HOW TO SCORE 1,782 IN SCRABBLE

...by spelling the word below (a pain-relieving drug, since you ask). Just one of the snippets from an intriguing new history of board games

Which board game was destroyed on the orders of Fidel Castro but also helped Allied prisoners of war escape from Colditz? Who handcuffed new games to his wrist and then hid them in giant bank vaults? Why did Cluedo’s Reverend Green come a cropper in America? We now spend almost €8bn a year on board games worldwide and Monopoly alone has sold more than 250million copies since its invention – so if you’re planning a few hours furiously competing around a table this Christmas, a fascinating new book, It’s All A Game, reveals the extraordinary stories behind the creation of these classics….

Monopoly

The capitalist board game banned by Russia, China and Cuba. Claim to fame The best-selling branded board game ever created, with more than 250 million copies sold worldwide.

WHAT’S THE SCORE? When Monopoly began life in 1902, designed by an American inventor and feminist, Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Magie, it was called The Landlord’s Game and aimed to show the tragedy of a capitalist society. Players travelled around the board using paper money to buy land, railways and utilities, much as they do today. 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.

In 1933 it was redesigned and commercialised by Charles Darrow, who, in 1935, sold it to Parker Brothers, who added the final touches. By the end of that year, more than 250,000 copies of the game, now called Monopoly, had been sold in the US.

Parker president Robert Barton then sent a copy to the Leeds-based card-game manufacturer Waddingtons, whose boss Victor Watson asked his son Norman to play it over a weekend. He loved it. Keen not to waste time, Watson made a transatlantic telephone call (at a cost of roughly £250 a minute in today’s money) to Parker Brothers to buy the rights. Parker, assuming Waddingtons must be a big deal in Britain because of the expense of the call, sold them the rights.

To rename the properties, Watson and his secretary spent a day touring London in a taxi, selecting locations to put on to the board. The Angel, Islington, was named BY TRISTAN DONOVAN after the pub in which they were having a drink at the end of the day.

DID YOU KNOW? During WWII, Waddingtons made special Monopoly sets to send to PoWs. Each contained a silk map, a compass and two files within the board. Real cash for bribes was hidden among the Monopoly money. They were a success, most famously aiding escapes from Colditz Castle.

FACT The belief that fines and taxes are put in the centre of the board and are won by anyone landing on Free Parking is wrong, but has entered into folklore.

Cluedo

Scene of the terrible crime. Claim to fame The game that embodied the golden age of detective fiction.

WHAT’S THE SCORE? It was invented in 1943 in Birmingham by factory worker Anthony Pratt. A keen interest in murder mystery books inspired him and his wife Elva to create a board game called Murder. Originally there were 10 rooms and the guests were Dr Black, Mr Brown, Mr Gold, the Rev Green, Miss Grey, Prof Plum, Miss Scarlet, Mrs Silver, Nurse White and Colonel Yellow (later changed to Colonel Mustard) and a set of unusual murder weapons.

The Pratts showed the game to Waddingtons’ Norman Watson in 1945. He published it but made changes. It became Cluedo, the board layout was altered and the guest list changed. The pistol became a revolver, while the axe, the cudgel, the bomb, the poison and the syringe were replaced by a spanner, a candlestick and a section of lead piping.

DID YOU KNOW? In the US, Rev Green become Mr Green, since Parker worried that a homicidal clergyman would not go down well.

FACT The Pratts made little from the game they invented. In May 1953, they accepted a one-off payment of £5,000 for the rights outside the UK. Mr Pratt died in 1994.

Scrabble

The game took 20 years to spell ‘SUCCESS’. Claim to fame The game that inspired its own dictionary. WHAT’S THE SCORE? When New York draughtsman Alfred Butts was made redundant in 1931, he decided to create a board game. He opted for an anagram game in which players would pull letters out at random and use them to construct words. He spent weeks poring over newspapers, counting how many times each letter of the alphabet appeared. That dictated how many of the 100 tiles in his game should represent each letter of the alphabet – vowels such as E and A are far more common than the letters X and Z.

