NOT SUCHDX1ST TRIVIAL
We spend £7billion a year on board games globally and Monopoly alone has sold 250 million sets. As you enjoy some competitive family fun this Christmas, we take a look at the extraordinary stories behind our favourites
WHEN Canadian journalists Chris Haney and his friend Scott Abbott sat down to play Scrabble in December 1979, they discovered to their horror that many letters were missing. Having popped out to pick up a new copy, Haney, then working as picture editor at the Montreal Gazette, realised he must have bought at least six sets over the years. It sparked a realisation. “Jeez, there’s a lot of money to be made out of board games,” Haney, who died aged 59 in 2010, later explained. And over a round of beers, it inspired their own: a trivia-based quiz game. Haney and Abbott came up with a prototype – which would become Trivial Pursuit – in 45 minutes: a six-spoked circular board and multiple categories on a few sheets of paper.
“We had it all wrapped up by about 6pm. It just sprang out in one burst of creative energy,” said Haney, whose brother John, a hockey enthusiast, helped with questions.
Having been launched in 1981 with the first copies sold at a loss (each cost £48 to make, but sold for a tenner) the game enjoys enduring appeal 40 years after its creation.
Everyone who took shares in Trivial Pursuit walked away with hefty returns when the company’s founders sold the rights to Hasbro in 2008 for £56million, after already selling more than 88 million sets.
In his new book It’s All A Game, Tristan Donovan records how, in just three years, 20 million sets were sold.
“The board game business had never seen anything like it. Trivial Pursuit became one of the sensations of the 1980s,” he records. Donovan’s book contains a wealth of fascinating facts on our most treasured games.
MONOPOLY
Arguably the most famous of them all, Monopoly started as a protest against capitalism yet ironically ended up celebrating it, and becoming, in the process, the bestselling branded board game ever, with 250 million copies in circulation around the world.
As such, it was banned in communist countries including the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. The idea – and its original title
The Landlord Game – came from an American called Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie. She wanted it to show the tragedy of capitalist society. Players travelled around the board using paper money to buy land, railways and utilities. But each time they passed a corner square marked “Labor upon Mother Earth produces wages”, they collected a salary of $100.
In another corner was a square warning: “No trespassing. Go to jail.” In a final corner there was a public park and the poor house where bankrupted players would end up.
“But Magie’s vision for the game was worlds away from the internationally famous game it spawned,” writes Donovan. In 1933 it was redesigned by Charles Darrow, who, in 1935, sold it to Parker Brothers, who added the final touches. By the end of that year, 250,000 copies of the game, now called Monopoly, were sold in the US. Parker president Robert Barton sent a copy to the Leeds-based game manufacturer Waddingtons. Boss Victor Watson’s son Norman loved the game, so he made a transatlantic telephone call (costing some £250 a minute in today’s money) to Parker Brothers to buy the rights.
To rename the properties, Watson and his secretary spent a day in the capital selecting London locations to put on to the board.The pub in which they were having a drink at the end of the day was immortalised as The Angel Islington.
SNAKES AND LADDERS
The family favourite is based on an Indian game, Moksha Patamu, which drew on Jain and Hindu beliefs. Players would travel the board towards spiritual Enlightenment. Donovan explains: “Along the way they would climb ladders that represented virtues such as knowledge and generosity and slide down snakes that represented vices such as anger, vanity, lust and killing.”
In the original, the path to goodness was more challenging than the path of evil... and there were more snakes than ladders! But when it reached Victorian Britain in the 1890s as Snakes And Ladders, the vices and virtues had been removed and there were as many ladders as snakes. It was adapted for the US market without snakes in 1934 as Chutes And Ladders.
SCRABBLE
Unemployed architect Alfred Butts invented the game in the US in the 1930s. He sold it under a variety of names including Lexico, It, and Criss-Cross Words. But it wasn’t until 1947, when New York social worker James Brunot bought the rights and renamed it Scrabble, that it finally began to take off.
By the end of 1954, close to four million Scrabble sets had been sold in the US. It was launched in Britain in 1955 and became extremely popular here too.
To date, more than 150 million sets have been sold in 121 countries worldwide and in 29 languages.
Over half the households in Britain are said to have a Scrabble set. The highest
scoring single turn record was set by the late Dr Karl Khoshnaw in 1982 for the word CAZIQUES (meaning
Native Chiefs in the West Indies), which, played across two triple word squares, scored
392. The first World Scrabble Championship was held in London in 1991 and the current champion is New Zealander Nigel Richards.
Theoretically, the highest scoring word possible is oxyphenbutazone – an anti-inflammatory drug – with a momentous 1,782 points.
But in order to get the points, the word has to be played across the top of the board.
It therefore hits three triple word score squares while connecting with seven crosswords downwards!
CLUEDO
The murder was committed by Miss Scarlet in the library with the lead piping. Or perhaps it was Professor Plum, in the ballroom with the rope?
The classic murder mystery game was devised during the Second World War by Anthony E. Pratt, a former pianist turned munitions worker from Birmingham. Pratt was a devotee of detective fiction so in his spare time invented a game that would bring the whodunnits he so enjoyed reading to life. The game was originally called Murder, but Waddingtons, the manufacturers, didn’t like that. They came up with the name “Cluedo” by fusing the words ‘clue’ and ‘ludo’, the Latin for ‘I play’. It’s not the only thing they altered.
Pratt’s original had 10 characters, each named after the colour of their playing piece, butWaddingtons cut the number down to six. The murder weapons changed too, with the axe, bomb and poison bottle among those discarded, and replaced with the spanner, the candlestick and the lead piping.
Sadly for Pratt, he was persuaded to sell his rights to Waddingtons for £5,000 plus royalties until the patent expired in 1967 – costing him millions of pounds. By 1973, two million copies of the game were being sold worldwide. “Cluedo joined the ranks of the world’s favourite board games,” writes Donovan. In 1985 there was even a film, Clue, made featuring the characters, with the slogan, “It‘s not just a game any more”.
In 2016, Mrs White was retired and replaced by Dr Orchid, the adopted daughter of the murder victim Dr Black.
THEY ALSO ENTERTAINED…
Game of Dracula was a “fiendishly exciting escape game” from Waddingtons brought out in the 1970s which involved players trying to escape from Count Dracula’s castle.
Any player unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Green Vampire in the coffin vault had to wear the vampire mask.
Another family favourite Mouse Trap – designed by Chicago-born Marvin Glass, known as the ‘Willy Wonka of toys’ – first went on sale in 1963.
Described as “the crazy, zany game for catching rodents”, the 1963 invention was inspired by a newspaper cartoon depicting a Heath Robinson-style contraption that solved an everyday task. It involves players co-operating to build a mousetrap, and then trying to catch rival mice. Glass worried so much about the risk of corporate espionage, he transformed his offices into a warren of high-security rooms and arrived at trade shows with the suitcase containing his latest prototypes handcuffed to his wrist.
The good news, says Donovan, is that instead of dying out in our increasingly digital age, board games are thriving. That’s great news. The festive season wouldn’t be the same without them.
●●It’s All A Game: A Short History Of Board Games by Tristan Donovan (Atlantic Books, £8.99). For your copy, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 with your credit/debit card, or visit expressbookshop.co.uk P&P £2 per order.