Lizzie Magie: America’s First Lady of Games

The idea for this talk arose out of a meeting at last year’s Dau Barcelona, an annual game fair held in the capital of Catalonia. Dau Barcelona makes special awards to games inventors and prominent people in the games world. Last year Dan Glimne proposed that it also establish a Hall of Fame for people who might have won it in the past had it existed. Two names immediately suggested were, unsurprisingly, Alfonso the Wise and Steward Culin. I suggested also Lizzie Magie, inventor of the forerunner of Monopoly, and started preparing a citation on her behalf. But it has proved much harder to discover as much about the person as about her best-known game. Her biography remains unwritten, and her papers are guarded by a New York journalist whom I’ve not yet been able to contact. Much can be gleaned from some of the most prominent books on the history of Monopoly, notably those of Mary Pilon (The Monopolists, 2015), Phil Orbanes (Monopoly – the World’s Most Famous Game, and how it got that Way, 2006), and Ralph Anspach’s obsessively detailed account of his battle with Parker Brothers’ lawyers to defend his own game of Anti-Monopoly (The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle, 1998). Equally helpful have been various postings on the websites landlordsgame.info/ and themonopolist.net. First problem: although the years or her birth and death are recorded (1866-1948) I only found the actual dates by going to the website of the cemetery sheltering the remains of her and her husband Albert Phillips. Another query: Lizzie Magie is always said to have been a Quaker, as I am, but there is no documentary evidence for it, though she did move in Quaker circles for much of her life. Then again, there’s the question of whether or not she knew Stewart Culin. In a BGS paper of 2011, Phil Winkelman suggested that Culin’s description of the Kiowan board game Zohn Ahl might have inspired the basic board layout of Magie’s proto-Monopoly, given that she was supposedly a friend of his. But was she? The only source for this assertion is one Bonita Freeman-Witthoft in an unsupported comment in