Part-Time GeniusTurns out, the history of Board Games isn't as simple as just passing Go and collecting $200. From the surprising way Abraham Lincoln's beard changed Milton Bradley's career, to the socialist board game that took off on Ivy League campuses, to the ancient Sumerian board game you can still play, this episode Will and Mango go wild game hunting and come back with plenty of stories to tell.
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what Will? What's that Mango? Did you know that the game Candyland comes from a polio ward? I have to say, I cannot think of two things more different than Candyland and polio Mango. I know it sounds entirely insane, but in nineteen forty eight, a teacher named Eleanor Abbot invented candy Land during a polio epidemic. Apparently, Abbot got sick and was confined to this hospital where children were being treated in iron lungs, which you know, it just sounds horrible. Iron lungs for those of you who don't know, were these early types of respirator where the kids were basically immobilized and mostly they're just lying on their backs, unable to see anything except the white ceiling above them. And to counter all of this, Abbot creates this bright, cheerful game where the only goal. The only goal is to move around the landscape of treats, and her original version of the board even showed a boy in a leg brace starting to walk. Wow, that's pretty cool, and you know, I almost feel bad admitting this now, but I always thought Candyland was kind of boring. Is that controversial to say? I don't know.
I mean, let's be clear, it is super dull. The game basically requires no effort and has no strategy. But it was made as mindless entertainment. It was really this way for kids to imagine again and pastime. But you know, reading about candy Land made me wonder about all these colorful cardboard boxes and family rooms across the country and the incredible stories hiding inside them, many of which don't involve deadly diseases. So let's dive in.
Hey there, podcast listeners, welcome back to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always, I'm here with my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and they're behind the booth. That's our amazing producer Dylan Fagan, who seems to be wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Haven't seen those in a minute. He's got a pipe. I hope the smoke alarm doesn't go off, and he's waving something at us. Mego, can you actually tell what that is? Yeah? I think it's a candlestick, which is maybe a reference to Clue. Oh my god, it's Professor Fagan in the booth with a candlestick. That's amazing. So I was a big fan of Clue. But Will I'm wondering if you had to pick, what would you say is your favorite board game of all time? You know, if we're having to stick to board games versus just like a party game and a box, I probably would put Clue way up there. I mean, it is so much fun playing with the family. My daughter gets so into it and so anxious about one of us guessing before her, and it just gets real heated, but in the right kind of way. But if I had to just say my favorite like game in a box, I'd probably go with something like, uh, Taboo. Like I just love the element of a timer being there and it being a word based game and having to play with a team and just getting so into it and all the screaming that starts to happen when it gets really heated. I don't know that those would probably be my two favorites, how about you. Yeah, for parties, I like Categories. I think Categories is always really really fun. Ruby brought home this game called out Foxed a few years ago and it's for younger kids, but there is a fox who is stolen the pie and you're trying to figure out which fox it is, and it's super super cute and really really fun. So that's a game I've been giving to people recently. So many good games out there. Well, you know, one of the things that surprised me when I started researching for this topic is just how many different types of board games that are out there. In fact, in nineteen ninety nine, a renowned British games history I'm named David Parlott. He published a book called The Oxford History of Board Games, and he divided board games into four different groups. You've got your race games, where the goal is to cross a finish line or get your pieces home first. You've got your space games, where you need to achieve a certain pattern or configuration. You've got your chase games where you hunt down and thwart your opponent's pieces. And then you've got your displaced games, where you win by capturing your opponent's pieces. So I don't know if you've got all those straight now, but those are the four categories. I love that games historian is a real job, but I also love that, like the height of games historian is that you make your categories rhyme like that, right, right, yeah, but I'm curious, like, where does something like Monopoly fit into the system? Mango, do not underestimate British games history and David Parlott so to address questions just like that one you asked, he actually added in an informal fifth classification these are theme games, so I guess they didn't rhyme with the others, but it includes quote the plethora of modern board games chiefly categorized by a thematic subject matter, such as property trading or crime detection.
Well, I mean, I do love that someone is taking such an academic approach to understanding board games.
