by Bruce Whitehill
published in Knucklebones games magazine May 2007
America has a long history of producing games that have become classics—games played by one generation after the next, in cities and villages. Though American game manufacturing dates back to 1822, a market wasn’t established until W. & S.B. Ives began production in 1843. The first game to outlive its competition was Parcheesi, published around 1870 and, as I’m sure you know, still popular today. Parcheesi has one of the earliest trademarks for a game—1874. You can recognize some similarities to backgammon, a world favorite that dates back to the 1st century: players have control of different pieces which they can move at different times, governed by a throw of the dice, the object being to get each piece once around the gameboard and into a home base.
Parcheesi, a proprietary game in that its name was owned by one company (Selchow & Righter; now by Hasbro), is virtually unchanged since its first appearance over 135 years ago, though it has been marketed by many other names, including Pachisi (the “generic” name), India (the game’s birthplace, and the name used by Milton Bradley), Ludo (Britain’s Parcheesi), Pollyanna (a themed version based on a girl’s book series following Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 book of that name), Wa-Hoo (an American Indian theme), and others. Sorry, originally from England and introduced by Parker Brothers in 1934, is a variation of Parcheesi in that movement around the board is governed by numbers shown on cards, rather than by dice.
Another game that has been with us for over a century is carroms. Carrom boards—large, wood boards, often with corner pockets—were to children in the early 1900s what Nok-Hockey was to the teenagers of the 1950s. (The Carrom Company now sells Nok-Hockey as well.) A variety of games—sometimes dozens of them—could be played on these approximately 28 1/2” square boards. Carroms was one of them. The boxed games often came with cue sticks, wooden rings, wood disks, and other pieces that were usually finger-flicked across the gameboard. The tabletop boards have been produced since 1889 by the Carrom Co., among others, and Carrom-Archarena, whose 100-game board had 140 pieces of equipment, including a revolving stand and an extra board insert on which you could play such standards as backgammon, checkers, crokinole, and twelve men Morris.
Break-aways and buyouts took place from the 1960s until 1972, but after the dust has settled, the carrom boards of today are basically still being made by the original company. The 100-game board retails for about $40—up slightly from the $3.95-$4.75 (“prepaid east of Omaha”) of a century ago. And you’re too late to get the revolving stand for free, as that offer expired after a special 1903 promotion.
Not all classic games are board games. A few card games have also earned that distinction. Flinch, Pit, and Rook were three games produced by Parker Brothers after the turn of the 20th century. All three are still being sold by Winning Moves, and Hasbro is offering the Rook 100th anniversary edition. Pit, a “trading” market game, is one of the longest-selling proprietary card games in the U.S. The game consists of suits that represented the commodities traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, such as oats, wheat, corn and barley, and what makes the game unique was that players do not wait for their turn but trade vociferously all at the same time, until one player finally succeeds in getting all the cards of one commodity. One edition of Pit came with a table bell, and one set from 1919 had a cover drawn by noted illustrator John Held Jr. Pit was brought to George Parker in 1903 by its inventor, celebrated psychic Edgar Cayce.
Flinch has had a difficult time maintaining “classic” status in the modern era as it has been dropped from production at various times. Flinch was first marketed by the Flinch Card Company of Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1903, and, because of the overwhelming response to Pit, George Parker decided to add the game to his line; Parker Brothers eventually bought the entire company in 1905.
Rook was produced by the Rook Co., which turns out to be a division of Parker Brothers. It seems that the powers that be decided that the game didn’t quite fit in the Parker line, so they marketed it under its own company. Or maybe it was because the game was invented by George Parker, with guidance from his wife, in 1906, and, to avoid the stigma attached to playing cards (and the gambling they were sometimes used for), he replaced the ace and the picture cards with a “1” and “11” through “13,” and then added a “14” card. The huge success of Pit and Flinch, and eventually Rook as well, did much to propel Parker Brothers toward becoming one of the most successful game companies of its time.
The earliest automobile card game to make inroads in America was Touring: The Great Automobile Card Game, produced by a small Wallie Dorr Company in 1906. Touring ranks with Authors and Old Maid as one of the most popular card games of all time. When it first came out, the game consisted of 100 cards and the object was to complete a race of 50 miles; distance cards were 1, 3, 5, and 10 miles, and the speeds limits were appropriately slow. In 1926, a total of 99 cards played out a race of 110 miles, in distances of 15 and 30 miles in addition to the 1 and 3 miles; the wonderful drawing on the box cover showed a broken-down roadster being pulled by a mule. By 1958, the game’s speed limits were 25 – 75 mph, and the race was won at 590 miles. You can see how Touring provides an intriguing glimpse of the changes in America and automobile culture over time.
