A Hundred Games Before the Empire

In 1883, a sixteen-year-old boy in Salem, Massachusetts spent forty dollars printing five hundred copies of a card game called Banking. He sold four hundred eighty-eight of them, pocketed a hundred dollars in profit, and founded a company. Fifty-two years and over a hundred personal game designs later, that company’s name would appear on the most commercially successful board game in history — a game George Swinnerton Parker did not design.

This is the paradox of Parker’s legacy. He was a prolific game designer who built a publishing empire so large it swallowed his design career whole. Say “Parker Brothers” and people think of Monopoly, Clue, Risk — none of which Parker designed. His personal creations number over a hundred, most of them forgotten, buried under the brand he built to house them. History remembers the publisher. The methodology measures the designer.

The Rebellion of Fun

George Parker entered a market dominated by moral instruction. In the 1880s, American board games were Sunday school in a box — The Checkered Game of Life taught children that Intemperance led to Ruin, that Industry led to Wealth, that every roll of the dice carried a sermon. Milton Bradley believed games existed to build character. The entire industry agreed.

Parker disagreed. Banking was a financial speculation game — players borrowed money, took risks, and won or lost on market forces. No moral lesson. No punishment for vice. The game existed to be played, not to instruct. At sixteen, George Parker had articulated a design philosophy that wouldn’t become industry consensus for another half century: games should be fun first, and fun only needs to justify itself.

This was not a mechanical innovation. It was a philosophical one. Parker didn’t invent new mechanisms — he liberated existing ones from the obligation to teach. Card games could be about speculation instead of scripture. Board games could be about adventure instead of virtue. The shift sounds obvious now because Parker won the argument so completely that his opponents vanished from memory.

The Cannons Before Wells

In 1897, as tensions between the United States and Spain escalated toward war, Parker designed War in Cuba — an action game in which players fired wooden bullets at die-cut soldiers using hand-held spring-loaded cannons. The game hit parlor tables before the actual war began. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor and America went to war, Parker was ready with three more: Battle of Manila, Siege of Havana, and The Philippine War, all released in 1898. The Blockade Runner followed in 1899.

These four box war games with miniature cannons and soldiers predate H.G. Wells’s Little Wars by fifteen years. The Strong National Museum of Play documents them as action-based games with physical projectile mechanics — spring-loaded cannons, wooden ammunition, die-cut military figures on illustrated battle scenes. The surface resemblance to Wells is striking.

But the resemblance is surface only. Parker’s war games were dexterity novelties — aim, fire, knock over targets. Wells’s Little Wars was a systematic rulebook with phase structure, measured movement, points-based army balancing, campaign scoring, and documented iterative design. Parker made toy cannons that shot. Wells made a rules framework that became a hobby. No historical evidence links Parker’s games to Wells or to the subsequent miniature wargaming tradition. They appear to be independent parallel developments — one a commercial entertainment product, the other the foundation of a new design space.

The historical footnote is fascinating. The causal link doesn’t exist.

Rook and the Art of the Simple Game

Parker’s most enduring personal design arrived in 1906. Rook, co-designed with his wife Grace, replaced standard playing card suits and face cards with numbered cards in four colors and a single special card — the Rook bird. The design targeted religious communities, particularly Mennonites and other groups who considered standard playing cards sinful. By removing the associations with gambling, Parker opened an entire market that had been locked out of card gaming.

Rook became the best-selling card game in the country. It has been continuously published for over a hundred and twenty years. The trick-taking mechanics are clean, the bidding system is straightforward, and the Rook card — worth twenty points and always assigned to the winning bidder’s team — adds a layer of strategic risk that elevates the game above its simple structure. In the American South and Midwest, Rook night is a cultural institution that has survived three centuries of change.

The design reveals Parker’s real strength: identifying a market need and building the simplest possible game to fill it. Not deep architecture. Not mechanical innovation. Accessibility as craft. The game does exactly what it needs to do, nothing more, and has outlasted virtually everything published in its decade.

