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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBRID from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

Today I'm talking with Andrew Innes,

HBO's senior product manager and the founder of Anomia Press, a maker of board games.

Andrew's the author of an article in our January, February issue that takes a look at board

games and the skills they teach that are relevant to business.

Andrew, thank you so much for talking with us.

My pleasure, thanks for having me.

So the article is in the section where we traditionally do book reviews,

although you actually, it's mostly a review of games which I find really interesting,

but there is a book at the heart of this and it's by Mary Pylon and it's called The Monopolists,

Obsession, Fury, and the scandal behind the world's favorite board game. So I thought we could just start with that.

Yeah, I thought it was a really interesting story. So basically, the commonly known history of monopoly is that it was invented by this man Charles Darrow in the early 1930s and

he invented it by himself and then pitched it eventually to Parker Brothers and then eventually it became this runaway hit and it's now

sold you know 275 million copies worldwide etc.

But really the story is that a woman named Elizabeth McGee invented a game in the early 1900s over 30 years

before Charles Darrow came upon the game. She called it the Landlords game and it was used, she created it to teach the evils of things like monopolies and private land ownership.

So she created this game, it then took on a little bit of a life of its own.

People made their own versions of it.

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