Games of America, From Morality Through Monopoly
by Bruce Whitehill
The commercial manufacture of games in the United States began in the early 1800s and took hold after 1843, when one company, W. & S.B. Ives, responded to a growing need for Americans to find additional tools to help teach children the morality of the period, and to provide family amusement that didn’t smack of gambling. Card games were designed with images and text to clearly set them apart from the pictured royalty and numbers of four-suit playing cards, considered gambling tools. This was a period of moral fervor, a time dedicated to developing “children’s rights”. In 1843, Ives published a morality game long considered to be the first American board game (until research uncovered the existence of two earlier games). Ives’ game, The Mansion of Happiness, was a game of luck in which players moved their pieces toward the center of the board, much like in the Game of Goose (from which this game may have derived), in an attempt to reach the “Mansion of Happiness” (i.e., heaven). Landing on spaces of virtue propelled you further, while those of vice sent you back toward the beginning. According to the rules, “Whoever possesses Piety, Honesty, Temperance, Gratitude, Prudence, Truth, Chastity, Sincerity, Humility, Industry, Charity, Humanity, or Generosity is entitled to advance…toward the Mansion of Happiness….Whoever possesses Audacity, Cruelty, Immodesty, or Ingratitude, must return to his former situation…and not even think of Happiness, much less partake of it.” A player who landed on the space marked “Passion” had to go back to “The Water”, since, it was explained, “Whoever gets in a Passion must be taken to the Water and have a ducking (sic) to cool him”. Players on the “Road to Folly” had to return to “Prudence”; and the Sabbath Breaker was “taken to the Whipping Post and whipt”. In this watershed game—which must have been popular, considering the number of copies that can be found today—children and their parents embarked on a voyage of discovery, instruction, and amusement that was the beginning of games becoming part of American family life.
Many of America’s immigrants had come over from England, so it is not surprising to find copies of English games. Dr. Busby, invented by America’s first renowned game author, Anne Abbot, is considered the first truly American card game, but was nonetheless similar to, or maybe even taken from, the European game of Happy Families. Other games were original, uniquely American. Small companies sprang up in the Northeast, many of them in book publishing districts in New York City. The game titles tell us something about the time in which they were produced—some of the games were seeped in English historical literature and politics, whereas others offered truly American themes and pushed American patriotism.
Most of the early games were card games, since it was much easier to print small cards than larger paper sheets, which then had to be folded or pasted onto cardboard. Board games were not put into boxes, but were sold with a separate parts box or a small pouch containing the game pieces attached to the back of the gameboard. “Teetotums” were used instead of dice to govern the movement on the board; teetotums were small spinning tops that, when they came to rest, indicated how many spaces the player could move. Dice were considered implements of gambling and “tools of the devil” and were therefore avoided.
America Mid-Century
This moral sensitivity continued throughout the 1850s. But then so did the movement from farmland to cities, the increased industrialization that led to more leisure time, and improvements in the welfare of children ; children were allowed more time for play, once the schooling and the chores were done.
The war with Mexico ended, resulting in a treaty that would give the U.S. the land that was to be developed as the American West. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 secured this migration westward as the country’s first gold rush began. In 1850, the U.S. population was listed as 23 million (including over 3 million slaves), compared to 34 million in Germany and less than 21 million in Great Britain. Through the 1850s there were continuing advances in rail and steamship travel and progress in the new form of communication, the telegraph. The games that emerged during the 1850s also reflected the events and attitudes that were shaping America, embracing themes such as the growth of the country’s rail lines and the increasing interest in travel and learning about distant cultures.
McLoughlin Brothers—The Company That Set the Standard
The accomplishments of Ives and the other smaller companies were overshadowed by the work of another publishing company, McLoughlin Brothers. In the early part of the decade, John McLoughlin Jr. took over his father’s book publishing business and added card games to the line. The younger McLoughlin clearly stepped away from the games of instruction and morality and began introducing games of true amusement. All the games were hand-colored, and John McLoughlin is credited with being the first to use an assembly line process to achieve this—a number of color-artists worked on one game, each artist being responsible for adding only one color to the image.
