Monopoly began as a warning. In 1904 a Washington stenographer named Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord’s Game: a square track of properties, rent paid to whoever owned the square you landed on, and a corner that sent you to jail. She meant it to show what happens when a few people own the ground everyone else has to cross. She gave it two sets of rules. Under one you won by bankrupting everybody else. Under the other, later called Prosperity, every player gained whenever anyone bought new land, and everybody won together once the player who started with the least money had doubled it. In 1935 Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500 and put its weight behind the version Charles Darrow had been selling, the one with only the first set of rules, which he said he’d invented in his basement. So the game about who ends up with the money ended up with somebody else. The rules she left behind are the more interesting game now, I think: not because winning together is sweeter, but because it is so much harder to arrange.