 1: just going to send you a copy so you could
Speaker 1: take a look at it.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's Abraham Lincoln, but his hair is very
Speaker 2: short and he doesn't have a beard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he doesn't have that trademark beard. So shortly after
Speaker 1: Bradley started selling this lithograph, Lincoln actually grew his beard,
Speaker 1: which made him look totally different. So not only did
Speaker 1: his stock of prints become worthless overnight, but some people
Speaker 1: actually started complaining about this and Bradley starts giving them
Speaker 1: their money back. It almost put him out of business
Speaker 1: and as well because of this ridiculous beard. But after
Speaker 1: this disaster Bradley pivots. He published a board game called
Speaker 1: The Checkered Game of Life. Now this was probably inspired
Speaker 1: by a British game called a New Game of Human Life,
Speaker 1: which was weirdly based on a sixteenth century game called
Speaker 1: the Royal Game of Goose, which I feel like, if
Speaker 1: you've got a game called the Royal Game of Goose,
Speaker 1: how can you improve on it?
Speaker 2: Early they did.
Speaker 1: But what all these games had in common was the
Speaker 1: idea of moving along a path that represented life, and
Speaker 1: it had a strict moral code that determined the outcome.
Speaker 1: So if you landed on a vice, you'd travel backwards.
Speaker 1: If you landed on a virtue, you move forwards. And
Speaker 1: players didn't have much agency in the games, much like Candyland,
Speaker 1: so wherever your pieces landed, that was kind of your fate.
Speaker 1: So what Bradley does is he adds this level of
Speaker 1: decision making to the game. Players spun a teetotem and
Speaker 1: then they look at the chart that gave them two
Speaker 1: to four options for their move. So some of the
Speaker 1: spaces on the board had points, like landing on college
Speaker 1: or happiness that actually gave you five points, and other
Speaker 1: spaces sent you back, kind of like snakes and ladders.
Speaker 1: And weirdly, Bradley really pulled from all elements of life,
Speaker 1: so bad spaces included things like ruin, poverty, disgrace, and
Speaker 1: most surprising of all, suicide.
Speaker 2: Oh that is horrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nothing fun about that. But Bradley's game was an
Speaker 1: enormous hit for the time. He sold over forty five
Speaker 1: thousand copies in his first year alone, which enabled them
Speaker 1: to build a company named after himself.
Speaker 2: And is this this checkered game of life related to
Speaker 2: the game life that we played growing up?
Speaker 1: You know, you look at the board and looks nothing
Speaker 1: like it right, Like, it almost looks more like Shoots
Speaker 1: and Ladders than the Game of Life, but it is related.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen sixty Milton Bradley gave the game to
Speaker 1: a designer to retool for the hundredth anniversary of the game.
Speaker 1: And along with taking out things like suicide, that's when
Speaker 1: they added those like little cars and the spinner and
Speaker 1: the cash, all to make it more fun. And along
Speaker 1: the way his company became this cornerstone of American board games.
Speaker 1: They produced titles like Operation Battleship, also Candy Land, and
Speaker 1: after one hundred and twenty four years of ownership by
Speaker 1: the Bradley family, in nineteen eighty four, the company was
Speaker 1: acquired by Hasbro, and then a few years later Hasbro
Speaker 1: was consolidating things, they buy Bradley's rival Parker Brothers, and
Speaker 1: they merged the two to form Hasbro Gaming.
Speaker 2: Actually, I'm glad that you mentioned the Parker Brothers because
Speaker 2: I did some research on them and it's kind of
Speaker 2: this heartwarming tale of a teenage prodigy who just wanted
Speaker 2: to have fun and make money in the process. So
Speaker 2: I'll tell you all about that right after a quick break.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to part Time Genius where we're talking board.
Speaker 1: Games, and I think you're going to tell us about
Speaker 1: the Parker brothers, who I didn't realize were real people.
Speaker 2: They were indeed real people. So specifically, the Parker brothers
Speaker 2: were George, Charles and Edward Parker. They were born in Salem, Massachusetts,
Speaker 2: and it was George, the youngest who was into games.
Speaker 2: This was in eighteen eighty three. He was just sixteen
Speaker 2: years old, and he created a game called Banking. Now,
Speaker 2: like you were saying earlier, many games at the time
Speaker 2: were thinly disguised lectures or lessons on various things, and
Speaker 2: so teenage George was like, absolutely not. Games should just
Speaker 2: be fun. So he made a game called Banking. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, what's more fun than banking? I guess banking
Speaker 2: was fun at the time, maybe now. The point of
Speaker 2: banking was pretty simple. Players competed to see who could
Speaker 2: make the most money, which was a little different than
Speaker 2: all other games that lectured you about morals. Anyway, George's
Speaker 2: family loved the game, and after two publishers were rejected it,
Speaker 2: his older brother Charles, convinced George to just publish it himself,
Speaker 2: and he did exactly that spending forty dollars to make
Speaker 2: five hundred copies. Can you imagine being on the five
Speaker 2: hundred copies of the game for forty bucks these days? Anyway,
Speaker 2: he sold almost all of them within the year and
Speaker 2: decided to launch his own games business. Charles joined the
Speaker 2: company a few years later and they adopted the name
Speaker 2: Parker Brothers. Eventually Edward, the oldest brother, joined too, and
Speaker 2: it was truly a family affair. So we have George
Speaker 2: Parker to thank for pushing American games in a much
Speaker 2: more entertaining direction. And over the years, Parker Brothers launched
Speaker 2: all these favorites from Clue to Sorry to Risk, even
Speaker 2: the Oiji board. So like some really fun stuff.
