PROSPERITY RULES FOR MONOPOLY PLUS
PROSPERITY RULES FOR MONOPOLY FREE

Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.īorn in 1866, Magie was an outspoken rebel against the norms and politics of her times. The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there. Now those chafing under the capitalist yoke (i.e., losing) could wise up, go socialist, and take over.‘Buy land – they aren’t making it any more,’ quipped Mark Twain. Most importantly, players could vote to switch from Landlord to Prosperity rules in midgame. Taxes, jail, and monopoly pricing were now eliminated land rent was paid to the public treasury once enough treasury cash accumulated, private utilities were condemned and placed in public ownership. Prosperity was played on the same board but with modified rules.

PROSPERITY RULES FOR MONOPOLY PLUS

She unveiled a combo game in 1932 called The Landlord’s Game plus Prosperity. However, since the goal was still to wind up with the most money, a more obvious lesson might have been that monopolies and land speculation were great.Īs the capitalist frenzy of the ’20s continued unabated, Magie undoubtedly thought her plan wasn’t working, and gave it one more try. Magie thought this would teach the proletariat that monopolies and land speculation were wicked. The other novelty was Monopoly, which at this point applied only to railroads: If you owned all of them, you could charge twice as much.

Idle Land could be bought for $100 and sold for $200, showing the easy money in land speculation. Two new concepts were introduced in the 1924 edition. The players will now call you Senator.” Ha! For example, when throwing the Chance cube, a five meant you’d been “caught robbing a hen-roost-go to jail,” whereas a 10 meant you’d been “caught robbing the public-take $200 from the board. Her 1924 patent for a second version of The Landlord’s Game explicitly said one objective was showing “how the single tax would discourage land speculation.” The rules now showed more attitude. Magie eventually tumbled to the pedagogical shortcomings of her invention. If so, ma’am, I have to tell you that probably went over the average player’s head. Perhaps she thought referring to money paid for food, shelter, etc., as “indirect taxation” rather than “expenses” would impart profound lessons in economics. All we can suppose is that in 1903 Magie’s political thinking, or anyway her approach to agitprop, wasn’t fully formed. How does this teach us about the dark side of capitalism? Search me.

Instead, the player who accumulated the most money won. If the idea was that the players, beaten down by exorbitant rents, were supposed to rise up and feed their evil landlord’s intestines to him with a fork, this might indeed make for a diverting family game night.īut that’s not what happened.

You’re thinking: What an exciting premise for a board game! Depends on how it’s handled. She was a fan of the theories of political economist Henry George, who thought landlords were parasites and advocated a “single tax” on them to replace all other taxes. The story goes that Magie intended her game to be a teaching tool about the injustices of capitalism. Nonetheless you realize that someone here has an agenda. The fourth corner, however, wasn’t labeled “Go” but instead bore a drawing of the globe encircled by the lofty words “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Translation: you got a hundred bucks.

PROSPERITY RULES FOR MONOPOLY FREE

At three of the corners were Go to Jail, Public Park (the ancestral version of Free Parking), and the Jail itself. The Landlord’s Game, as she called it, featured a board with the familiar circuit of increasingly pricey neighborhoods interspersed with railroads and utilities. The earliest recognizable version of what we know as Monopoly was patented by Lizzie Magie in 1903. Their review: nothing like the socialists to make the capitalists look good. Yes, it’s more or less true, although you have to ask: Who needs a game to understand how screwed up capitalism is when all you have to do is read the news? Be that as it may, I convened the Straight Dope staff to play several versions of proto-Monopoly. I heard the original Monopoly game, before Parker Brothers took it over, was designed to teach people how broken capitalism is.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription.

Prosperity rules for monopoly