In 1855, John McLoughlin brought his brother Edmond into the business to create McLoughlin Brothers, the company that became the premiere name in early American games. They introduced board games with lavish illustrations and wonderful coloring, and they were prolific, producing an astonishing assortment of games over the next sixty years. John McLoughlin, Jr., according to Laura Wasowicz of the American Antiquarian Society, “continually experimented with color illustration—progressing from hand stenciling, to the mechanical relief process of zinc etching, to the planographic process of chromolithography”. In 1871, the company opened a color-printing factory in Brooklyn, employing as many as 75 artists for their book, game and lithograph work.
Milton Bradley—Making the Game Business an Industry
As the McLoughlin brothers were venturing into games, another lithographer, Milton Bradley, opened his enterprise in Springfield, Massachusetts. This was the man who would turn America’s game business into an industry. It was 1860. During the past decade, over 1,338,000 people emigrated from England and, especially, Ireland. Tensions continued to rise between the North and the South over the issues of slavery. Anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States. An interesting sidelight is that Milton Bradley printed many copies of a beardless Lincoln portrait, only to find that the new president had grown a beard; most of the prints were discarded, and today they are very rare and quite valuable.
Milton Bradley was a draughtsman who started printing games as a sideline to his lithography business. He allegedly made improvements to the printing process that allowed for games to be mass-produced for the first time. The hand-coloring of games became a thing of the past as Bradley used—or possibly even developed—new ways of printing multiple copies of the same game in a short time. His first game was The Checkered Game of Life, a morality game similar to Ives’ Mansion of Happiness. Bradley’s board was a simple checkerboard (hence the title), and the players attempted to be the first to reach Happy Old Age, beginning at Infancy. Landing on a space indicating a positive trait took players closer to their goal: “Bravery” sent you to “Honor”, and “Perseverance” took you to “Success”. Some of the moves were very telling for the period: a “Government Contract” shot you to “Wealth”, and “Influence” took you to a “Fat Office”. Spaces noting ill deeds (e.g., “Crime”) would move you back (e.g., to “Prison”). A teetotum governed whether a player could move one or two spaces, and in what direction.
Bradley was extremely interested in education and, as his company grew, sold a wide range of school supplies and optical toys in addition to educational games. He was very active in the new “kindergarten” movement that began in Germany and eventually swept through the U.S. He produced many games aimed primarily at children and was prolific, though his smaller, less ornate, less colorful games paled next to those of his older competitor, Mcloughlin. By 1876, if not earlier, Bradley was gluing lithographed sheets to cardboard and producing colorful folded gameboards exactly the same size (47 cm square) as the standard used in the U.S. today. In 1876 he was awarded the Medal of Excellence at the Centennial Exposition, the first award ever made “for ethical teaching of children through play”.
Bradley was in business only a year when the American Civil War began in 1861, setting brother against brother in battles between the Union armies of the Northeast and the Confederate armies of the South. It is interesting to note that at this time, almost all the game companies were in the industrialized north, particularly New York and Massachusetts; few, if any, were operating in the South. Of the industrial establishments listed in the U.S., nearly 86% were located in Union states. Over 90% of the money invested in real and personal property devoted to business in America was concentrated in the North, and the combined investments of Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts were larger than in the entire South.
After the war began, Milton Bradley decided to produce small versions of The Checkered Game of Life designed to fit into a soldier’s pocket or knapsack. As such, one could consider him the designer of America’s first “travel” games. In 1866 he patented the first American croquet game. He sold his own paper cutter and introduced the zoetrope (an optical toy) to America.
The Growth of America and the Promulgation of America’s Smaller Game Companies
The 1860s saw the completion of America’s transcontinental railroad. Lincoln was re-elected, then assassinated a short time later; the Confederacy lost the war, and slaves won their freedom. “In God We Trust” was first imprinted onto U.S. currency, the Ku Klux Klan was founded, and the Pony Express began mail service between Missouri and California. The first sleeper (train) cars made tracks—and the first American train robbery took place. The U.S. spent $7,200,000 to buy Alaska, and John D. Rockefeller started Standard Oil Co. Baseball turned professional, intercollegiate (American) football began, and roller-skating wheeled its way into the hearts of Americans.
The 1860s were also a prominent time in world literature. Many literary giants were featured in various games of Authors, the first one having been developed by A.A. Smith and published with his partner in 1861 under their company name, Whipple & Smith. Smith was also responsible for bringing the game of Squails into the U.S. in 1865, though Milton Bradley seems to have appropriated the honor with his 1867 introduction of the game. Squails, first produced in England by John Jaques in 1857, is a table game in which counters or disks are propelled toward some post or goal by finger-snapping or pushing. The game represents one of the earliest American examples of what came to be known as a dexterity or “skill & action” game.