It's really kind of amazing. It's honestly one of my favorite things is when people have such specific specialties, like I really do love that to be like the guy to go to on stuff like this. But anyway, Parlotte explains that board games are a cultural activity, not unlike music or dance. They've been part of human civilization for as long as human civilization has been around, and as a result, they deserve to be studied.
I actually wanted to know what the world's first board game was, and it turns out it's something called senate. The game means passing, and it was a popular board game in ancient Egypt, played by everyday people as well as royalty, and one of the paintings in Queen Nevertid's tomb shows her playing it, and King tut was actually buried with five Senate game boxes.
So how did the game work?
I mean, the thing is, we don't really have a definitive account of the rules. What we know mostly comes from tomb paintings and the few surviving boards. But basically, the board was a grid of thirty squares made of both three rows of ten, and you started the top left corner and move your pieces across the roads until you get to the bottom right corner. But what's interesting about it is that while archaeologists think Senate began as this sort of simple pastime, like something you played for fun, eventually it took on this greater meaning. So there's actually tombart that shows the deceased playing Senate against their living relatives, and that sug just the game had the power to connect the living and the dead, and some people think the game may represent the soul's journey through the realm of the dead as they try to reach the after life.
So maybe a little bit more profound than say, hungry, hungry hippos. But you know, I also looked into ancient board games and I discovered the story of the royal game of er. Now. It was played in Mesopotamia around four five hundred years ago, and Westerners learned all about it in the nineteen twenties when a British archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley was exploring the ruins there and that was the great Samerian city state in modern day Iraq, and so deep in the royal tombs there, Woolly found these beautiful boards made from shells and semi precious stones, but there was nothing to indicate what the game was exactly or how to play it. So for decades the boards just sat there at the British Museum. And I'm guessing the story doesn't end there. It does not, I have more to say about that. And so that's when Irving Finkel, who was a British museum curator with the perfect name for a British museum curator, Irving Finkel, he enters the scene. Now, he's apparently quite a character he's got his huge white beard and bushy eyebrows, all these things that you knew exactly when I said. His name was Irvan Finkel, and he's obsessed with board games and cuneiform and this made him uniquely suited to solve this mystery. So one day in the nineteen eighties, he's looking at a tablet that had this weird combination of Sumerian and Babylonian languages on it, and he's just trying to decipher it, and Finkel figured out it was written by a Babylonian scribe who was quoting an early Sumerian document. This was all about the royal game of er. So what was he looking at? Like, did he find directions for the game? He kind of did. So the tablet Finkel translated had a set of directions for a gameplay that included fortune telling, like landing on certain squares apparently predicted your future. But like I said, this Babylonian guy was quoting an earlier description of the game, and so that helped Finkel reconstruct the original method of play, and under David Parlot's classification, it's a race game. So you move your pieces along the board by rolling dice which back in Sumerian times would have been made from sheep or ox bones. And whoever gets all their pieces across the finish line wins. Now you can thwart your opponent by landing on one of their pieces and then sending them back to the start, and according to Finkel, special mark squares gave you an extra turn. So even some of the little things that you would see in today's games.
Yeah, I know, it feels so modern in a sense. So can you actually play this game now?
Yeah? And so lots of people have made boards modeled after the ones at the British Museum. You can find them on Etsy if you want to look at this. But if you prefer a more digital Sumerian experience, you can go to royal ur dot net and play online.
That is amazing to think you can play a game that Mesopotamian's played way back when.
You know.
One thing I learned while researching this episode is that board game history is really messy, and different culture has often developed similar games, and they evolved as people played, so it's not always easy to trace their lineage like you think about chess. Right, Chess was originated in India over a thousand years ago, but there's also evidence that similar games were created in China, Pakistan, Russia and elsewhere.
Wow. Yeah, And actually, for our newer listeners, you know Mango, didn't we do an episode about chess a few years ago? Yeah? It was called why are Russians So Good at Chess? And we got into some of that history. So we don't have to go over it now. But I do want to tell you about another game with Indian roots and a complicated family tree. It's called Pachis and it goes to show how a single game can leap frog its way across the globe. But why don't we get into that right after this break? Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about board games, where they come from, and why we love them so well. I want to tell you about the game of Pachise, So, Mengo. I know a lot of times we'll have discussions around pronunciations, given your family roots and my roots here in Alabama. So I think what you mean though, is Parcheesi, right? No?
