Monopoly's secret history canonized the wrong version of The Landlord's Game

The original Landlord’s Game was designed to warn players about wealth inequality. The version that survived did the opposite.

Between 1902 and 1903, Elizabeth Magie designed and playtested a board game called The Landlord’s Game in Arden, Delaware as a means to educate the masses about Georgism — an economic philosophy that argued land ownership should benefit everyone, not just the few who control it. (Yes, she was a rather passionate leftist!) Rather than celebrate and weaponize the ruthless accumulation of wealth, The Landlord’s Game was meant to expose how the endgame of capitalism essentially disenfranchises the masses by putting the vast majority of wealth into the hands of a select few. Magie even created two separate sets of rules: one is cooperative and allows players to share in the wealth they accumulate. In the other competitive ruleset, players build up their monopolies and try to crush each other. Sound familiar?

Magie eventually sold her second patent to Parker Brothers in 1935 for $500, the equivalent of $11,742 in 2025.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, various versions of The Landlord Game had begun circulating throughout the northeastern United States, long before board games were widely produced and distributed. In 1932, a Philadelphia heating engineer named Charles B. Darrow was introduced to a modified, handmade version of The Landlord’s Game at a friend’s home. Players rolled dice to move around the outer edge of a square board, buying up properties, railroads, and utilities while charging rent to other players who landed on their property. One corner even had a jail. Property names in this specific version referenced real places in Atlantic City, NJ, including a misspelling of Marven Gardens as Marvin Gardens.

Darrow obtained a copy of the written rules from his friend and by 1933 had rebranded it into a game that focused on the more cutthroat ruleset, rather than one where wealth uplifted all. He called it Monopoly and went on to sell the game to Parker Brothers in early 1935.

His most significant contribution was the visual appearance and the iconic illustrations — but even those were reportedly created by a graphic designer he hired. Then, Parker Brothers bought Magie’s patent for the Landlord’s Game later that year. Darrow received a patent for Monopoly one month after that.

The marketing for the game positioned Darrow as an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia who created the game while tinkering in his basement so he might support his family during the Depression. His version, however, still included the Marvin Gardens typo.

It sold two million copies in two years. Within a year of its release, 35,000 copies were being produced each week. More than 275 million copies ever have been sold across the world in the decades since.

The game’s creation story included on instructions for years following its initial release read as follows: “Parker Brothers Real Estate Trading Game Monopoly was invented during the Great Depression by Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Mr. Darrow, like many other Americans, was unemployed at the time and he worked out the details of the game primarily to amuse himself during this period. Prior to the Depression, Darrow and his wife vacationed in the resort town of Atlantic City, New Jersey. When it came to naming the streets on the game board, Darrow naturally adopted those of his favourite vacation spot.”

Magie went on to develop more games later in life: in Bargain Day, players compete as shoppers in a department store; and in the abstract strategy game King’s Men, players aim to line up their tokens in formation to claim dominion. As for Darrow, he remained a one-hit wonder — sort of.

Hasbro eventually acquired the rights to Monopoly in 1991, when the company purchased Tonka Corporation, which owned Parker Brothers at the time. Hasbro’s official history still positions Charles Darrow as Monopoly’s creator while acknowledging Magie as an early influence whose Landlord’s Game helped inspire it. In a statement provided to Polygon for this story, Magie is acknowledged as “one of the pioneers of land-grabbing games” while maintaining Darrow as Monopoly’s designer.

“Based on the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey, Darrow’s prototype used materials from around his home,” the statement reads. “He used a piece of oilcloth that had been a table covering for the game’s board, cut the houses and hotels out of scraps of wooden molding, and typed the deeds and cards. The early mover tokens were actually charms from his niece’s charm bracelet.”

Magie created The Landlord’s Game to demonstrate the juxtaposition between radically different economic systems. Only by experiencing both does it truly serve its intended purpose. On one side, we see laissez-faire capitalism where private ownership leads to a concentration of wealth that siphons resources from the masses. The other reflects the idea that land, and its financial value, should be owned collectively by the public. Otherwise, we eventually see it acquired and monetized in the hands of a few — all for the sake of capital gains at the expense of others.

Magie’s earnest hope was that players might see the inherent value in a more balanced distribution of wealth. More than a century later, her concerns feel more prescient than ever. She designed The Landlord’s Game to warn players about the dangers of unchecked wealth. Monopoly turned that warning into the goal. What if the other ruleset had won out instead? What might that world look like?