Patent No. 748,626 was granted on January 5, 1904, to a 37-year-old stenographer and actress from Illinois named Lizzie Magie. The invention: a board game called The Landlord’s Game, played on a square track with rentable properties, a jail space, and a corner marked “Public Park.” Three decades later, a nearly identical board would make Charles Darrow a millionaire and put his name on every box of Monopoly sold. Magie got a flat $500 buyout and a footnote, according to the National Women’s History Museum’s account of her invention.

The gap between those two facts is one of the stranger cover-ups in American toy history, and it stayed buried for almost 70 years.

A Game Built to Teach a Lesson, Not Sell a Toy

Magie wasn’t trying to invent a bestseller. She was a devoted follower of economist Henry George, whose 1879 book Progress and Poverty argued that concentrated land ownership, not laziness or bad luck, was what kept working people poor. The Landlord’s Game was her teaching tool: players circled a board acquiring property and paying rent to whoever held it, watching wealth pool in fewer and fewer hands as the game went on. She built two rule sets into her patent, one where rising land value was taxed and shared, and one where a single monopolist could bleed every other player dry, so that players could compare the outcomes directly, according to the British Library’s research into her patent filings. She wanted people to finish a round of her “monopolist” version angry enough to ask why the real economy worked that way too.

It’s worth sitting with how rare her patent itself was. Women accounted for less than one percent of U.S. patent applicants at the time Magie filed, per the National Women’s History Museum’s research into her career, and she filed it herself, under her own name, as a single working woman in a field almost entirely closed to her.

The Game Spreads, Quietly, for 30 Years

The Landlord’s Game never became a commercial hit under Magie’s name, but it didn’t disappear either. It traveled hand to hand through Quaker communities, college campuses, and left-leaning social circles for the next three decades, with players redrawing the board on tablecloths and cardboard and swapping in local street names as they went. Somewhere in that long, informal chain of house games, in the early 1930s, an unemployed heater salesman in Germantown, Pennsylvania named Charles Darrow was taught a version of it at a friend’s house.

Darrow didn’t invent the board, the rent mechanic, the jail space, or the trip around the corner to collect money for passing “Go.” What he did was polish it: he swapped in Atlantic City street names, designed clean color-coded property groups with matching deed cards, and had a friend letter a more attractive board by hand. Those are real, legitimate contributions to the game as generations came to know it, and Darrow deserves credit for the version that actually sold. What he did not do, according to the MIT Lemelson Program’s own biographical research on him, was invent the underlying game, despite what Parker Brothers would tell the public for the next 40 years.

Parker Brothers Buys the Silence

When Parker Brothers picked up Darrow’s version in 1935 and it exploded into the bestselling game in the country, the company had a problem: Magie’s original patent still existed, and it covered too much of what Darrow was selling to ignore. Parker Brothers’ solution was to quietly buy Magie’s 1904 patent outright, along with a couple of other unrelated game designs she’d developed, for a flat $500 and no royalties, per the National Women’s History Museum’s account. In exchange, she reportedly agreed to let the company build and market Darrow’s version as his own uncomplicated invention. Darrow, meanwhile, became a millionaire off royalties within about a year of the game’s national release.

Uncovered by the Man Who Sued Over It

The Darrow origin story held up publicly until 1973, when a San Francisco State economics professor named Ralph Anspach released a board game called Anti-Monopoly and Parker Brothers, by then part of General Mills, sued him for trademark infringement. Digging for a defense, Anspach went looking for prior art and found Magie’s original patent filings gathering dust, along with evidence of the game’s long, informal life among ordinary players decades before Darrow ever saw a board. His research became part of the court record and, eventually, common knowledge, a discovery the National Women’s History Museum credits with finally surfacing “the Monopoly lie” that Parker Brothers had quietly maintained since the 1930s.

Magie died in 1948, having spent her later years working other jobs and largely out of public memory, unaware her name would eventually resurface at all. The game she built to warn people about unchecked monopolies became, thanks to one salesman’s makeover and one company’s convenient silence, the most successful board game in American history, minus the byline.