I mean pachie swhiches often revirred to is the national game of India. I had no idea of been the India. A number of times. I did not know it was the national game of India. But the name comes from the Hindi word which means twenty five. And it's a classic chase game played on a board shaped like cross. There's a square in the middle and the goal is to be the first player to get all four of your pieces around the board and into the center.
I have to say, mango, that sounds a lot like Parcheesi.
Yeah it should, because Parchiesi is a simplified version of the game that was marketed in the US and the late eighteen hundreds, but there are differences. So in the Indian version, the pieces start and end in the center square. In PARCHIESI, each player starts their pieces in one corner and races to the center. Also, Parchiesi uses dice, putchies uses Cowrie shells. You throw them and count the number of shells that land with the open end up and that determines the number of spaces you can move. And in most versions of the game, the highest value you can get from these cowri shells is twenty five.
Hence the name you know, the cowori is of course for those that don't know, it's a small, shiny sea snail, which I've just discovered is a great tongue twister to say ten times fast.
Well, what's really interesting is that no one knows exactly where Putchies came from. It may have evolved from games that began in the fourth century or even earlier. There are depictions of cross shaped boards that date back to the second century BCE. We do know there was an early version called chowpar that was popular among Mogul royalty in the sixteenth century, including the Emperor Akbar, and he actually had a life sized game set up at his palace and instead of using tokens, he and his friends played by calling out their moves to courtesans who walked across the outdoor board.
It's interesting, and how did pacice get turned into Parcheesi? For those of us in America now around eighteen sixty, there was a British games company that made a version called Pachisi for the UK market. A few years later, a New York man named John Hamilton made his own version, copyrighted it, and sold it to a company that became known as Cell Chaw and Writer, which you know is a major games publisher, and that's where it was rebranded as PARCHIESI and became a hit. I do like it when things like this evolve and sort of bounce around over time. So in this case, this bounced from India to Britain to America, and I guess with slightly different names at each stop.
I mean, what's weird is that there's even a little bit more back and forth. So in the eighteen nineties, after Parcheesi took off in the US, the game changed again in England and people modified it to a smaller board and they used one die instead of two, and that version was called Ludo, which you know, I'm sure you've heard of, And strangely enough, in the twentieth century there was a Ludo craze that swept India. So, I mean, it's kind of amazing to think this board game that started in India ends up traveling, evolves and then and then comes back to India.
Oh that's wild, all right. So for my next fact, I think I'm going to go back to British Games Historium, David Parlott and his game classification system. You remember him from the top of the episode Mango. I mean, how could I forget British Games historian David Parlotte. I like that every time we're going to mention and we're going to have to say in full British games historian David Parlott. But it's good, good branding for him. But I want to get into the modern era of board games here, which is really when we start to see the rise of what Parlot calls these these theme games. And one of the first teams people applied to board games was geography. And why do you think that was? Well, in the late eighteenth century, board games took off in Europe. Now this was the age of Enlightenment, so there were all kinds of theories about education and people realize that board games could be educational. Now at the same time, you have cartographers who were getting into the game publishing business, creating game boards out of maps. And these geographic board games mostly followed the same pattern, so you moved from city to city across a map, learning little facts along the way. And here's an unusual detail. Most games didn't use dice because dice were associated with gambling. So instead people use this spinning top with numbered sides called teetotem. Now have you ever heard of this? I actually have it kind of looks like a Dradel right. In fact, it became the Dradal like European Jews modified it by replacing numbers with Hebrew letters, so by using a teetotem instead of dice, it made board games socially acceptable. And back then travel wasn't as common as it is now, so geographic board games were also a way to discover places that you might not otherwise get to know. Oh that's really fun. So in eighteen twenty two, a geographic game called a Traveler's Tour of the United States became the first board game to be published in America, and it was created by a New York map maker, and it consisted of a map of all twenty four states at the time, that's all we had at that point, and so cities on the map were marked by numbers instead of names. There was a corresponding list of places. So, for example, Trenton, New Jersey, was marked with a ten on the map, and if you looked up number ten on the list, it said Trenton. And then there were bonus facts like capital of the state on the Delaware River, thirty miles northeast of Philadelphia, population three thousand, stuff like that. And so you spin the teetotem, look that number of spaces ahead on the map, and if you can name the town without looking at the list, you get to move your token there. So if I'm a number seven Wilmington, Delaware and I spent a three, I can move to number ten, assuming that I know the spot is Trenton. You're following this, it's a little complicated.