Touring was a road race fraught with difficulties: accidents, flat tires, break downs, and “out of gas,” and was similar to—or I would go so far as to say “based on”—games like the Dutch game of Stap Op in which the apparatus in question was a bicycle instead of a car. (Naturally, the “out of gas” card was not included.)
In 1927, Lindy, the New Flying Game, by Parker Brothers, and The New Lindy Flying Game, by Nucraft Toys, both hit the market. The two games, nearly identical in theme and methodology, were basically the same game as Touring, only using airplanes, and capitalizing on the success of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic. I suspect that the founder of Nucraft Toys, Paul Guillow, originated the airborne variation. Guillow, a World War I U. S. Navy pilot with a great interest in aviation, started a model airplane company, marketing a line of small balsa wood construction kits of famous World War I combat aircraft. Parker Brothers, a well-grounded creator of games by this time, sued Guillow and won, ending the aviator’s foray into flying games (following Guillow’s production of the game of Crash in 1928).
Touring was bought by Parker Brothers in the 1930s and published in at least 15 different editions over 40 years. The game has been supplanted by the now popular Mille Bornes, the American classic having yielded to a French namesake, with kilometers replacing miles. Mille Bornes has been around (at least in France) since 1954, but Parker Brothers steered the game to a pedestrian market in 1962, banking on its success over Touring, which Parker published for its last time in 1975. The latest edition (unless it has been updated yet again) is a race of 1000 kilometers (just over 621 miles )using 112 cards in distances of 25, 50, 75, 100 or 200. Now, Mille Bornes drives the market for a younger generation that never even heard of Touring.
A year after Lindbergh’s flight and the Lindy games, J. Pressman & Co. published something called Hop-Ching Chinese Checkers. The game was not Chinese and it was not checkers, but it caught the attention of a public that was still enamored with all things oriental, following the enormous publicity that surrounded the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen a few years before. One of Pressman’s salesmen “discovered” the game, though it is not known where or in what form. Chinese Checkers actually goes back to at least 1892 when it was published by the German company, Ravensburger, under the name Stern-Halma (Star Halma), the successor of Halma. Halma was invented in the U.S. in 1885 by Harvard professor George H. Monks who was inspired by the British game, Hoppity, which his brother Robert reported on after a trip to England. Halma is played on a square board, with players attempting to be the first to get all their pieces across the board, from one corner to the other, by moving one space or jumping other pieces—the player’s own or his opponent’s (with multiple jumps allowed). In Chinese Checkers, of course, the square board has been modified into a star-shaped board; there are ten pieces per player, in contrast to 19 per player in a two-player Halma game and 13 in a four-player Halma game. What makes Halma and Chinese Checkers unique is that the pieces that are jumped are not removed from the board. Though Halma is no longer played in the United States—Chinese Checkers has taken its place—it is still popular throughout Europe; many compendiums have a board with Halma on one side and Stern-Halma or Chinese Checkers on the other.
Chinese Checkers wasn’t patented until 1941, when Milton Bradley received a patent (though one wonders why Bradley and why then). Now the name appears to be generic, with many companies producing Chinese Checkers games.
In the year following the introduction of Chinese Checkers, some Americans jumped out of windows as many lost all their money when the nation plunged into a great depression. Movies and, yes, games were two forms of entertainment that provided an affordable means of recreation. In fact, much of the game industry didn’t feel the brunt of the crunch until 1933. That was the year that Charles Darrow patented Monopoly. Darrow didn’t own Monopoly and he didn’t invent it. Monopoly was a “folk” game, played on college campuses and other places around the country, with players using local street names to represent the properties on the board. The game was invented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie (later Phillips) as a tool to help promote the single tax concept of economist Henry George. One element of the two-part game showed the disadvantages of monopolies, which pushed players into bankruptcy. That’s the part of the game that everybody loved and that evolved to become the game we know today. The success of the game has been attributed to the public’s opportunity to wheel and deal in millions at a time when money was scarce.
