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- Object: The object of the game is to become the wealthiest
player through buying, renting and selling property.
It was 1934, the height of the Depression, when Charles
B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the MONOPOLY
game to the executives at Parker Brothers. Can you believe it, they rejected
the game due to "52 design errors"! But Mr. Darrow wasn't daunted. Like
many other Americans, he was unemployed at the time, and the game's exciting
promise of fame and fortune inspired him to produce it on his own.
With help from a friend who was a printer, Mr. Darrow
sold 5,000 handmade sets of the game to a Philadelphia department store.
People loved it! But as demand grew, he couldn't keep up with all the orders
and came back to talk to Parker Brothers again. The rest, as they say, is
history! In its first year, 1935, the MONOPOLY game was the best-selling
game in America. And over its 65-year history, an estimated 500 million people
have played!
- Rules
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- Object: Mr. Boddy--apparantly the victim of foul
play--is found in one of the rooms of his mansion. To win, you must
determine the answers to these three questions: Who done it? Where? and
with What Weapon?
A solicitor's clerk from Leeds, England named Anthony
Pratt, an avid murder mystery fan, began to devise a way to pass the time
during air raid drills. The result was a murder mystery board game in which
players would have to discover three things- Who Dunnit? Where? and With
What? Pratt's wife designed a game board, and the two began to perfect the
mechanics of their creation. In 1946, the Pratts took their game to Waddingtons,
England's leading game manufacturers. They played it with Waddingtons executives
who immediatley knew the Pratts had a hit! Waddingtons agreed to produce
the game, and began hammering out the details. When time came to name the
game, a play on words was used. In England, the game known to the U.S. as
Parchisi is called "Ludo" (Latin for "I Play") and since in Pratt's game,
the object was to collect clues, the game was named CLUEDO! In 1949, Parker
Brothers obtained the license to produce CLUEDO in the U.S. Changing the
name to CLUE (since Americans wouldn't get the Ludo connection) the game
was launched later that year. Now fifty years later, CLUEDO remains one of
the world's most popular board games. Sold in over 70 countries, the common
name is CLUEDO (known only as CLUE in the U.S., Canada, and Japan). Over
the years the game has spawned a major motion picture, television series,
and a popular musical. CLUEDO's creator, Anthony Pratt died in 1994 at the
age of 90.
- Rules
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- Object: Collect money and LIFE tiles, and have
the highest dollar amount at the end of the game.
In the mid-19th century, Massachusetts lithographer
Milton Bradley printed up some copies of a game he had invented called “The
Checkered Game of Life.” He promoted it as an amusement both fun and educational,
and it was a quick success—a better seller than his pocket-sized “Games of
Soldiers” travel kits, which he marketed to Civil War soldiers, and better
than his quiz games, the earliest descendants of today’s Trivial Pursuit.
The Checkered Game eventually went into hibernation, but in 1959, the brass
at Milton Bradley wanted something special for the company’s 100th anniversary.
They hired a toy inventor named Reuben Klamer, and Reuben happened upon the
old Checkered Game in the Milton vaults. He re-vamped it for a 1960 release,
and a hundred years later, the game found an audience once again. Art Linkletter
endorsed it back in the 60’s—his picture can be found on the cardboard game
boxes of old—and millions have played it since.
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Rules
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