I mean, I do love this like Oregon Trail nature of these games where you're learning about places along the way, but this almost sounds painfully educational.
Yeah, and the goal of the game was to travel from the East Coast down to New Orleans. But interestingly the game was political too, so an Iowa State professor named Matthew winn Sivils he writes this fascinating essay about this in the conversation, and he points out that the location descriptions tell a very specific story about the United States in eighteen twenty two and how we wanted to see ourselves. They emphasize institutions of higher learning, economic prosperity, the industriousness of American citizens, and they do not, however, mention slavery. So it's like American exceptionalism the game, right, that's exactly right. But you have to know where Trenton is. That's the main thing.
Fascinating. Well, speaking of things Americans are good at. I did some research into the creation of the board game industry, like how did these games go from these folk creations to indie publications to you know, a billion dollar business. And it turns out we have a man named Milton Bradley to thank for it.
You know, for some reason, I always thought that was like a law firm name, you know, the partner's last names that come together to form the name.
Yeah, I actually thought so too. I thought it was two partners. But Milton was a real person, and he was born in Maine, in this tiny town called Vienna. His family struggled financially and they ended up moving to Lowell, Massachusetts, so his dad could work in a mill. Now, Milton never finished school and he had a hard time finding jobs too. But in eighteen sixty he started this lithography business. This happened to be an election year. Abraham Lincoln was running against Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Bradley made a lithograph print of Lincoln that sold like hotcakes. Actually, I'm just going to send you a copy so you could take a look at it.
I mean, that's Abraham Lincoln, but his hair is very short and he doesn't have a beard.
Yeah, he doesn't have that trademark beard. So shortly after Bradley started selling this lithograph, Lincoln actually grew his beard, which made him look totally different. So not only did his stock of prints become worthless overnight, but some people actually started complaining about this and Bradley starts giving them their money back. It almost put him out of business and as well because of this ridiculous beard. But after this disaster Bradley pivots. He published a board game called The Checkered Game of Life. Now this was probably inspired by a British game called a New Game of Human Life, which was weirdly based on a sixteenth century game called the Royal Game of Goose, which I feel like, if you've got a game called the Royal Game of Goose, how can you improve on it?
Early they did.
But what all these games had in common was the idea of moving along a path that represented life, and it had a strict moral code that determined the outcome. So if you landed on a vice, you'd travel backwards. If you landed on a virtue, you move forwards. And players didn't have much agency in the games, much like Candyland, so wherever your pieces landed, that was kind of your fate. So what Bradley does is he adds this level of decision making to the game. Players spun a teetotem and then they look at the chart that gave them two to four options for their move. So some of the spaces on the board had points, like landing on college or happiness that actually gave you five points, and other spaces sent you back, kind of like snakes and ladders. And weirdly, Bradley really pulled from all elements of life, so bad spaces included things like ruin, poverty, disgrace, and most surprising of all, suicide.
Oh that is horrifying.
Yeah, nothing fun about that. But Bradley's game was an enormous hit for the time. He sold over forty five thousand copies in his first year alone, which enabled them to build a company named after himself.
And is this this checkered game of life related to the game life that we played growing up?
You know, you look at the board and looks nothing like it right, Like, it almost looks more like Shoots and Ladders than the Game of Life, but it is related. So in nineteen sixty Milton Bradley gave the game to a designer to retool for the hundredth anniversary of the game. And along with taking out things like suicide, that's when they added those like little cars and the spinner and the cash, all to make it more fun. And along the way his company became this cornerstone of American board games. They produced titles like Operation Battleship, also Candy Land, and after one hundred and twenty four years of ownership by the Bradley family, in nineteen eighty four, the company was acquired by Hasbro, and then a few years later Hasbro was consolidating things, they buy Bradley's rival Parker Brothers, and they merged the two to form Hasbro Gaming.
