Monopoly is a multiplayer economics-themed board game. In the game, players roll two dice to move around the game board, buying and trading properties and developing them with houses and hotels. Players collect rent from their opponents and aim to drive them into bankruptcy. Money can also be gained or lost through Chance and Community Chest cards and tax squares. Players receive a salary every time they pass "Go" and can end up in jail, from which they cannot move until they have met one of three conditions. House rules, hundreds of different editions, many spin-offs, and related media exist.
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
Stratego is a strategy board game for two players on a board of 10×10 squares. Each player controls 40 pieces representing individual officer and soldier ranks in an army. The pieces have Napoleonic insignia. The objective of the game is to either find and capture the opponent's Flag or to capture so many enemy pieces that the opponent cannot make any further moves. Stratego has simple enough rules for young children to play but a depth of strategy that is also appealing to adults.
Risk is a strategy board game of diplomacy, conflict and conquest for two to six players. The standard version is played on a board depicting a political map of the world, divided into 42 territories, which are grouped into six continents. Turns rotate among players who control armies of playing pieces with which they attempt to capture territories from other players, with results determined by dice rolls. Players may form and dissolve alliances during the course of the game. The goal of the game is to occupy every territory on the board and, in doing so, eliminate the other players. The game can be lengthy, requiring several hours to multiple days to finish. European versions are structured so that each player has a limited "secret mission" objective that shortens the game.
Cluedo, known as Clue in North America, is a murder mystery game for three to six players that was devised in 1943 by British board game designer Anthony E. Pratt. The game was first manufactured by Waddingtons in the United Kingdom in 1949. Since then, it has been relaunched and updated several times, and it is currently owned and published by the American game and toy company Hasbro.
Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which winning is determined by a player's ability to answer trivia and popular culture questions. Players move their pieces around a board, the squares they land on determining the subject of a question they are asked from a card. Each correct answer allows the player's turn to continue; a correct answer on one of the into the answerer's playing piece. The object of the game is to collect all six wedges from each "category headquarters" space, and then return to the center "hub" space to answer a question in a category selected by the other players.
Hasbro, Inc. is an American multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment holding company founded on December 6, 1923 by Henry, Hillel and Herman Hassenfeld and is incorporated and headquartered in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Hasbro owns the trademarks and products of Kenner, Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and Wizards of the Coast, among others. As of August 2020, over 81.5% of its shares were held by large financial institutions.
Avalon Hill Games Inc. is a game company that publishes wargames and strategic board games. It has also published miniature wargaming rules, role-playing games and sports simulations. It is a subsidiary of Hasbro, and operates under the company's "Hasbro Gaming" division.
Pictionary is a charades-inspired word-guessing game invented by Robert Angel with graphic design by Gary Everson and first published in 1985 by Angel Games Inc. Angel Games licensed Pictionary to Western Publishing. Hasbro purchased the rights in 1994 after acquiring the games business of Western Publishing. Mattel acquired ownership of Pictionary in 2001. The game is played in teams with players trying to identify specific words from their teammates. Its name is a portmanteau of "picture" and "dictionary".
Boggle is a word game introduced in 1972 and in which players try to find as many words as they can from a grid of lettered dice, within a set time limit. It was invented by Allan Turoff and originally distributed by Parker Brothers.
Up Front is a World War II card-based wargame. It was designed by Courtney F. Allen and published by Avalon Hill in 1983. Hasbro now owns the franchise, and at one time licensed it to Multi-Man Publishing, a license that has since expired without republication of the game. There was an attempt to reprint Up Front through Kickstarter in 2013. The project raised over $300,000, but no updates to status has been posted since March 21, 2014.
Jenga is a game of physical skill created by British board game designer and author Leslie Scott and marketed by Hasbro. The name comes from the Swahili word "kujenga" which means 'to build or construct'. Players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower constructed of 54 blocks. Each block removed is then placed on top of the tower, creating a progressively more unstable structure. The game ends when the tower falls over.
Parker Brothers was an American toy and game manufacturer which in 1991 became a brand of Hasbro. More than 1,800 games were published under the Parker Brothers name since 1883. Among its products were Monopoly, Clue, Sorry!, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, Ouija, Aggravation, Bop It, Scrabble, and Probe. The trade name became defunct with former products being marketed under the "Hasbro Gaming" label, with the logo shown on Monopoly games.
Connect Four is a game in which the players choose a color and then take turns dropping colored tokens into a six-row, seven-column vertically suspended grid. The pieces fall straight down, occupying the lowest available space within the column. The objective of the game is to be the first to form a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line of four of one's own tokens. It is therefore a type of m,n,k-game with restricted piece placement. Connect Four is a solved game. The first player can always win by playing the right moves.
HeroQuest, is an adventure board game created by Milton Bradley in conjunction with the British company Games Workshop in 1989, and re-released in 2021. The game is loosely based around archetypes of fantasy role-playing games: the game itself was actually a game system, allowing the gamemaster to create dungeons of their own design using the provided game board, tiles, furnishings and figures. The game manual describes Morcar/Zargon as a former apprentice of Mentor, and the parchment text is read aloud from Mentor's perspective. Several expansions have been released, each adding new tiles, traps, artifacts, and monsters to the core system.
Selchow and Righter was a 19th- and 20th-century game manufacturer best known for the games Parcheesi and Scrabble. It was based in Bay Shore, New York.
The board game Monopoly has its origin in the early 20th century. The earliest known version, known as The Landlord's Game, was designed by Elizabeth Magie and first patented in 1904, but existed as early as 1902. Magie, a follower of Henry George, originally intended The Landlord's Game to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of economic rent and the Georgist concepts of economic privilege and land value taxation. A series of board games was developed from 1906 through the 1930s that involved the buying and selling of land and the development of that land. By 1933, a board game already existed much like the modern version of Monopoly that has been sold by Parker Brothers and related companies through the rest of the 20th century, and into the 21st. Several people, mostly in the midwestern United States and near the East Coast of the United States, contributed to its design and evolution.
Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy video games, first released in 1991. Sid Meier developed the first game in the series and has had creative input for most of the rest, and his name is usually included in the formal title of these games, such as Sid Meier's Civilization VI. There are six main games in the series, a number of expansion packs and spin-off games, as well as board games inspired by the video game series. The seventh installment in the series is slated for release on Feb 11, 2025. The series is considered a formative example of the 4X genre, in which players achieve victory through four routes: "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate".
Diplomacy is a strategic board game created by Allan B. Calhamer in 1954 and released commercially in the United States in 1959. Its main distinctions from most board wargames are its negotiation phases and the absence of dice and other game elements that produce random effects. Set in Europe in the years leading to the First World War, Diplomacy is played by two to seven players, each controlling the armed forces of a major European power. Each player aims to move their few starting units and defeat those of others to win possession of a majority of strategic cities and provinces marked as "supply centers" on the map; these supply centers allow players who control them to produce more units. Following each round of player negotiations, each player can issue attack and support orders, which are then executed during the movement phase. A player takes control of a province when the number of provinces that are given orders to support the attacking province exceeds the number of provinces given orders to support the defending province.
Cluedo, known as Clue in North America, is a murder mystery-themed multimedia franchise started in 1949 with the manufacture of the Cluedo board game. The franchise has since expanded to film, television game shows, book series, computer games, board game spinoffs, a comic, a play, a musical, jigsaws, card games, and other media.