Speaker 1: That's so funny because when I think of Parker Brothers,
Speaker 1: I really only think of one game.
Speaker 2: All right, I'll take a guess it's Monopoly exactly.
Speaker 1: And I have to say this is one of the
Speaker 1: most interesting and infuriating stories I found during my research.
Speaker 1: So according to Hasbro's official narrative, Monopoly was invented in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three by an out of workman named Charles Darrow.
Speaker 1: He brought the game to Parker Brothers, which was struggling
Speaker 1: during the Great Depression, and of course the famous story
Speaker 1: is that they turn it down at first it breaks
Speaker 1: all their rules, but then they changed their mind and
Speaker 1: Monopoly becomes a sensation, selling millions of copies and making
Speaker 1: Darrow and Parker Brothers a ton of money. Today, it's
Speaker 1: a bestseller in over one hundred countries with at least
Speaker 1: a billion copies sold, which is insane to me.
Speaker 2: Now, there was something about the way you said official
Speaker 2: narrative that makes me think there's a more interesting story here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, it turns out the nineteen oh three, and this
Speaker 1: is three decades before Darrow patented Monopoly, there was a
Speaker 1: Maryland woman named Lizzie McGhee and she created a monopoly prototype.
Speaker 1: She called it The Landlord's Game, and she actually had
Speaker 1: an agenda with this. She wanted to spread the belief
Speaker 1: of a philosopher named Henry George, and George believed that
Speaker 1: private land ownership would ruin society. So McGee released game
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh six, and it caught on even among
Speaker 1: people who weren't interested in this philosophy. It was just
Speaker 1: really fun to play.
Speaker 2: And do you play it in the same way you
Speaker 2: play Monopoly?
Speaker 1: Today, not quite Like the goal of avoiding bankruptcy was
Speaker 1: the same. But McGee made a rule that allowed players
Speaker 1: to cooperate. You could vote to pay rent into a
Speaker 1: common bank instead of paying the title holder of the property.
Speaker 1: And I actually love this detail. Instead of that square
Speaker 1: that says go, McGee had a square that read, quote
Speaker 1: labor upon mother Earth produces wages.
Speaker 2: Which is kind of a mouthful. Yeah, the card that says,
Speaker 2: do not pass labor upon mother Earth produces wages, do
Speaker 2: not collect two hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: It's not as catchy. But McGee's game became popular with
Speaker 1: socialists and quakers and also university students, and in keeping
Speaker 1: with her beliefs, she didn't profit from this, Like it
Speaker 1: was an open source, public domain, free for people to
Speaker 1: play and modify game.
Speaker 2: Wow, so I'm curious. So how did this socialist experiment
Speaker 2: turn into a billion dollar commodity?
Speaker 1: So Harper's magazine actually did this incredible investigation of this,
Speaker 1: and according to that article, a professor at the Warden
Speaker 1: School used the game to teach his classes quote the
Speaker 1: wickedness of land monopoly, Which is just amazing to think of,
Speaker 1: right Warden teaching the wickedness of land Monopoly, but it
Speaker 1: catches on and the students spread it across Pennsylvania as
Speaker 1: summer camps. It gets to the Pocono's, people are playing
Speaker 1: it at like Columbia and Harvard and lounges there, and
Speaker 1: before long people were calling it monopoly, but with a
Speaker 1: lowercase M, so kind of the way you'd refer to
Speaker 1: Domino's or chess. And then during the Great Depression, these
Speaker 1: two brothers in Atlantic City, Jesse and Eugene Rayford, they
Speaker 1: learned the game from this Indianapolis woman they had met.
Speaker 1: The Rayfords were Quakers, and they shared it with their community.
Speaker 1: But they replaced the usual ponds in the game with
Speaker 1: household objects. You've got things like thimbles that suddenly are
Speaker 1: added into the next.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, And so this was still in its open
Speaker 2: source kind of free to the public stage though too right, yeah,
Speaker 2: And people were free to modify the rules. So they
Speaker 2: actually made one other major change. Originally, properties were sold
Speaker 2: at auction when players landed on them, but the Rayferds
Speaker 2: thought that was too complicated, so they put sale prices
Speaker 2: on the board and changed property names to reflect places
Speaker 2: in Atlantic City, and they showed their version of the
Speaker 2: game to a friend who showed it to a friend
Speaker 2: of his, and that friend ended up being Charles Darrow,
Speaker 2: who I think is the alleged inventor of Monopoly.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, so it seems what Darrow really did was
Speaker 1: copy McGee's games, stripped out the socialist elements, capitalized the
Speaker 1: m monopoly, and passed this version off as his original game.