Actually, I'm glad that you mentioned the Parker Brothers because I did some research on them and it's kind of this heartwarming tale of a teenage prodigy who just wanted to have fun and make money in the process. So I'll tell you all about that right after a quick break. Welcome back to part Time Genius where we're talking board.
Games, and I think you're going to tell us about the Parker brothers, who I didn't realize were real people.
They were indeed real people. So specifically, the Parker brothers were George, Charles and Edward Parker. They were born in Salem, Massachusetts, and it was George, the youngest who was into games. This was in eighteen eighty three. He was just sixteen years old, and he created a game called Banking. Now, like you were saying earlier, many games at the time were thinly disguised lectures or lessons on various things, and so teenage George was like, absolutely not. Games should just be fun. So he made a game called Banking. Yeah, I mean, what's more fun than banking? I guess banking was fun at the time, maybe now. The point of banking was pretty simple. Players competed to see who could make the most money, which was a little different than all other games that lectured you about morals. Anyway, George's family loved the game, and after two publishers were rejected it, his older brother Charles, convinced George to just publish it himself, and he did exactly that spending forty dollars to make five hundred copies. Can you imagine being on the five hundred copies of the game for forty bucks these days? Anyway, he sold almost all of them within the year and decided to launch his own games business. Charles joined the company a few years later and they adopted the name Parker Brothers. Eventually Edward, the oldest brother, joined too, and it was truly a family affair. So we have George Parker to thank for pushing American games in a much more entertaining direction. And over the years, Parker Brothers launched all these favorites from Clue to Sorry to Risk, even the Oiji board. So like some really fun stuff.
That's so funny because when I think of Parker Brothers, I really only think of one game.
All right, I'll take a guess it's Monopoly exactly.
And I have to say this is one of the most interesting and infuriating stories I found during my research. So according to Hasbro's official narrative, Monopoly was invented in nineteen thirty three by an out of workman named Charles Darrow. He brought the game to Parker Brothers, which was struggling during the Great Depression, and of course the famous story is that they turn it down at first it breaks all their rules, but then they changed their mind and Monopoly becomes a sensation, selling millions of copies and making Darrow and Parker Brothers a ton of money. Today, it's a bestseller in over one hundred countries with at least a billion copies sold, which is insane to me.
Now, there was something about the way you said official narrative that makes me think there's a more interesting story here. Yeah.
Well, it turns out the nineteen oh three, and this is three decades before Darrow patented Monopoly, there was a Maryland woman named Lizzie McGhee and she created a monopoly prototype. She called it The Landlord's Game, and she actually had an agenda with this. She wanted to spread the belief of a philosopher named Henry George, and George believed that private land ownership would ruin society. So McGee released game in nineteen oh six, and it caught on even among people who weren't interested in this philosophy. It was just really fun to play.
And do you play it in the same way you play Monopoly?
Today, not quite Like the goal of avoiding bankruptcy was the same. But McGee made a rule that allowed players to cooperate. You could vote to pay rent into a common bank instead of paying the title holder of the property. And I actually love this detail. Instead of that square that says go, McGee had a square that read, quote labor upon mother Earth produces wages.
Which is kind of a mouthful. Yeah, the card that says, do not pass labor upon mother Earth produces wages, do not collect two hundred dollars.
It's not as catchy. But McGee's game became popular with socialists and quakers and also university students, and in keeping with her beliefs, she didn't profit from this, Like it was an open source, public domain, free for people to play and modify game.
Wow, so I'm curious. So how did this socialist experiment turn into a billion dollar commodity?
