Board Games! (and card games too, I guess)

[Techwright]

Those that have been commenting about their love of Monopoly might want to check out the predecessor game The Landlord's Game.  Rumor is that there's a crowdsourcing going on to revive and publish the game.

 

I learned of this when I took my elderly Mom back to her hometown of Macomb, IL a few weeks ago. The city limits sign said it was the hometown of the creator of Monopoly, Elizabeth J. Magie (later Phillips).  This puzzled me, and I launched into a search that revealed that "Lizzie" did indeed create The Landlord's Game, with a testing model in 1903 and a patent in 1904 (A second patent for a revision came in 1924.), three decades before Monopoly. The game ended up selling in both Britain and England for years before Charles Darrow showed up at Parker Brothers to hawk a game he "invented".  It's been demonstrated that his version was so similar that it had to have been a theft of her intellectual property.  Regardless, Parker Brothers bought the rights to both Monopoly and The Landlord's Game, so legalities became a moot point.  The Landlord's Game was originally created to explain through playing the basic concepts of Georgism, an economic ideology.

 

 

[Mr. Vee]

21 hours ago, Techwright said:

Those that have been commenting about their love of Monopoly might want to check out the predecessor game The Landlord's Game.  Rumor is that there's a crowdsourcing going on to revive and publish the game.

 

I learned of this when I took my elderly Mom back to her hometown of Macomb, IL a few weeks ago. The city limits sign said it was the hometown of the creator of Monopoly, Elizabeth J. Magie (later Phillips).  This puzzled me, and I launched into a search that revealed that "Lizzie" did indeed create The Landlord's Game, with a testing model in 1903 and a patent in 1904 (A second patent for a revision came in 1924.), three decades before Monopoly. The game ended up selling in both Britain and England for years before Charles Darrow showed up at Parker Brothers to hawk a game he "invented".  It's been demonstrated that his version was so similar that it had to have been a theft of her intellectual property.  Regardless, Parker Brothers bought the rights to both Monopoly and The Landlord's Game, so legalities became a moot point.  The Landlord's Game was originally created to explain through playing the basic concepts of Georgism, an economic ideology.

 

 

History channel had a recent documentary series called The Toys that Built America with an episode that covered this iyi in a partly dramatized version of the whole Parker Bros/Milton Bradley rivalry story. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14357568/

[DougGraves]

Two new games that are now some of my favorites:

 

Century Golem Edition - Kind of like Splendor but with a lot more thinking.  You build up a hand of cards that let you convert gems into various colors of different values.  You need to get the right set of gems to buy the victory cards.  It's basically a gem manipulation engine building game.  Hard to describe.

 

Sleeping Gods - Kind of like Tales of the Arabian Nights.  Cooperative game.  You are lost in another world.  You  move about a map on a ship and have adventures.  The adventures are written stories in the world that you encounter and decide what to do.  Depending on the outcome you get cards with keywords that give you quests and modify your further adventures.  So if you go to a city and fail to stop bandits from destroying it, you might get a "bandit attack" keyword and when you go back to the city it is destroyed and you cannot shop there.

[InvaderStych]

Got introduced to this one at a friend's New Years' gathering. Instant hit:

 

https://doomlings.com/pages/how-to-play