He sold it under a variety of names: Lexico, It, Criss-Cross Words. But it wasn’t until 1947, when James Brunot, a New York social worker, bought the rights to it, spruced up the board, renamed it Scrabble and had it commercially produced that it began to take off. Arguments over which words were and were not acceptable led to the creation of Scrabble dictionaries.

Mattel owns the rights to the game everywhere in the world apart from the US.

DID YOU KNOW? The US Scrabble dictionary has ruled that profanities and words that could cause offence must not be included. This clear-up began after a Holocaust survivor discovered that her Scrabble dictionary contained an offensive slang term for Jew. A subsequent cull removed about 175 words. The Collins dic-

tionary leaves the profanities in place.

FACT It’s possible to score 1,782 points on a single word – ‘oxyphenbutazone’ (an anti-inflammatory drug). To get the points, the word would have to be played across the top of the board, hitting three triple word score squares while connecting with seven crosswords downwards.

Mouse Trap

Created by the Willy Wonka of toys. Claim to fame It sold about three million copies in its first year.

WHAT’S THE SCORE? Chicago-born Marvin Glass was a 5ft 3in, paranoid, chain-smoking ball of nervous energy who became known as the Willy Wonka of toys. Having set up a toy company in 1941, he made a fortune from a plastic chicken that laid marble eggs and a set of wind-up, chattering dentures. But he is best remembered for Mouse Trap, a 1963 game inspired by a newspaper cartoon that depicted a humorous, over-designed contraption that solved an everyday task. A couple of company employees designed a convoluted mouse trap with cranks, gears and levers that would cause a shoe to kick a bucket, a metal ball to roll down a rickety staircase and a drainpipe, and a bowling ball to drop through a hole in a bathtub and land on a seesaw, before finally unbalancing a cage that dropped down and captured the mouse. They then created a race game around that ridiculous apparatus. By the early Seventies, an estimated one in 20 toys and games sold in the US began life in Glass’s Chicago toy lab.

DID YOU KNOW? Glass fretted constantly about the risk of corporate espionage. He transformed his offices into a warren of high-security rooms, and arrived at trade shows with armed guards and a suitcase containing his latest prototypes handcuffed to his wrist.

FACT Glass dreaded sleeping. ‘It’s like being dead,’ he said, revealing he slept just five hours a night. He died at 59 after years of smoking three packets of cigarettes a day.

Trivial Pursuit

Sinatra admired them for doing it their way. Claim to fame The must-have game of baby-boomers, it defied the trend for video games. WHAT’S THE SCORE? When Montreal Gazette photo editor Chris Haney bought a new Scrabble set in 1979, its price convinced him and his friend Scott Abbott that there was a fortune to be made in games. Abbott suggested a trivia-quiz game, and the pair came up with a prototype in 45 minutes. They chose questions that they felt their generation would enjoy answering or learning the answers to.

The game was launched in 1981, and the first copies were sold at a loss – each game cost £48 to make and they were sold to shops for £10. But despite the fact they were trying to sell it at the peak of video-game mania, it became one of the biggest sensations of the Eighties. The nostalgic appeal of the questions was important. The game reconnected baby boomers, now saddled with mortgages, kids and careers, with the TV shows, music and defining moments of their youth.

DID YOU KNOW? In 2006, the game’s makers were accused of dumbing down their questions.

Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes lamented: ‘The makers are having to reflect the collapse of education in this country.’

FACT Everyone who took shares in Trivial Pursuit walked away with hefty returns, while the company’s founders sold the rights to Hasbro in 2008 for £56 million, having already sold more than 88 million sets. ‘It’s All A Game: A Short History Of Board Games’ by Tristan Donovan is published by Atlantic, priced £12.99.