So Harper's magazine actually did this incredible investigation of this, and according to that article, a professor at the Warden School used the game to teach his classes quote the wickedness of land monopoly, Which is just amazing to think of, right Warden teaching the wickedness of land Monopoly, but it catches on and the students spread it across Pennsylvania as summer camps. It gets to the Pocono's, people are playing it at like Columbia and Harvard and lounges there, and before long people were calling it monopoly, but with a lowercase M, so kind of the way you'd refer to Domino's or chess. And then during the Great Depression, these two brothers in Atlantic City, Jesse and Eugene Rayford, they learned the game from this Indianapolis woman they had met. The Rayfords were Quakers, and they shared it with their community. But they replaced the usual ponds in the game with household objects. You've got things like thimbles that suddenly are added into the next.
Oh interesting, And so this was still in its open source kind of free to the public stage though too right, yeah, And people were free to modify the rules. So they actually made one other major change. Originally, properties were sold at auction when players landed on them, but the Rayferds thought that was too complicated, so they put sale prices on the board and changed property names to reflect places in Atlantic City, and they showed their version of the game to a friend who showed it to a friend of his, and that friend ended up being Charles Darrow, who I think is the alleged inventor of Monopoly.
Right, yeah, so it seems what Darrow really did was copy McGee's games, stripped out the socialist elements, capitalized the m monopoly, and passed this version off as his original game. And in doing so he made himself fantastically wealthy.
I mean, it's kind of like he won the biggest real life game of monopoly. If you think about it. He really did. But the question today is who's going to win the fact off, I don't know if there's only one way to find out.
Okay, So in the past, board games were used to teach everything from geography to morality. But did you know there's growing evidence that games have a positive impact on brain activity. For instance, a study showed that playing the game Go can improve symptoms of depression and anxiety in patients with Alzheimer's. Some experts think that Go can help kids with ADHD two because it can help improve executive function. All right, well, I think we both know trivia keeps the brain sharp. So here's a fact about trivial Pursuit. Did you know that Trivial Pursuit was the focus of a strange lawsuit. The game was invented in nineteen seventy nine by Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, and it was an overnight success, But in nineteen ninety four, a Nova Scotia man southed the pair, saying that in nineteen seventy nine, Hany had picked him up while he was hitchhiking. He claimed that during the ride, he had described the idea for Trivial Pursuit and Haney stole it. Haney said in his defense that he'd never picked up a hitchhiker. A judge ruled in the journalists favor in two thousand and seven.
Lizzie has a family friend who claims that she sat next to Leijah Coca on a plane and coach and mentioned that he should make an affordable car called the Eon, and all he did was add the letter end on Wow. That is amazing.
So I know we talked about life and Milton Bradley earlier, but one thing I hadn't realized was what a marketing genius the game designer was. So during the Civil War he realized that soldiers needed things to de stress. So he started bumbling a game set with chess, checkers, dominoes, and his game the early Version of Life. And he made it tiny enough that you could nail it anywhere, so according to mental flaws, during Christmas he advertised it as quote, just the thing to send to members of the armed forces, and that's how the game really took off.
So classy, all right, So for my last fact, mango, do you know what copy pasta is? I mean, I know it's kind of like a memish thing, but remind me what it is, all right. Copy pasta is a horror story that's spread around the Internet, getting copied and pasted over and over across the Internet, and one of the weirdest copy pastas of all time is about a nineties board game. It's been shared thousands and thousands of times. The anonymous author claims that they were terrorized by a demonic VHS tape of rap Rat, a character in a bizarre board game also called rap Rat. Now that story, like most copy pastas, is fake, but rap Rat is real. The game was released in nineteen ninety two, and it really did come with a VHS tape featuring a wrapping rodent, so players would compete to assemble puzzles before rap Rat eats all the cheese on the TV screen. Now, in between nibbles, he shouts off instructions and of course he raps, and the whole thing is totally nuts. And the best part is I found an actual nineteen ninety two commercial for rap Rat. It's VHS's a okay, it's kids entertainment. It's you have to stay with video board so get mellow, get yellow, get the video board game rap Rat. He ain't no ghost, He's the most the video board game rap Rat. Okay, that is amazing for rap Rat alone. I think you have to take the trophy. Congratulations. It is possible that this entire episode was an excuse for me to play some rap rap for you brought up, but there you go. I'm gonna look for on Spotify. Now that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening from Will Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself. We are so excited to be making shows in the new year.
And can't wait for you to hear all of them. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongais Chatikler, and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