Selchow & Righter—The Forgotten Giant—and Parcheesi
In 1865, New York toy business owner Albert Swift published Bezique, a two-player card game that originated in France and eventually evolved in the U.S. into the two-handed game of pairs called pinochle (“pee´-nahkl”). Swift sold his business to E.G. Selchow in 1867, and along with it (or in addition to it) the rights to Parcheesi, the Game of India. Parcheesi went on to become the longest selling game in America, and one of the most popular. In Parcheesi, copied from Pachisi, players control different pieces that they can move at different times, the object being to get each piece once around the gameboard and into a home base; moves are governed by a throw of the dice, each die counted separately as one move. And whereas Parcheesi is a game for two to four individuals, Pachisi is played by four people playing as two teams. These game mechanisms share some similarities with backgammon, a world favorite that dates back to the 1st century. Parcheesi was trademarked in 1874, giving it one of the oldest trademarks for an American game.
After E.G. Selchow took in John Righter as a partner, the company name was changed to Selchow & Righter in 1880. They were “jobbers”—that is, they sold other company’s games—a practice that continued for another 47 years. Parcheesi enjoyed early success, and four versions of the game were listed in Selchow & Righter’s 1887 catalog. Another early sensation was Pigs in Clover, a dexterity game by Charles Crandall, the famous inventor and maker of building blocks.
Bliss and Beyond—The 1870s & ‘80s
In or soon after 1871, the R. Bliss Manufacturing Co. began to add games to its newly successful line of lithograph-on-wood toys. Many of the games were “skill & action” games in which a ball or marble was rolled or shot at a target. Rufus Bliss started a company in 1832 that manufactured wood screws and clamps for piano and cabinet makers; one of his inventions was a machine that cut wood screws rapidly, allowing for a process later utilized to produce the “turned men” or shaped wooden playing pieces used in games. Bliss retired in 1863, years before the company produced its first toy. The Bliss Company was later famous for target games, parlor ring toss, floor and table croquet, and Fish Pond.
In spite of the depression during the 1870s, smaller game companies began to appear, selling everything from educational to whimsical games, from patriotic to political parody. The 1870s and ‘80s in America saw the first tennis tournament, the first public telephones, and the first fruits and meats sold in cans. The American Federation of Labor was formed. New York street lights were powered by electricity. The U.S. had almost 89,000 miles of railroad in operation compared to a combined 67,000 throughout Britain, Germany, France and Russia. There was a huge increase in the number of immigrants entering the United States, and New York reached a population of over one million, the same as Berlin. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred most Chinese immigration for 10 years, following a large influx of Chinese escaping problems in their home country or searching for gold and working on the railroads of the American West. The Oklahoma land rush helped propel the surge westward.
The first skyscraper—10 stories high—began the elevation of the American landscape. The Brooklyn Bridge became an architectural wonder, and The Statue of Liberty, a gift of France, made its way to New York. Buffalo Bill Cody organized his “Wild West Show”, while Nellie Bly (a.k.a. Elizabeth Cochrane) beat the imaginary “’round-the-world-in-80-days” feat of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg. Golf was introduced to the nation. All of these happenings were significant enough to inspire numerous game box illustrations and themed games commemorating or capitalizing on the events.
George Parker and the Parker Brothers he made famous
In 1883, another Massachusetts games enthusiast, George S. Parker, went into business, selling games of his own invention and aiming at an adult market. He was still in high school when he invented his earliest games. Parker, a player interested in game strategy, was a strategic businessman as well. In a few years he was selling—in addition to his own games—games by Horsman and Bliss, and by Ives, whose entire line he gained the rights to in 1887.
In 1888 George’s brother Charles joined the firm, creating Parker Brothers, which became to family and adult games what Milton Bradley was to family and children’s games. On a literary note, that same year, the company published the Amusing Game of Innocence Abroad, a parody of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad.
Jumping into the Public Eye: Tiddley Winks and Halma
In the 1880s, the game with the greatest variety of spellings, Tiddley Winks, Tiddely Winks, Tiddly Winks or Tiddledy Winks, reached America from England, where it was trademarked in 1889. Now in the public domain, tiddly winks has popped up all over, and over 70 patents have been issued for a profusion of variations.
