![]() When I was growing up, my family was big into playing games, and we had a few house rules: 1. You play by the rules as printed. 2. We don't "let" people win; you win fair and square. 3. Dad always has the black army in Risk! 4 Winner cleans up. A few clarifications of these rules are as follows: #1 made it very easy to settle disputes, but I found that when I played games with people outside the family, things were more fluid, and that didn't sit well with me. If you read Tanya Lee Stone's book Pass Go and Collect $200, even from its beginning, there is a history of people making House Rules for Monopoly. As the book shows, it was this fluidity of rules and versions that led to issues when Parker Brothers decided to mass produce the game. However in my house, my dad didn't like the idea of House Rules--at all! We used to take a vote to make all of the chance money paid to the bank go into a pot for anyone landing on Free Parking, and he couldn't stand being outvoted. You see, rule #1 didn't just apply to board games; it was a life rule. To this day I struggle with respecting people who seem entitled and take lots of shortcuts, because I was always encouraged to play fair and work hard. In retrospect, this probably is related to me not being the biggest risk-taker, so I've had to work on that. Rule #2 applied mostly to me. I was a second-marriage baby. I had older siblings who were 10, 11, and 21 years OLDER than I was. Back then there weren't any modified kid versions of popular games, so I played what they played. Today, Monopoly is one of the most popularly-adapted board games, with versions renaming properties with various landmarks and street names for cities and universities. Whenever I won, I felt a strong sense of accomplishment, knowing I'd truly beaten them, and they hadn't gone easy on me. It also led to our game nights being described as "cutthroat". After reading Stone's book with my children and wanting to play it with them, I realized in our house, we owned a kids' version of Monopoly, a UT-themed Texasopoly, and a Corpus Christi version, but not the classic. That's something I think we need to remedy. ![]() Rule #3 was serious business. Risk! [with an exclamation mark] was the game our family would use to test people out. If it was serious, a new boyfriend or girlfriend would eventually be asked to play, and it was a commitment of time and a test of skill and stamina. Once I had forewarned a college boyfriend that my dad always had the black army, and when he was offered to choose an army first, he chose black. He grinned. I was mortified. He didn't last long. Rule #4 was usually preceded by the winner belting out Queen's "We Are the Champions", although my husband isn't as into that. Making the winner clean up was always a way to take the cockiness out of winning, a way of taking them down a notch and keeping the winner humble. After playing Risk! my kids take this to another whole level by hollering, "Ransack!" and dump everything into the middle of the board. ![]() While not all families are as into playing games together as mine, I wanted to delve into my family's relationship with game-playing as a way of connecting with Tanya Lee Stone's book, Pass Go and Collect $200: The Real Story of How Monopoly Was Invented...although I wrote far more than I had intended! The story of Lizzie Magie's original incarnation of the game that would become the Monopoly we know today reminded me of so many other stories of inventors who never received their proper due--by recognition, financially, or both***. Parker Brothers, who had already entered into business with Charles Darrow for his version of Monopoly, gave Magie only $500 in 1935 for the rights to her patent for The Landlord Game, which is, as Stone puts it, "the heart of the game." Being the middle of the Great Depression, Magie might not have expected the popularity Darrow's version would generate, and it wasn't until the 80th Anniversary Edition of the game that Lizzie Magie's name was more widely known in connection to the creation of the game. Whether your family is into playing board games or not, Pass Go and Collect $200 is part game origin story, part cautionary tale, and part economics lesson. Those familiar with the game might be surprised and even delighted at some of the tidbits the book shares I won't spoil here. To read more about Lizzie Magie, check out this New York Times article from 2015. Happy Reading! ***One success story from the same time period is told in another Texas Bluebonnet List alum, Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully, in which Mattie successfully proved in court that her design for a flat-bottom paper bag machine had been stolen. Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully appeared on the Texas Bluebonnet List in 2008-09.
1 Comment
Raghav
8/25/2020 02:56:41 pm
Congratulations Mrs.Mensing one being the new librarian
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