How a real-life monopoly made Monopoly the world’s biggest board game
How a real-life monopoly made Monopoly the world’s biggest board game
How a real-life monopoly made Monopoly the world’s biggest board game
Mark Dent
December 12, 2020
Summary
In the UK this spring, board game and jigsaw puzzle revenues were up 240% - and Monopoly was the top seller.
How did Hasbro corner the board game market? And could a new wave of collaborative board games threaten to disrupt their dominance?
Monopoly began its life as The Landlord's Game.
Monopoly violated the cardinal tenets of board game design: The rules were confusing and a single game took an eternity to finish.
"Having a hit in the board game or toy industry is so rare - and having one multigenerational game was pretty much unheard of," Pilon tells The Hustle.
Hasbro Gaming's website features 240 board games, the vast majority of which were invented decades ago; 45 of the games are variations of Monopoly.
These days you can play infinite versions of the Monopoly board game, the computer game, and the iPhone game.
While Hasbro nurtured Monopoly and other classics, independent German publishers started to produce board games with more complex strategies and sleeker designs - games that were about cooperation as much as competition.
Trend pieces abounded about the rise of a new style of game that would replace Monopoly and similar pop-strategy games, which have been derided as Ameritrash.
The company had already bought numerous European distributors, to the extent that Stephen Conway, president of a board game nonprofit called The Spiel Foundation and a longtime industry observer, says Asmodee effectively controls European board game distribution.
Reference
Dent, M. (2020, December 12). How a real-life monopoly made Monopoly the world's biggest board game. Retrieved December 15, 2020, from https://thehustle.co/how-a-real-life-monopoly-made-monopoly-the-worlds-biggest-board-game/