“It was ingenious,” Philip Orbanes, the author of several books on Monopoly, told Heussner. To develop that kit, MI9, the British secret-service unit responsible for escape and evasion, conspired with John Waddington, Ltd., the U.K. “The game was too innocent to raise suspicion,” ABC News’s Ki Mae Heussner put it- but “it was the ideal size for a top-secret escape kit.” The maps? Concealed within the board itself. The money, in the form of French, German, and Italian bank notes? Hidden below the Monopoly money. The compasses and files? Both disguised as playing pieces. And one of the categories of items that could be included in those packages was “games and pastimes.” So the Allies took military advantage of this human kindness: Posing as “charities” (one of the better fake names: the Licensed Victuallers Prisoners Relief Fund), they sent packages to their POWs that featured clandestine escape kits, which included tools like compasses, metal files, money, and, most importantly, maps.Īnd: They disguised those kits as Monopoly games. Germany, however- in part as a nod to the Geneva Convention-allowed humanitarian groups like the Red Cross to distribute care packages to those prisoners. In Monopoly’s case, those consequences came during World War II.ĭuring the war, large numbers of British airmen were felled over enemy airspace and then held as prisoners behind enemy lines. While this seems a minor change as far as the game itself is concerned-Thimble? Guitar? What’s the difference?-it’s worth remembering that even the smallest changes in the even the smallest amusements can, over the capricious course of history, have significant consequences. (If we ever end up playing a future version of Monopoly together, by the way: Dibs on the robot.) And it will be replaced, per Hasbro, by one of these candidates: a cat, a diamond ring, a guitar, a helicopter, or a mustachioed robot.
One of the cast-metal widgets that track players’ moves across the board-the Scottie dog, the race horse, the hat, the wheelbarrow, the shoe, the battleship, the thimble-will soon be replaced. Today brings news, however, that the board game will be making some changes to some of its most recognizable anachronisms: the iconic playing pieces. To play Monopoly-even if you’re playing one of those newfangled versions-is in some sense to step back in time: specifically, to the America of 1934, when the game was first mass-marketed. One of the charms of Monopoly is its insistent iconography: the quaint little board, with its quaint little properties and its quaint little playing pieces, all overseen by the quaint little mascot that is Rich Uncle Pennybags.
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