The Landlord's Game

The Landlord's Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie. It is a realty and taxation game, and the earliest patented predecessor to the Parker Brothers game Monopoly. Though many similar home-made games were played at the beginning of the 20th Century and some predate The Landlord's Game, it is the first of its kind to have an attested patent. Magie based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.