America’s oldest game that is still played around the world today—albeit not in America!—is Halma. In 1885, Harvard professor George H. Monks, inspired by the British game of Hoppity that his brother Robert told him about after a trip to England, created Halma. It is a race game in which players’ pieces move one space or jump over other pieces (the player’s own or an opponent’s), but the jumped pieces are not removed. The object is to get one’s pieces to the opposite corner of the board first. Halma has been seen as the forerunner of Chinese Checkers, the game that replaced it in the U.S., though Chinese Checkers was actually taken from the German game Stern-Halma, first published by Ravensburger in 1892. Halma, which uses 19 pieces each (sometimes only 15) in a two-player game and 13 in a four-player game, is more involving than Chinese Checkers, which uses only ten pieces (usually marbles) per player, but allows for a six-player game on a star-shaped board.
Halma was produced in the U.S. by E.I. Horsman [no ‘e’], beginning the company’s ten-year run of games before it went on to become famous for dolls. Milton Bradley, incidentally, claimed it had obtained the rights to Halma from the inventor, but backed down after a legal skirmish with Horsman, stating: “…Owing to the fact that certain parties claim to possess exclusive rights to the use of the word ‘Halma,’ …(and) in order to avoid any controversy, we now designate that game by the new name of ‘Eckha’”. Eckha didn’t last.
From Rags to Riches, and a Turn Over to Reversi
In 1886, McLoughlin Brothers released District Messenger Boy, or Merit Rewarded, based on the theme running through the novels of Horatio Alger that began in 1867 and earned great recognition in America. The stories recounted the “rags to riches” idea in which an impoverished youth, through hard work and good deeds, rises to at least the security of the middle class. In District Messenger Boy and many others like it, including Parker Brothers’ Office Boy in 1889 and McLoughlin’s 1891 Errand Boy, the first player to reach the center or last space becomes head of the company and wins the game.
In 1888, McLoughlin published Reversi, based on one of two British games: an 1870 game called Annexation (later called Annex, the Game of Reverses) that employed a cross-shaped board, or on the game of Reversi, invented in 1880 and patented in 1888, that used the checkerboard as in the game of today. Reversi fell out of favor in the U.S. after the 1950s, but returned in 1975 as the “new” game of Othello, allegedly “invented” by Goro Hasegawa in Japan in 1971 or ‘73. The game has been highly successful ever since. Othello is played on an 8 x 8 grid with pieces that are white on one side and black (or red, in the older Reversi sets) on the other. There is only a minor difference between Othello and Reversi, based on the initial placement of pieces—in Reversi, the first four pieces can be placed in any configuration within the four center spaces; in Othello, the first four pieces must be placed so that the same color pieces are on the diagonal.
Throughout the final decades of the 19th century, games continued to portray and reflect the events of the period—for example, games themed around a new gold rush in the Klondike (that helped develop Alaska) and games picturing the new fashion of velocipedes (bikes with large front wheels). The Spanish-American War in 1898 led to the first series of games (mostly from Chaffee & Selchow company) based on a war.
A New Century
By 1900, European immigration was high and the culture of America was changing. The society was turning from agriculture to industry, evenings at home were becoming brighter as gaslights became electric, and the morality of earlier decades was shifting, allowing for more leisure and play. Games were becoming so popular they were even printed in Sunday newspapers as full-page color supplements, made possible by advances in the printing process. Dozens of U.S. companies were supplying the American family with games designed to inform and amuse. The ensuing years brought continued success—except for McLoughlin.
McLoughlin Bros. reached its peak in the 1880s and 1890s, creating many large, gorgeous games that used wood for the box frame and incorporated bone dice, metal tokens and figural wooden playing pieces turned on a lathe. After John McLoughlin, Jr. died in 1905, the company began to struggle, and in 1920 sold out to Milton Bradley. The McLoughlin name continued in book publishing but disappeared from games. In spite of the high level of artistic design and workmanship, no McLoughlin game besides Reversi ever became a “classic”.
Milton Bradley, too, showed continued success in the 1890s in spite of the financial Panic of 1893—the same year as the Chicago World’s Fair, which served as a platform for larger companies to display their games. Many businesses, including railroads and banks, failed, especially in the West, though the larger game companies did not seem to be unduly affected. This may have been due to the low cost of games and the high value of amusement during times of financial hardship.
