Monopoly is a multi-player 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, aiming to drive them into bankruptcy. Money can also be gained or lost through Chance and Community Chest cards, as well as tax squares. Players receive a stipend 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. Monopoly has become a part of international popular culture, having been licensed locally in more than 103 countries and printed in more than 37 languages. As of 2015, it was estimated that there have been 275 million copies sold worldwide.
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.
Upwords is a board game invented by Elliot Rudell and originally published by the Milton Bradley Company, now a division of Hasbro. Worldwide marketing rights to Upwords have been licensed to Spin Master Inc. by Rudell Design, LLC as of 2018. Upwords is similar to Scrabble or Words With Friends, in that players build words using letter tiles on a gridded gameboard. The point of difference is that in Upwords letters can be stacked on top of other letters already on the gameboard to create new words. The higher the stack of letters, the more points are scored. This typically makes words built in later turns of the game more valuable than earlier words, increasing play intensity and adding a level of strategy unique to Upwords. The memorization of two-letter words is considered a useful skill in this 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.
Boggle is a word game invented by Allan Turoff and originally distributed by Parker Brothers. The game is played using a plastic grid of lettered dice, in which players look for words in sequences of adjacent letters.
Hasbro Interactive was an American video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the large game and toy company. Several of its studios were closed in early 2001 and most of its properties were sold to Infogrames which completed its studio's closures at the end of 2001.
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, and Probe. The trade name became defunct with former products being marketed under the "Hasbro Gaming" label with the logo shown on Monopoly games.
Scrabble is an American television game show based upon the Scrabble board game. Muriel Green of Exposure Unlimited developed the idea for a television game show based upon the board game concept. During 1983, Green convinced Selchow and Righter, who at that time owned the Scrabble board game, to license Exposure Unlimited to produce the game show. Exposure Unlimited co-produced the show with Reg Grundy Productions, and licensed the show to NBC. Scrabble aired on NBC from July 2, 1984, to March 23, 1990, and again from January 18 to June 11, 1993. Chuck Woolery hosted the program. Jay Stewart was the announcer for the first year. Charlie Tuna replaced him in the summer of 1985 and remained through the original run and the entirety of the 1993 revival.
Rich Uncle Pennybags is the mascot of the board game of Monopoly. He is depicted as a portly old man with a moustache who wears a morning suit with a bowtie and top hat. In large parts of the world he is known, additionally or exclusively, as the Monopoly Man, or Mr. Monopoly. He also appears in the related games Advance to Boardwalk, Free Parking, Don't Go to Jail, Monopoly City, Monopoly Junior, and Monopoly Deal.
Super Scrabble is a board game introduced in 2004 and a variant of Scrabble. It is played on a 21×21 grid board instead of Scrabble's usual 15×15, and uses twice as many letter tiles.
Scattergories is a creative-thinking category-based party game originally published by Parker Brothers in 1988. Parker Brothers was purchased by Hasbro a few years later, which published the game internationally under its Milton Bradley brand. The objective of the 2-to-6-player game is to score points by uniquely naming objects within a set of categories, given an initial letter, within a time limit. The game is based on a traditional game called "Categories".
Philip E. Orbanes is an American board game designer, author, founding partner and former president of Winning Moves Games in Danvers, Massachusetts. Orbanes is a graduate of the Case Institute of Technology. He was a Senior Vice President for Research and Development at Parker Brothers until the 1990s. Orbanes has also served as Chief Judge at U.S. National and World Monopoly tournaments.
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 an American, 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 had been created much like the modern version of Monopoly sold by Parker Brothers and its 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 design and evolution.
Monopoly: The Mega Edition is a special variant of the popular board game Monopoly. The game was first published in 2006 by Winning Moves Games USA in the USA. A UK version was adapted in 2007.
The Computer Edition of Scrabble is a computer game developed by Leisure Genius for the Macintosh in 1988, and was an official computerized version of the board game Scrabble.
Family Game Night was an American television game show based on Hasbro's family of board games and EA's video game franchise of the same name. The show was hosted by Todd Newton. Burton Richardson announced for the first two seasons, until he was replaced by Stacey J. Aswad for the third season, and then Andrew Kishino beginning in the fourth season. The 60-minute program debuted on October 10, 2010, on The Hub, formerly Discovery Kids. The network would become Discovery Family on October 13, 2014; it was previewed on October 9, 2010, on its sister channel, TLC. Seasons 1 and 2 each contained 26(1) and 30(2) episodes. Seasons 3, 4 and 5 each contained 15 episodes. Season two premiered on Friday, September 2, 2011, and additional games were added. The games added to the second season included Cranium Brain Breaks, Green Scream, Ratuki Go-Round, Simon Flash, Operation Sam Dunk, Trouble Pop Quiz, and Spelling Bee. However, games from the previous season were still kept.
Words with Friends is a multiplayer word game developed by Newtoy. Players take turns building words crossword-puzzle style in a manner similar to the classic board game Scrabble. The rules of the two games are similar, but Words with Friends is not associated with the Scrabble brand. Up to 40 games can be played simultaneously using push notifications to alert players when it is their turn. Players may look up friends either by username or through Facebook, or be randomly assigned an opponent through "Smart Match". Players can also find potential opponents using Community Match.
