20 Classic Board Games With Surprising Origins

Here’s a little tidbit about Monopoly that I never knew: it was invented by a woman, Elizabeth Magie, in 1903 (and patented in 1904). The Landlord’s Game was designed to show how bad monopolies on land were for the common man. It was played, as a folk game, on college campuses and within the Quaker community for decades. In 1935, Charles Darrow took an adaptation of the game and sold it to Parker Brothers, who gave him a lucrative royalty deal on Monopoly. Magie only received a total of $500 for her patent!

Chinese Checkers has no history or cultural tie to China whatsoever. The game was first published under the name Sternhalma by Ravensburger in 1892, a modification of an older American game, Halma. Ravensburger introduced the six-pointed star-shaped board so that up to six players could be accommodated. In 1928, it was brought to the U.S. by Bill Pressman and Jack Pressman as “Hop Ching Checkers” and soon renamed “Chinese Checkers” to capitalize on Americans’ supposed infatuation with East Asia. It is one of the most glaring examples of marketing built entirely on false exoticism.

Candy Land is Milton Bradley’s bestselling game. But the game’s origins were in a San Diego hospital. Retired teacher Eleanor Abbott was a polio patient when she drew the original Candy Land game on butcher paper so that bedridden young polio patients, unable to manage reading or arithmetic games, could enjoy color matching instead. It was published in 1949, and Abbott gave the royalties to polio charities.

It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate origin story for Cluedo, the classic board game of murder mystery deduction, than the blackouts of WWII. Anthony Pratt, a musician who worked in a factory making tank components, and his wife Elva created a whodunit game to play during air-raid blackouts. He applied for a patent on the game, called Murder, in 1944, before it was published as Cluedo by Waddingtons in 1949, keeping just three of Pratt’s original nine weapons (the dagger, revolver, and rope) and adding three new ones. It was released in America as Clue by Parker Brothers the same year.

Before its release in 1967 (that famous plastic edition with the ships, pegs, and the upright boards) as a Milton Bradley game, Battleship had a much simpler existence. Tracing back to the World War I era, pencil-and-paper-style naval games involved players drawing a secret fleet on a grid, taking turns calling out numbers to try and sink the opponent’s ships, marking hits and misses. An early commercial version called Salvo appeared around 1930, though its exact origins remain murky.

Scrabble was invented by Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect during the Depression, and was originally called Lexiko and later Criss-Cross Words. Though toy manufacturers turned down the idea, Butts created letter point values based on a count of the letters’ appearances on the front pages of newspapers, including the New York Times. In 1948, James Brunot bought the rights and trademarked it as Scrabble. In 1952, it became a hit after the president of Macy’s saw one while on vacation.

The Mansion of Happiness was designed in 1800 in England by George Fox and published in 1843 by the W. & S.B. Ives firm in Salem, Massachusetts. It is thought to be one of the first mass-produced American board games. The game used a teetotum spinner, not dice, because of their negative connotation with gambling. Landing on Sincerity meant you’d be rewarded by advancing. Landing on Drunkard, on the other hand, resulted in a trip to the Whipping Post.

Modern chess is descended from the 6th-century Indian game Chaturanga, which represented the four arms of the army. Through Persia and the Islamic world, the game eventually made its way to Europe. Modern chess took shape in southern Europe in about 1475, when the weak counselor piece became the powerful Queen, speeding up the game considerably. In 1849, Nathaniel Cook registered the iconic Staunton chess set.

I love the fact that one of the first American licensed children’s character board games is about an old bunny with rheumatism! Uncle Wiggily is the star of Howard R. Garis’s popular stories, first published in 1910, and the Milton Bradley Company adapted his adventures into a 1916 board game. Players move their rabbit piece along a woodland path toward the home of Dr. Possum, advancing according to rhyming text on cards.

Milton Bradley had heavily invested in portraits of presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. In 1860, he ordered some of them printed, featuring the clean-shaven candidate. By the time the portraits were printed, however, Abe had grown a beard! That meant that a few thousand clean-shaven portraits were worthless. Later that year, Bradley released his Checkered Game of Life, which sold 45,000 copies in its first year, and included moralistic twists of fate where vice leads to Ruin or Suicide and virtue leads to Happy Old Age!