In or around 1901, the Milton Bradley Company produced The Game of India, a game nearly identical to Parcheesi, the national game of India. By 1904, the company had offices in three major eastern cities as well as in the Midwest (Kansas), the South (Atlanta), and the West (San Francisco). Milton Bradley, the man, died in 1911, leaving the company in the hands of a new generation.
Parker Bros. also reached its highest level of design in the 1880s and 1890s, with many games featuring a patented sliding drawer in which the implements were kept. These were visually superb games that reflected popular culture. In 1894, Parker reproduced The Mansion of Happiness, erroneously calling it “the first board game ever published in America”. Geo. S. Parker introduced Americans to Ping Pong in 1902 (imported from Britain), and to the card games of Rook, Pit, and Flinch that same decade. Later, the company produced such a high quality line of wood jigsaw puzzles that it devoted its entire production facility only to jigsaw puzzles in 1909. Parker brought Mah-Jongg into the U.S. in 1923, though it may not have been the first company to do so. And to save the company from depleted revenues after the Great Depression, Parker bought and released Monopoly in 1935.
Monopoly was actually taken from The Landlord’s Game, invented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie (Phillips), and soon became a folk game. It had become popular at college campuses across the country, when Charles Darrow picked up the game and brought it to Parker, misrepresenting it as his own. The company first refused the game, but George Parker changed his mind when he saw the success Darrow was having selling it on his own. Monopoly became not only Darrow’s and Parker’s success story (Elizabeth Magie didn’t receive the credit due her until two generations later), but it became the icon of American games.
Monopoly, Parcheesi, Sorry (a Parcheesi variant brought from England in 1934), the 1916 children’s game of Uncle Wiggily (based on the “Uncle Wiggily Bedtime Stories” of Howard R. Garis, a writer of children’s books), and the classic card games of Flinch, Pit and Rook are among the very few games that have been sustained through 20th century America. Like their counterparts in many countries, they represent the legacy of a culture that produced so many games, but, over the long run, preserved so few. Still, from the early morality pastimes through the beginnings of the epoch of Monopoly, many hundreds of games served millions of Americans, enlightening, educating and entertaining the populace.
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FROM FOLLY TO PRUDENCE, FROM AMBITION TO FAME
The MANSION OF HAPPINESS, published by Ives in 1843 and once thought to be the first American board game, used this moral concept: when a player landed on a space denoting a virtue, the player was directed to move ahead toward the Mansion of Happiness; when landing on a space illustrating one of the vices, the player was instructed to move back toward start. A player who landed on the space marked “Passion” had to return to the space marked “The Water”; the instructions read: “Whoever gets in a Passion must be taken to the Water and have a ducking (sic) to cool him.” Landing on Idleness sent the player to Poverty; players on the Road to Folly had to return to Prudence; the Sabbath Breaker was “taken to the Whipping Post and whipt”; and any player who reached the Summit of Dissipation (a state of wastefulness) went to Ruin. “Whoever possesses Piety, Honesty, Temperance, Gratitude, Prudence, Truth, Chastity, Sincerity, Humility, Industry, Charity, Humanity, or Generosity is entitled to advance…toward the Mansion of Happiness. “Whoever possesses Audacity, Cruelty, Immodesty, or Ingratitude, must return to his former situation…and not even think of Happiness, much less partake of it.”
Milton Bradley’s first game, the CHECKERED GAME OF LIFE, made in 1860, was similar: the path took the player from Infancy to Happy Old Age. Landing on Bravery sent the player to Honor, Perseverance to Success, and Ambition to Fame. Gambling led to Ruin, and Idleness to Disgrace.
Because of the religious and moral fervor during the mid 1800s, gambling was frowned upon and the dice so often associated with gambling games were considered “tools of the devil.” The movement of playing pieces in such games as The MANSION OF HAPPINESS and the CHECKERED GAME OF LIFE was governed by a “teetotum,” a squared top with numbers on the side, or one made by inserting a wood shaft into a piece of hexagonal or octagonal cardboard with numbers along the edge.
DICEY SITUATION
Many soldiers during the Civil War carried dice for gambling during the leisure hours. But the social taboo against dice was so strong, the soldiers would leave them behind when going into battle–if they were killed in combat, they didn’t want the dice to be sent back to the family as part of their personal effects. Because of this, Civil War battlefields are said to be an excellent place to unearth early bone dice.
