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The Board Game

Simple hunks of wood were the video games of the nineteenth century. In homes and general stores and taverns, homemade wooden game boards were indispensable implements for an evening’s recreation. They were also, almost by accident, beautiful—commonplace objects rendered extraordinary through the decoration of anonymous craftsmen. Today they are recognized as highly collectible examples of folk art.

Board games are among our oldest diversions. Ancient racing games that scholars believe to be the precursors of backgammon have been found in Sumerian burial mounds and Egyptian tombs and dated as early as 3000 B.C. There is a reference to checkers in Chaucer, European immigrants settling in America and Canada brought board games with them from the Old World, and some eighteenth-century gaming tables (usually for chess or backgammon) exist today. The American craft of the game board reached its peak, however, in the nineteenth century. One of the earliest known examples is a checkerboard manufactured in 1824, now in the hands of a private collector. By the 1850s the homemade game board was well established as a simple, cheap alternative to the lithographed boards manufactured by Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley in the same period. Sign painters, carriage makers, and, above all, talented amateurs produced their own game boards for use by family and friends. Because it was overwhelmingly an anonymous craft, there are few records, and there is little in the way of formal scholarship. But much can be deduced about the makers and their times from the boards themselves.

There are few game boards known to have come from warm climates. Most can be traced, through hints in design or construction, to Northern states. Pennsylvania Dutch designs (such as hexes) suggest Pennsylvania; Germanic motifs (such as tulips) suggest Pennsylvania or Ohio. A unique game like A Trip around the World, which features a marine motif, including an unlucky whaler being taken on a Nantucket sleigh ride, clearly indicates that it came from the New England coast. (Its construction provides another clue: The joints of the end boards are mitered together tongue and groove, possibly to prevent warping.) All this suggests that homemade gaming was in large part a diversion for long Northern winters.

Certain common pictorial elements were part of the standard decorative vocabulary of the time and can also be found on quilts, fabrics, and painted furniture. This serves to place game boards squarely in the late-nineteenth-century tradition of decorative objects that were made first of all to be used around the home. Not that the makers were blind to their visual appeal. Some game boards still have hooks of brass or iron attached; when not in use, they were hung as wall decorations.

There are many more checkerboards surviving than any other kind of game board, confirming that checkers was a far more popular game than others whose boards survive today: Parcheesi, backgammon, Chinese checkers, and rarer games like Ringo or Agon. Boards with more than the usual number of squares were probably used for draughts, a Canadian variant on the game that also trickled down into Maine. Game boards made of pine are probably rural in origin; harder, more expensive woods like cherry or walnut suggest an urban craftsman. Most boards are one-of-a-kind, but occasionally collectors will come across several boards that were clearly made by the same hand, suggesting that some makers set up small cottage businesses.

The craft of wooden game board making survived well into the twentieth century before it was put down by the mass manufacture of cheap paper boards. Perhaps because good boards were still being made as late as the 1940s, collectors of folk art came to game boards fairly late, after they had discovered (and driven up the prices of) nineteenth-century weather vanes and quilts. Twenty years ago, when the Connecticut collector R. Scudder Smith began buying game boards at antique fairs and flea markets, most were in the ten-to-fifty-dollar range. Today the price range is nearly one hundred times that, with the best pieces going for three to four thousand dollars in pricey New York galleries. Collectors, curators, and dealers offer a cautionary note, however: Because they are so simple, game boards are the easiest pieces of folk art to fake, and there are innumerable new copies in the marketplace. Perhaps there’s a perverse justice in this, the humble home craftsmen of the last century, long dead, having a last laugh on the collectors of today’s inflated art market.

Milton Bradley was a game pioneer, credited by many with launching the game industry in North America. But years before he invented his first game, Bradley enjoyed a successful career in lithography. Born in Vienna, Maine, in 1836, Bradley chose a career in printing and lithography in his late teens and set about learning the trade. In 1860, he set up Massachusetts' first color lithography shop in Springfield. One of his lithographs, a likeness of Abraham Lincoln, sold especially well, until Lincoln grew a beard and rendered Bradley's beardless image out-of-date.

At about the same time Bradley's lithography business was beginning to wane, Bradley visited a friend who challenged him to a game. Although it hasn't been recorded, this was probably an imported European game using a spinner to determine how many spaces a player moves. Bradley was inspired with a new idea - he would invent a game. Bradley designed a board game called The Checkered Game of Life. The object was to obtain a happy old age instead of financial ruin and a player's luck was decided by a numbered spinner. Players moved game pieces over sixty-four squares, which could be good, bad, or neutral according to their color.

The Checkered Game of Life, was conceived by Milton Bradley in 1860. One of the first major game publishers in America, Bradley later became a pioneer in American primary education and a leader in promoting the then strange and new idea of kindergarten for preschool children. His game relied heavily on moral instruction. The player attempted to move his token through School, Honor, and Truth until he finally arrived at Happy Old Age. Should he falter on squares allotted to such vices as Idleness and Crime, he could expect to fall into Poverty, Disgrace, and ultimately Ruin. Bradley was instrumental in making board games nationally popular during the Civil War when he devised a package called Games for Soldiers, which became a favorite with the Union Army. Made of pasteboard so that it added little to the weight of a soldier’s pack, the package held nine games: chess, checkers, backgammon, five versions of dominoes, and because Mr. Bradley was, after all, a Yankee tradesman, the Checkered Game of Life.