Mahjong began as a tile-based game in the mid-to-late 1800s in China. Contrary to the popular belief that the game was brought over by Chinese immigrants, the game was introduced to the US by American engineer Joseph Babcock, who added Western numbers to the tiles and simplified scoring in 1920. Babcock’s “Little Red Book” sparked a Mahjong craze. In 1937, the National Mah Jongg League was founded by American women to standardize the rules, which had grown too loose as the game became popular.

By 1952, Minnesota mailman Herb Schaper was selling 1.2 million Cootie games, one of the first board games made entirely of three-dimensional plastic pieces. It all started when he hand-carved a bug-shaped fishing lure in 1948. The flexible legs led Schaper to start a business in 1949 to make interlocking plastic versions. He used the plastic cooties to turn Cootie, a simple paper-and-pencil game dating back to World War I, into a commercially successful board game.

Games of Puritan morality gave way to games of Gilded Age ambition, including 1886’s McLoughlin Brothers title The District Messenger Boy, based on Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories. In it, players move their token messenger boys up the telegraph company totem pole, advancing spaces when they land on Industry, and retreating when they land on Playing Marbles. The first player to achieve the rank of President of the Company wins.

Pachisi originated at least as early as the 6th century CE in India, and is depicted in rock-cut relief sculptures at the Ellora Caves. It is a tradition that Akbar, Mughal Emperor in the 1500s, played outdoor games of Pachisi on a giant scale during his rule at Fatehpur Sikri, and used sixteen women of his harem to act as pawns. The game was subsequently adapted to Western forms; American publisher Selchow & Righter copyrighted a Westernized version of the game as Parcheesi in 1867.

According to the company history records kept by E. S. Lowe, in 1954, a wealthy Canadian couple (their identity has never been confirmed) developed a game consisting of dice and a scorecard aboard their yacht. In 1956, the inventors licensed the rights to the game to E. S. Lowe, who marketed it as Yahtzee. The license involved an exchange of the game rights for 1,000 gift sets.

Go (or Weiqi) is a game of strategy in which black and white stones are played on a 19×19 grid, with the object being to surround more area than the opponent. Go was developed in China (there are records dating back to the 4th century BCE, though it is likely older), and legend has it that Emperor Yao created it in 2200 BCE.

Backgammon is one of the oldest games known to man. When the Royal Tombs of Ur were discovered, boards of the Royal Game of Ur were found, an ancestor of race games. Those ancient boards date back to approximately 2600 BCE. It is known that in the mid-1920s, a club player in New York City added the doubling cube to the race game, starting the modern backgammon craze.

The board game Sorry! was patented in England by William Henry Storey in 1929. In the UK, the game was published by Waddingtons, and Parker Brothers licensed it in the U.S. in 1934, marketing it as “The Game of Sweet Revenge.” The board’s design is based on the classic cross-and-circle layout of the ancient Indian game Pachisi, but cards rather than dice determine the players’ moves, allowing for tactical decisions like trading spaces with an opponent.

Risk: The Continental Game, published by Parker Brothers as Risk in 1959, originated from a 1957 French world strategy game, La Conquête du Monde, invented by Academy Award-winning director Albert Lamorisse (best known for his film The Red Balloon) and published in France by the Miro Company. Parker Brothers’ William Wright acquired the rights to this game for the U.S. and streamlined the design.

Chutes and Ladders began as a Hindu board game used to teach moral lessons. In India, it was called Moksha Patam. During the 1890s, British officers in India took the game back to Great Britain, where it was known as Snakes and Ladders. In 1943, it was introduced in America as Chutes and Ladders, published by Milton Bradley. Basically, it illustrates the concept of Karma: you do good deeds, you’re rewarded and move closer to final liberation from the cycle of reincarnation; if you fall victim to negative deeds, you have to continue the cycle.

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