She was a woman that believed in equality, a staunch feminist and political activist, as well as a believer in the principles of Georgism - the economic ideology developed from the writings of Henry George that was popular among some political theorists of the time. It was ultimately game design that would take her focus. Magie was looking for an effective way to espouse the virtues of Georgism. This was a time where women were credited with less than 1% of all patents filed. In fact, at the age of just 26, Maggie received a patent for an invention of her own design that eased the process of typewriting, something she was intimately familiar with due to her time as a stenographer in the early 1880s. Magie was somewhat of a jack of all trades, dipping her toes into all sorts of pastimes and professions, from poetry, comedy and theatre to engineering. Magie, who would spend the 1850s accompanying Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates around Illinois, Elizabeth was no stranger to progressive politics from an early age. Born to newspaper publisher and abolitionist James K. To start we’re going to have to go all the way back to 1903 - to when Monopoly was known by an entirely different name.Įlizabeth Magie was an American game designer, writer and inventor born in Illinois in 1866. So why is that? What’s so bad about Monopoly? Why does it harbor so much disdain? Well, it’s a complicated thing to explain.

Despite its mainstream appeal, ask most big board game fans if they want to play a game of Monopoly and they’ll likely roll their eyes or grimace at the mere suggestion. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. If you say you’re into board games, it’s not unlikely someone will assume you spend your nights playing Monopoly with your mates.

If you want an example of just how omnipresent it is, there’s even a McDonald's Monopoly promotion. And yet, to this day, Monopoly is still one of the largest board games in the world - available in 37 different languages in toy and book shops the world over. We’ve seen massive innovations in play and design across the industry, whole new genres lift their heads from the primordial soup and designs that would literally not have been possible at the time Monopoly was first published.īoard games, and everything related to them, are better now than they have ever been. Tabletop games have come a long way since the 1930s when the Parker Brothers first unleashed the game of Monopoly onto the world.

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