In 1936, two Washington newspapers photographed an old woman holding up two board games. They were identical down to the corners — the same square loop of properties, the same jail, the same rents. One was Monopoly, the best-selling game in America, credited to a man named Charles Darrow. The other was the Landlord’s Game, patented thirty-two years earlier by the woman in the photograph. The papers reported, with some bemusement, that she had made almost nothing from it.
Her name was Elizabeth Magie, and there were two stories about where Monopoly came from. The one the country knew was about Darrow. The true one was about her.
The story the box told
Charles Darrow was an unemployed heater salesman in Philadelphia, scraping through the Depression, when a friend introduced him to a board game at a dinner. He was shown a board with Atlantic City street names already on it, the monopolist rules already the only rules anyone played. He asked for a written copy, made his own version, and began selling it.
In 1934 he pitched it to Parker Brothers, who turned it down for containing “52 fundamental errors.” Darrow printed and sold thousands of copies himself. The next year Parker Brothers reconsidered, bought the rights, and put the game out under a single clean origin story: Charles Darrow, a down-on-his-luck salesman, had invented Monopoly at his kitchen table and saved both himself and the company from ruin.
It sold 278,000 copies in 1935 and 1,751,000 the next year. Darrow took royalties on every one. He became the first board-game designer in history to make a million dollars, and he retired on it.
That was the story on the box, and it was a marketing fiction. The board Darrow was shown at that dinner had been circulating, hand to hand, for nearly three decades — and the woman who set it loose had a patent to prove it.
The story the patent told
Magie was born in 1866 in rural Illinois, the daughter of James Magie, an abolitionist newspaper publisher who had followed Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 campaign against Stephen Douglas and talked him into sitting for a photograph in Macomb. She worked as a stenographer and typist at the Dead Letter Office and wrote poetry and short stories on the side. She was also a Georgist — a follower of the economist Henry George, whose 1879 book Progress and Poverty had become one of the best-selling works in America.
George’s argument was simple and incendiary. Poverty persisted alongside progress, he said, because a small class of people owned the land everyone else needed to live and work on, and collected rent for the privilege of existing on it. His remedy was a single tax on the value of land, which would fund government, break the grip of speculators, and replace every other tax. To his followers it was less an economic policy than a moral cause.
Magie set out to teach it on a board. Around 1902 she designed the Landlord’s Game, and on January 5, 1904, she was granted U.S. Patent 748,626 for it — years before she or any other American woman could vote.
The board was a square loop of properties. Players moved around it, bought land, and paid rent when they landed on what someone else owned. There was a “Public Treasury,” a jail, a corner where wages were earned, a utility for water, another for light. Anyone who has set up a Monopoly board has set up Magie’s.
A game built to lose
What made the Landlord’s Game an argument rather than a pastime was that it shipped with two sets of rules.
Under the first, called Prosperity, every player was rewarded whenever any player earned wages, and the game ended — everyone winning together — once the poorest player had doubled their starting wealth. Under the second, the monopolist rules, players grabbed land, charged ruinous rents, and squeezed opponents out one by one until a single winner sat atop a board of bankrupts.
The point was the contrast. Magie expected players to feel the misery of the monopoly game, recognize it as the world they actually lived in, and prefer the version where the land’s value was shared. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” she wrote.
Players did feel the contrast. They simply preferred to win.
This was the same woman who, in 1906, took out a newspaper advertisement offering herself for sale — a “young woman American slave,” available to the highest bidder, looking for a man to own her outright. It was a stunt, a forty-year-old stenographer making a point about how little a woman’s labor and freedom were worth in the eyes of the law and the market. “We are not machines,” she said. “Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.” The board game was the quieter, more durable version of the same argument.
How the two stories collided
The Landlord’s Game spread the way folk songs do — hand to hand, changing as it went, nobody keeping receipts. It caught on first among the people most likely to take Henry George seriously: economics professors, Quakers, left-leaning intellectuals. Scott Nearing, an economist at the Wharton School, learned it in the single-tax colony of Arden, Delaware, around 1910 and taught it to his students. They made their own boards. Those boards spread to other campuses and other towns.
Each group that adopted it tinkered. Players added fixed prices for properties instead of negotiating them. A circle of Quakers in Atlantic City renamed the squares after their own streets — Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens — anchoring an abstract teaching tool to a real seaside town. The two-rule structure quietly fell away. Almost nobody kept the version where everyone won. The fun was in the bloodletting.
By the early 1930s the game had been circulating, unpatented in its homemade forms and largely uncredited, for nearly three decades. One of those homemade boards, with the Atlantic City names already on it, reached a dinner in Philadelphia and a heater salesman named Charles Darrow.
Parker Brothers had a problem, because Magie’s patent still existed, and so did the dozens of older homemade boards floating around. So the company went looking for them. In November 1935 it bought Magie’s patent — by then a 1924 revision — for $500 and no royalties. It also quietly acquired the rights to several rival games, the better to protect the one game it had decided was Darrow’s.
“The whole business will not have been in vain”
Magie was nearly seventy when the two boards were laid side by side for the cameras. The Washington Evening Star and the Washington Post ran her side in 1936, photographing her holding both — the Landlord’s Game and the Monopoly that had swallowed it, identical down to the corners. The papers reported that the woman who invented the most popular game in America had made almost nothing from it — that, counting patent and printing fees, the game had likely cost her more than it ever paid.
She did not seem to be chasing the money. What she wanted was for the lesson to survive the theft. “If the subtle propaganda for the single tax idea works around to the minds of the thousands who now shake the dice and buy and sell over the ‘Monopoly’ board,” she told the Evening Star, “she feels the whole business will not have been in vain.”
It did not work around to their minds. The single-tax idea vanished from the game completely. What survived was the part she had built as a warning — the joy of bankrupting your friends.
Magie died in 1948. Her death notices did not mention Monopoly.
The verdict
Her name might have stayed buried if not for a man trying to sell the opposite game. In the 1970s Ralph Anspach, an economics professor in San Francisco, created a game called Anti-Monopoly, in which players broke up trusts instead of building them. Parker Brothers — by then owned by General Mills — sued him for trademark infringement. To defend himself, Anspach had to prove that Monopoly had not sprung from one man’s basement but from a long public lineage, and he spent years tracking down the old boards, the Quakers, the professors, and the patent of a woman named Elizabeth Magie.
The litigation ground on for a decade and reached the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the company’s appeal; Anspach kept his game. Along the way the paper trail he assembled made the older story impossible to deny. The salesman in the basement had been a marketing fiction. The woman who held the original patent had been telling reporters the truth in 1936, and no one had listened.
She had built a machine to show people what unchecked landlords do to everyone beneath them. A century later it is the best-selling proprietary board game in the world, owned by a corporation, and most of the people who play it have never heard her name.