Speaker 1: And in doing so he made himself fantastically wealthy.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's kind of like he won the biggest
Speaker 2: real life game of monopoly. If you think about it.
Speaker 2: He really did. But the question today is who's going
Speaker 2: to win the fact off, I don't know if there's
Speaker 2: only one way to find out.
Speaker 1: Okay, So in the past, board games were used to
Speaker 1: teach everything from geography to morality. But did you know
Speaker 1: there's growing evidence that games have a positive impact on
Speaker 1: brain activity. For instance, a study showed that playing the
Speaker 1: game Go can improve symptoms of depression and anxiety in
Speaker 1: patients with Alzheimer's. Some experts think that Go can help
Speaker 1: kids with ADHD two because it can help improve executive function.
Speaker 1: All right, well, I think we both know trivia keeps
Speaker 1: the brain sharp. So here's a fact about trivial Pursuit.
Speaker 1: Did you know that Trivial Pursuit was the focus of
Speaker 1: a strange lawsuit. The game was invented in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine by Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, and
Speaker 1: it was an overnight success, But in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: a Nova Scotia man southed the pair, saying that in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, Hany had picked him up while he
Speaker 1: was hitchhiking. He claimed that during the ride, he had
Speaker 1: described the idea for Trivial Pursuit and Haney stole it.
Speaker 1: Haney said in his defense that he'd never picked up
Speaker 1: a hitchhiker. A judge ruled in the journalists favor in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2: Lizzie has a family friend who claims that she sat
Speaker 2: next to Leijah Coca on a plane and coach and
Speaker 2: mentioned that he should make an affordable car called the Eon,
Speaker 2: and all he did was add the letter end on Wow.
Speaker 2: That is amazing.
Speaker 1: So I know we talked about life and Milton Bradley earlier,
Speaker 1: but one thing I hadn't realized was what a marketing
Speaker 1: genius the game designer was. So during the Civil War
Speaker 1: he realized that soldiers needed things to de stress. So
Speaker 1: he started bumbling a game set with chess, checkers, dominoes,
Speaker 1: and his game the early Version of Life. And he
Speaker 1: made it tiny enough that you could nail it anywhere,
Speaker 1: so according to mental flaws, during Christmas he advertised it
Speaker 1: as quote, just the thing to send to members of
Speaker 1: the armed forces, and that's how the game really took off.
Speaker 2: So classy, all right, So for my last fact, mango,
Speaker 2: do you know what copy pasta is? I mean, I
Speaker 2: know it's kind of like a memish thing, but remind
Speaker 2: me what it is, all right. Copy pasta is a
Speaker 2: horror story that's spread around the Internet, getting copied and
Speaker 2: pasted over and over across the Internet, and one of
Speaker 2: the weirdest copy pastas of all time is about a
Speaker 2: nineties board game. It's been shared thousands and thousands of times.
Speaker 2: The anonymous author claims that they were terrorized by a
Speaker 2: demonic VHS tape of rap Rat, a character in a
Speaker 2: bizarre board game also called rap Rat. Now that story,
Speaker 2: like most copy pastas, is fake, but rap Rat is real.
Speaker 2: The game was released in nineteen ninety two, and it
Speaker 2: really did come with a VHS tape featuring a wrapping rodent,
Speaker 2: so players would compete to assemble puzzles before rap Rat
Speaker 2: eats all the cheese on the TV screen. Now, in
Speaker 2: between nibbles, he shouts off instructions and of course he raps,
Speaker 2: and the whole thing is totally nuts. And the best
Speaker 2: part is I found an actual nineteen ninety two commercial
Speaker 2: for rap Rat. It's VHS's a okay, it's kids entertainment.
Speaker 2: It's you have to stay with video board so get mellow,
Speaker 2: get yellow, get the video board game rap Rat. He
Speaker 2: ain't no ghost, He's the most the video board game
Speaker 2: rap Rat. Okay, that is amazing for rap Rat alone.
Speaker 2: I think you have to take the trophy. Congratulations. It
Speaker 2: is possible that this entire episode was an excuse for
Speaker 2: me to play some rap rap for you brought up,
Speaker 2: but there you go. I'm gonna look for on Spotify.
Speaker 2: Now that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for listening from Will Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself. We
Speaker 2: are so excited to be making shows in the new year.
Speaker 1: And can't wait for you to hear all of them.
Speaker 1: Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongais Chatikler,
Speaker 1: and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with
Speaker 1: support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for
Speaker 1: iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media
Speaker 1: support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.