“The Landlord’s Game” eventually became “Monopoly,” and the game took a page from its own playbook, becoming one of the most popular in history. Success could be determined by counting up the dollars at the end. The means did not matter-monopolizing, using social circles, bankrupting your peers. Though it demonstrated George’s theories perfectly, it also embodied what David Wallace Adams and Victor Edmonds call a “secularized idea of success: Magie tried to use the game to point out the evils of monopolies and the social stratification they created. While living in Arden, she came up with “The Landlord’s Game,” a board game she hoped would demonstrate George’s theories to a wider audience. Lizzie Magie wasn’t just a George supporter-she believed in his single-tax theory so strongly that she moved to a Delaware commune called Arden to put it in action. Plutocracy,” “a supporter invented a board game to teach how unchecked land ownership created extremes of either vast wealth or poverty.” But as George’s opinions fell out of favor in the early twentieth century, notes Harry Brod in “ Past Perfect: Democracy vs. George advocated for a single tax reflecting only a land’s economic and natural resources value.

In his best-selling Progress and Poverty, George looked at how advances in technology and society drive up the price of land, creating wealth for landowners (and putting societies at risk when speculators increase land values without an according increase in social wealth). Long before the game was a Hasbro-owned juggernaut, it was an economic concept developed by political economist Henry George, a Progressive-era reformer with a bone to pick about economic inequality. What’s in a game? If the game is Monopoly, which turns 80 years old this week, that’s a loaded question.

Monopoly board game origin