Board Games Invention

The oldest board game in the world is Senet appeared in ancient Egypt in 3300 b.c. Even King Tut had one. He liked it so much he was buried with it.

The oldest set of board gaming equipment ever found is The Royal Game of Ur, which was invented more than 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the site of present-day Iraq. It was a “race” game where the first player to complete the course was the winner. Moves were governed by throwing dice-like objects. Archaeologists believe it is the forerunner of backgammon.

Parcheesi, the original male chauvinist game, was created in the 1500s in India by Akbar the Great. It was played in the palace courtyard where Akbar would sit in the middle with slave girls dressed in different colors as game pawns.

The first American board game, “The Mansion of Happiness,” was produced in 1843. Its theme was Victorian: players tried to avoid Passion, Idleness, Cruelty, Immodesty, and Ingratitude. Drunkenness was punished by a trip to the stocks.

In 1860, Milton Bradley bought a lithographic press and began printing board games. His first game was called “The Checkered Game of Life.” The object was to land on the "good" spaces and collect 100 points. A player could gain fifty points toward this goal by reaching "Happy Old Age" in the far corner, opposite "Infancy" where one began. The game board was essentially a modified checkerboard.

In 1885, Mark Twain designed and patented a game intended to help people keep historical facts straight. He called it “Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates. In the introduction to the rules he wrote, “Many public school children seem to know only two dates - 1492 and 4th of July but as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion. It is because they have not had a chance to play this game.

Monopoly was invented by Charles B. Darrow during the Depression in 1934 and at first, the game was rejected by the Parker Brothers due 52 design errors. In its first year, 1935, game was the best-selling game in America. Standard Monopoly bank starts with $15,140 and it is estimated that Monopoly has been sold 250 million times through out the world. Mr. Monopoly is the name of the Monopoly® man.

Source: http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/en_US/