The Developer’s Hand

In March 1935, Parker Brothers acquired a game called Monopoly from an inventor named Charles Darrow. George Parker was sixty-nine years old and the company’s final authority on every game considered for publication. He personally rewrote the rules.

Parker’s editorial hand is documented: he added the short-game rules and time-limit options that made Monopoly practical for actual play sessions. He adjusted Income Tax from three hundred dollars or ten percent down to two hundred or ten percent. He specified visual design elements — the gold ring on the Luxury Tax space, property values printed directly on board spaces. These are development choices, not design choices, but they shaped how the world actually plays the game.

Monopoly was not Parker’s design. Lizzie Magie created The Landlord’s Game in 1903. Darrow developed the version Parker Brothers purchased. But Parker’s development work made the published product playable, and his company turned it into the most commercially successful board game in history — two hundred seventy-five million copies sold across a hundred fourteen countries. The designer gets no credit here. The methodology measures what you designed, not what you polished.

A Hundred Games in the Dark

The historical record is frustratingly incomplete. Sources confirm George Parker personally designed over a hundred games during his career, but only a fraction have surviving documentation: Banking (1883), The Dickens Game (1885), Ivanhoe (1885), Speculation (1885), Great Battlefields (1885), Innocence Abroad (1890), the war game series (1897–1899), Klondike (circa 1897), Rook (1906). The remaining ninety-odd titles exist as catalog entries, faded box lids, and archival references — real games by a real designer, but too distant to evaluate in detail.

What the surviving work reveals is consistency over depth. Parker’s designs are card games, board games, and action games — three distinct formats, all pitched at accessibility. His rules-writing was reportedly so clean it needed no editing decades after composition. His topical approach — Klondike for the Gold Rush, the war games for the Spanish-American War, Innocence Abroad for Mark Twain — shows a designer who understood that theme sells and that the fastest path to a player’s attention is through the morning newspaper.

But none of these games demonstrate deep mechanical systems. Parker worked in simple structures. His craft was in the clarity of the rules, the sharpness of the theme, and the rightness of the market fit. That is a real design skill — and one that most designers undervalue — but it sits at a different altitude than the system-builders who scored higher on this list.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

George Parker was the first American game auteur. Before him, American games were made by companies or by ministers with moral agendas. Parker put his name on the box and his philosophy in the rules: this game exists to be enjoyed. Full stop.

The irony is architectural. He built a company so successful at publishing other people’s games that it erased his own design career from cultural memory. Parker Brothers published Monopoly, Clue, Risk, Sorry, Trivial Pursuit — the canon of American board gaming — and none of them were George Parker’s designs. His hundred-odd personal creations sit in archives and collector’s shelves while the brand he built dominates the mass market.

The 1898 war games are the most tantalizing ghost in this story. Spring-loaded cannons firing at die-cut soldiers, fifteen years before Wells picked up a toy gun at Sandgate. If Parker had written a rulebook instead of selling a box — if he had codified movement, terrain, campaign scoring, and published it as a system rather than a product — the entire genealogy of miniature wargaming might run through Salem, Massachusetts instead of Kent, England. He had the physical mechanic. He lacked the systems thinking. The cannons fired. The rules stayed in the box.

What Remains

Rook (1906) — a hundred twenty years in continuous print, still played at kitchen tables across the American South and Midwest.

Banking (1883) — the game that launched Parker Brothers, designed by a sixteen-year-old who believed games didn’t need permission to be fun.

The 1898 war games — War in Cuba, Battle of Manila, Siege of Havana, The Philippine War — spring-loaded cannons and die-cut soldiers, fifteen years before Wells, a fascinating historical footnote in a box.

A philosophy that changed an industry: games are entertainment, not instruction. Parker said it first in America, said it loudest, and built the company that proved it to the world.

And over a hundred games, most of them lost, all of them designed by a man whose brand became so famous it made his personal work invisible.

Total: 22 points. Year: 1883.

22 points. 1883. A hundred games before the empire.

And over a hundred games, most of them lost, all of them designed by a man whose brand became so famous it made his personal work invisible.