Darrow’s prototypes were printed on circular oilcloth boards, like a table covering. His game came with no tokens, instructing players to use common household objects, such as coins or buttons; the idea for tokens came later and was inspired by the pieces used in charm bracelets of the time. Though his initial presentation of Monopoly to Parker Brothers was rejected, after Darrow was successful selling the game on his own for two years, George Parker changed his mind. The game was accepted and mass-marketed in 1935, changing Darrow’s fortunes as well as Parker’s; Monopoly has probably sold more copies worldwide than any other game in history.
Wartime helped bring the nation back to a level of prosperity, though it reeked havoc on some of the smaller game companies. Parker Brothers worked out a deal with Waddingtons, which, in part, gave the British company the rights to Monopoly in the U.K. in exchange for getting Clue for distribution in the U.S. beginning in 1948/49. Cluedo, as it was called in Europe, was invented in 1944 by Anthony Pratt while on duty during WWII, and sold to Waddingtons about four years later. The first U.S. version was sold as Clue: “The Sherlock Holmes Game,” but the name of the famous fictional British sleuth was soon dropped. Parker Brothers kept the conservatory (one of the rooms on the board) but changed “spanner” (one of the weapons) to “wrench.” The early versions, which consisted of a board and a separate parts box, used real rope—not plastic—for one of the weapons. Clue has two distinctions: it was the first board game to be made into a movie, and it added a new phraseology to the language—variations of the many “culprit-scene of the crime-weapon” combinations such as “Colonel Mustard in the library with a wrench.” The crime, of course, was murder; and the victim??? “Mr. Boddy!”
The same year that Clue reached our shores, America’s favorite word game hit the market. Scrabble actually got its start during the depression when an unemployed Alfred Butts tried inventing a new game that he felt would “combine elements of luck and skill in the formation of words.” He devised a letter-tile game called Lexico, similar to Anagrams, and six years later added a gameboard to his game. Two name changes and another decade later Butts went into partnership with James Brunot, the man responsible for naming the game Scrabble and taking it into production.
The letter distribution was based on Butts’ study of cryptography and on a letter frequency count of words appearing on the first page of The New York Times.
Two theories attributed to the phenomenal and inexplicable success of Scrabble are that the owner of Macy’s department store liked the game and kept it well-stocked in his store, and that when vacationers returned from the fashionable resorts at which the game was played, they wanted to buy the game to play at home.
Scrabble, which has remained almost the same since it first came out, was issued by Butts’ and Brunot’s Production & Marketing Co. In 1948 they made less than 20 sets a day, but by the end of 1952 the company was selling over 400 sets daily. When they could no longer keep up with the demand, they hired Selchow & Righter to produce the gameboards. After S&R bought the full rights to the game in 1971, the 104-year-old company focused almost entirely on word games. They produced Scrabble in many foreign languages and in Braille, and made deluxe versions, such as one with ivoroid tiles, letter racks (in plastic) with built-in peg scoring, and a rotating board; there is a rare edition with a vinyl board sewn into a large cloth table covering, but this may have been unauthorized, produced by another company.
The only officially licensed Scrabble variant was Skip-A-Cross, a low-end colorful cardboard Scrabble twin made by Cadaco in 1953. But a J. Pressman Company game dated 1939, called Wordy, was nearly identical to Scrabble, except the point value of letters was shown by different color tiles (see “Bruce’s Attic” in this issue). It is possible that this game was actually released in 1949 but carried an incorrect date—a mistake Pressman made even on one of its anniversary catalogs; this would clarify the comment by former CEO Lynn Pressman that Wordy was probably a knock-off of Scrabble.
In 1986, Richard Selchow, head of Selchow & Righter, stunned the industry when he sold the 119-yr-old company to Coleco, a company that went bankrupt the following year and was bought by Hasbro. Hasbro soon dropped the Selchow & Righter name but continued to sell Scrabble. Over the last almost-sixty years millions of Scrabble sets have been sold, and the pinnacle of all word games has more than earned an “A.”
Of course, there are many more classic games that are the favorites of countless Americans. Games from Twister to Trivial Pursuit, from Mousetrap to Blockhead, from Yahtzee to Boggle. Kids’ classics, too, like Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Old Maid, and Operation. As today’s youth are inundated with amusements from video games to I-pods to miniature telephones you don’t even have to talk on, one can only hope that the games invented in the days to come will become lasting landmarks for the future.
