By the 1930s, when Monopoly became popular, economic conditions were very different. To reduce costs of production, early sets included only the paper board, money, and cards needed to play. The tokens were provided by players themselves. As Philip E. Orbanes explains in his book Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game and How It Got That Way, Darrow’s niece and her friends used bracelet charms and Cracker Jack treats as markers in the game. The sense of choice and identification was still present, to an extent, but the feeling of making do and using things already at hand was more salient. It was the Depression, after all.

When Parker Brothers marketed the complete game that we know today, in the mid-1930s, the company elected to include four of the metal charms direct from the manufacturer that supplied the popular bracelet charms Darrow’s niece had adopted, along with another four of new design. Those original tokens—car, iron, lantern, thimble, shoe, tophat, and rocking horse—were joined by the battleship and cannon soon after.

Despite Hasbro’s attempts to modernize Monopoly, the game is really a period piece. It hides the victory of personal property ownership and rentier capitalism over the philosophy of shared land value in Georgism. And it juxtaposes the economic calamity of the Great Depression with the rising tide of industrialism and monopolism that allowed the few to influence the fates of the many. To play the game with a thimble—that symbol of domesticity and humility—instead of a T-rex, connects players to that history, both in leisure and in economics. Reinventing the game might appear to make it more “relevant” to younger players. But perhaps what today’s Monopoly players really need isn’t easy familiarity and identification, but an invitation to connect to a time when the same game bore different meaning, and embraced different experience.

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