Monopoly

Monopoly is a board game published by Parker Brothers, an imprint of Hasbro. more...

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Players compete to acquire wealth through stylized economic activity involving the buying, rental and trading of properties using play money, as players take turns moving around the board according to the roll of the dice. The game is named after the economic concept of monopoly, the domination of a market by a single provider.

According to Hasbro, since Charles Darrow patented the game in 1935, approximately 750 million people have played the game, making it "the most played (commercial) board game in the world." The 1999 Guinness Book of Records cited Hasbro's previous statistic of 500 million people having played Monopoly. Games Magazine has inducted Monopoly into its Hall of Fame.

History

The history of Monopoly can be traced back to the early 1900s. In 1904, a Quaker woman named Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George. Her game, The Landlord's Game, was commercially published a few years later. Other interested game players redeveloped the game and some made their own sets. Lizzie herself patented a revised edition of the game in 1924, and similar games were published commercially. By the early 1930s, a board game named Monopoly was created much like the version of Monopoly sold by Parker Brothers and its parent companies throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st. Several people, mostly in the U.S. Midwest and near the U.S. East Coast, contributed to the game's design and evolution.

In 1941, the British Secret Service had John Waddington Ltd., the licensed manufacturer of the game outside the U.S., create a special edition for World War II prisoners of war held by the Nazis. Hidden inside these games were maps, compasses, real money and other objects useful for escaping. They were distributed to prisoners by the International Red Cross.

By the 1970s, the game's early history had been lost (and at least one historian has argued that it was purposely suppressed - see below), and the idea that it had been created solely by Charles Darrow had become popular folklore. This was stated in the 1974 book The Monopoly Book: Strategy and Tactics of the World's Most Popular Game, by Maxine Brady, and even in the instructions of the game itself. As Professor Ralph Anspach fought Parker Brothers and its then parent company, General Mills, over the trademarks of the Monopoly board game, much of the early history of the game was "rediscovered."

Read more at Wikipedia.org