By 1861, Bradley had sold more than 45,000 copies of his game. He formed Milton Bradley and Company in 1864 to print other games and game manuals. But games were not Bradley's only interest. In 1869, Bradley published America's first book on kindergartens, Paradise of Childhood, by Friedrich Froebel. Bradley's interest in childhood and children's education continued. In addition to printing a series of kindergarten manuals, newsletters, and children's books, Bradley wrote and published four books on teaching color to kids, including Colour in the Kindergarten (1893). The Milton Bradley Company, producers of the Game of Life and Candy Land, has long retained its place as one of the world's leading manufacturers of games and toys. It is now a division of Hasbro, Inc.

The name "Parker Brothers" is probably familiar in most American households. People know them for at least several popular board games - Monopoly, Risk, Clue, and Sorry. George Parker was born in 1867 in Salem, Massachusetts, the youngest of Mr. and Mrs. George Parker's three sons. Although he wanted to be a journalist, Parker was an avid game player and even had an informal game-playing club with several of his friends.

A quiet revolution in what was to become the game industry started from a most unlikely source in 1883. A shy, rather solemn sixteen-year-old Salem-born boy named George Swinerton Parker asked of his high-school principal in nearby Medford, where the family was living at that time, to be excused for three weeks before the Christmas vacation so he could go out and earn some money. It was an unusual request. Young Parker was descended from an old and substantial Massachusetts family that had settled in Woburn in 1645. His father, Captain George Parker, had been a sea captain until he was beached because of illness and went into the real-estate business. Captain George must have been something of a plunger. He speculated heavily in salt mines, a popular investment at the time. There was considerable money to be made in salt mines in those days, but unfortunately not in the ones Captain Parker had selected. From the time of his death, when George was ten, the family had repeatedly found itself a bit short of money. Young George decided to make some cash with the only thing he really knew about—games. He had been a dedicated gamester most of his young life. He played all the popular ones like Authors and Anagrams. But he found they weren’t as much fun as he thought they should be. He felt that The Mansion of Happiness was too “preachy” and deadly dull. Chess may have been too drawn out for his quick spirit, and checkers he liked not at all. “Duelling in a closet,” he called it.

When Parker was only a teenager, he invented his first game, Banking, in which players borrowed money from a bank at 10 per cent interest and attempted to make money through speculating. The contest was to see which player could amass the most wealth. Therein lay the first secret of the modern American home game. Instead of the most pious player reaping the most joy in the next world, the smartest player got the most money in this one. One-hundred-and-sixty cards determined each player's luck. In 1883, with the encouragement of his friends and older brother, Charles, Parker decided to publish Banking.

The rising tide of mercantilism was obviously shouldering aside the Puritan ethic. Banking was so popular with his friends that young George decided to try to market it himself. With the kind of bettor’s instinct his father would have admired, after being turned down by two Boston book publishers, George spent forty of the fifty dollars he had earned by selling currants from the Parker garden on printing up five hundred sets of the new game. With the remaining ten dollars for expenses he set off for Boston and Providence with a valise stuffed with Banking games. He returned within the allotted time having sold all but a dozen sets to department stores and wholesalers for a net profit of somewhere around ninety dollars. A business that could return a sixteenyear-old boy close to a 200 per cent profit in three weeks was clearly something to think about. Think about it he did. After graduating from high school he worked briefly as a cub reporter for The Commercial Bulletin of Boston for three dollars a week. He returned home shortly thereafter, and in 1885 moved back to Salem and went permanently into the game business.

Again encouraged by his brother Charles, George, at just sixteen years old, founded his own game publishing company, the George S. Parker Company. By 1888, the business was doing so well that George convinced his brother Charles to join the company. Parker Brothers was born. Ten years later, the eldest Parker brother, Edward, also entered the company.

In the late 1880s, the Parker Brothers catalog featured twenty-nine games, most of which had been invented by George Parker. In addition to writing the rules to all Parker Brothers games, the youngest brother was also responsible for advertising the games in newspapers and magazines, an unheard of practice at the time.

Throughout the early 1900s, Parker Brothers released a slew of new board games, most of which combined education and fun, like the Game of American History and Story of the Bible. They also produced the popular card games Pit, Flinch, and Rook, as well as wooden jigsaw puzzles.

Until he finally retired in 1945, George Parker was essentially an inventor of new games and an adapter of old ones. Traditionally, most board games, except for open strategy ones like chess and checkers, are called track games. In a track game a player proceeds along a prescribed route laid out for him by the dimensions of the board itself and tries to overcome various obstacles as he heads for a specific goal. Parker realized that although he couldn’t risk changing the basic trip—Peter Rabbit trying to find the hole in the fence in Mr. MacGregor’s garden or the intrepid girl reporter Nelly BIy trying to go around the world in eighty days—he could rearrange the scenery along the way. He worked out scores of variations on the basic track layout, taking advantage of whatever fads or national interests he could turn into a game. In the late 1800’s George Parker’s company, now joined by brothers Edward and Charles to become Parker Brothers, was what Madison Avenue today would call a “trendy shop”—one quick to exploit the latest style of the day. Whenever there was a popular rage or an important news event, it seemed that there was a Parker Brothers game not far behind.

With the introduction of Monopoly in 1935, Parker Brothers' place as a game giant was solidified. George Parker died in 1953, at the age of eighty-six. In his lifetime, he invented more than one hundred games. Since that time, Parker Brothers has gone through several corporate changes. It was bought by General Mills in 1968, but was spun off to join Kenner Products in 1985, forming a new company called Kenner Parker Toys Inc. In 1987, Kenner Parker Toys was acquired by the Tonka Corporation, which, in 1991, became a division of Hasbro, Inc. Hasbro, Inc. is also the parent company for Milton Bradley, Kenner, Tonka, and Playskool.

BILL BAROL. AMERICAN MADE Game Boards. February 1990; Volume 41, Issue 1.

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