The Landlord's Game is a board game

Board game

A board game is a game which involves counters or pieces being moved on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two, and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve...

 patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie

Elizabeth Magie

Elizabeth "Lizzie" J. Phillips née Magie was an American game designer. She invented The Landlord's Game, the precursor to Monopoly.-Early life:...

 as . It is a realty and taxation game, which is considered to be a direct inspiration for the board game Monopoly

Monopoly (game)

Marvin Gardens, the leading yellow property on the board shown, is actually a misspelling of the original location name, Marven Gardens. The misspelling was said to be introduced by Charles Todd and passed on when his home-made Monopoly board was copied by Charles Darrow and thence to Parker...

. Though many similar home-made games were played at the beginning of the 20th century and some predate The Landlord's Game, it is the first of its kind to have an attested patent.

Magie designed the game to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism

Georgism

Georgism is an economic philosophy and ideology that holds that people own what they create, but that things found in nature, most importantly land, belong equally to all...

, a system proposed by Henry George

Henry George

Henry George was an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "single tax" on land...

, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate. Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood.

Publication

Although The Landlord's Game was patented, it was not taken up by a manufacturer until 1910, when it was published in the U.S. by the Economic Game Company of New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. In the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 it was first published in 1913 by the Newbie Game Company of London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 under the title Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit, although despite the title change it was recognizably the same game.

Magie moved back to her birth state of Illinois and was married in 1910, then moved with her husband to the Washington D.C area and eventually patented a new version of The Landlord's Game in 1924 under her married name of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. This version, unlike the one depicted in her first patent, included named streets, some named after locations in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. Apart from commercial distribution in 1932, it spread by word of mouth and was played in slightly variant homemade versions over the years by Quakers

Religious Society of Friends

The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...

, Georgists, university students, and others who became aware of it.

Magie held the patent until 1935, when she sold it to Parker Brothers

Parker Brothers

Parker Brothers is a toy and game manufacturer and brand. Since 1883, the company has published more than 1,800 games; among their best known products are Monopoly, Cluedo , Sorry, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, Ouija, Aggravation, and Probe...

 for $500. The company had recently started distributing Charles Darrow

Charles Darrow

Charles Brace Darrow was born in Philadelphia; he is best known as the purported inventor of the Monopoly board game. Darrow was a domestic heater salesman from Germantown, a neighborhood in Philadelphia during the Great Depression. The house he lived in still stands at 40 Westview Street...

's Monopoly, and was buying up the patents of various commercial forms of the game in order to claim undisputed rights to selling it. As part of the purchase agreement, which Magie insisted upon, Parker Brothers manufactured and marketed three of her games; while Bargain Day and King's Men (1937) did relatively well, a third edition of The Landlord's Game (1939) only sold a few hundred copies before it was discontinued.

In a 2004 episode of PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

' History Detectives

History Detectives

History Detectives is a documentary television series on PBS. A group of researchers help people to seek answers to various historical questions they have, usually centering around a family heirloom, an old house or other historic object or structure...

(title: Monopoly; Japanese Internment Camp Artwork; The Lewis and Clark Cane), the show investigated a game board belonging to a Delaware

Delaware

Delaware is a U.S. state located on the Atlantic Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, and to the north by Pennsylvania...

man, having an intermediate version of a game combining elements of The Landlord's Game and Monopoly. The investigators concluded that this game board was the missing link that proves that Monopoly was derived from The Landlord's Game.