Soon after making its deal with Darrow Parker Brothers, in its effort to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, struck a deal with Lizzie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas. If not for her trailblazing patent, the original game and Lizzie Magie herself may have been lost in history. In addition to properties named after Atlantic City streets, fixed prices were added to the board. The version of that game held the core of Magie’s game, but included some modifications added by the Quakers to make the game easier to play. Ironically, decades later it was Magie’s Landlord’s Game, that Charles Darrow was taught by a friend, played and then in 1935 appropriated and sold to Parker Brothers under the name of Monopoly. Bear in mind this was at a time when less than one percent of patent holders were women. Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “ Go to Jail.” She called her creation, The Landlord’s Game and in 1903 filed a patent for the game. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail Macomb’s Jail, incidentally was, at that time, in one of corners of the Square. The plat of the board game is surprisingly similar to that of Macomb’s Downtown Square. It featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. Magie’s game was quite unique for its time. The seeds of the Monopoly game were planted when James Magie shared with his daughter a copy of Henry George‘s best-selling book, “ Progress and Poverty,” written in 1879. As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone. In the early 1880s, Lizzie Magie, as her friend’s called her, worked as a stenographer. She spent her time drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking the game that she wanted to be based on the theories of Henry George. Magie, was a newspaper publisher and an abolitionist who accompanied Lincoln as he traveled around Illinois in the late 1850s debating politics with Stephen Douglas.Īside from being an actress, writer, poet, pioneering feminist and an inventor who held several patents, Lizzie Magie is best known for creating what has become the most popular board game in the world : Monopoly.

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie-Phillips (MA- Gee) was born in Macomb, on May 9th, 1866, the year after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Feminist monopoly chance cards