(12/41: 1843) ANNE ABBOTT
The Woman Who Proved Americans Would Play
In 1843, nobody in America thought games were a business.
Games existed, of course. The Mansion of Happiness had been selling modestly since 1800 — a morality board game where players advanced toward heavenly reward by landing on virtues and retreated by landing on vices. It was instruction disguised as entertainment, and the disguise was thin. The American middle class bought it the way they bought Sunday school primers: because they were supposed to.
Anne Wales Abbott walked into W. & S.B. Ives’ publishing office in Salem, Massachusetts, with something different. Dr. Busby was a card game. Twenty cards. Four families. Players requesting cards they believed their neighbors held, winning through memory and attention. It was fun. Not morally improving, not pedagogically structured, not a sermon in cardboard. Fun.
The publishers were skeptical. They bought it for a nominal fee, expecting modest returns. It sold fifteen thousand copies in eighteen months — three times what Mansion of Happiness moved in its best year. The first commercially successful American game was designed by a clergyman’s daughter from Beverly, Massachusetts, who lived to be one hundred years old and never designed another hit.
Beverly, Salem, Cambridge
Born April 10, 1808, Anne Wales Abbott was the daughter of Reverend Abiel Abbott, a Congregationalist clergyman. She grew up in the New England intellectual tradition — educated, literate, steeped in the culture of moral purpose that shaped everything from schoolbooks to parlor entertainment.
Her path to game design was indirect. She was a writer first — literary criticism, editorial work, the kind of professional intellectual labor available to educated women in antebellum New England. In 1850, she published a review of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in the North American Review. From 1851 to 1858, she edited The Child’s Friend, a literary magazine for young readers whose profits went to the relief of indigent children.
Game design was a brief chapter. Three games between March 1843 and September 1844. Then she returned to the literary world and stayed there for the remaining six decades of her life. She died June 1, 1908, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One hundred years old. The longest-lived designer in this series by a considerable margin, and the one with the shortest design career.
Dr. Busby
The game is simple. Twenty cards depicting four fictional families — the Busbys, the Dolls, the Ninny-Come-Twitches, and Spade the Gardener’s household. Players take turns requesting specific cards from their neighbors. If you remember which cards have been called, shown, or passed, you know where they are. If you don’t, you’re guessing. The first player to collect complete sets wins.
The mechanic is memory. Not dice, not moral judgment, not the spinner that governed most American games of the era. Memory — the cognitive skill that rewards attention, punishes distraction, and scales with every additional player at the table. The game worked because it was competitive without being adversarial, simple enough for children, and engaging enough for adults who discovered that keeping track of twenty cards across four opponents was harder than it sounded.
Fifteen thousand copies. In 1843. When the entire American game market was measured in thousands of units total. Dr. Busby outsold everything else Ives published by a factor of three and demonstrated, for the first time, that Americans would pay for games they actually wanted to play rather than games they thought they should play.
The game was reprinted for decades. Copies survive in the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. It appears in every serious history of American board gaming as the inflection point — the game that proved the market existed.
The Other Two
The Game of the Races appeared in January 1844, published by J.P. Jewett in Salem. A racing game — the mechanics are not well documented in surviving sources. Master Rodbury and His Pupils followed in September 1844, published by Ives, an educational game in the moral-instruction tradition that Abbott had already transcended with Dr. Busby.
Neither achieved Dr. Busby’s commercial impact. Neither is remembered the way Dr. Busby is remembered. They exist as evidence that Abbott was thinking seriously about game design as a practice — three distinct formats in eighteen months: card game, racing game, educational game — but without documented mechanics or sales figures, they remain footnotes to the one game that mattered.
The Scoring Case
Invention (5): “It was out there, this person implemented it”
Memory-based card games existed in European parlor traditions before Abbott. What she did was package the concept into a commercially viable American product at the exact moment the market was ready for entertainment games distinct from purely moral instruction. The innovation is cultural and commercial rather than mechanical — she proved American families would buy games for fun, not just edification. That’s a real contribution to design space, but it’s implementation of an existing game concept rather than creation of new mechanics. Not 6 because the mechanics themselves were circulating in parlor traditions. Not 4 because the commercial framing — game-as-entertainment-product for the American middle class — represented a genuinely new application that opened the entire American game industry.
Architecture (4): “Functional but rough”
Dr. Busby is a twenty-card memory game. It functions. The small deck creates manageable memory load while supporting competitive play. It was reprinted for decades, suggesting basic durability. But the system is simple by any standard — no hidden depth, no subsystems, no extensibility beyond the core memory loop. Not 5 because there is no evidence of deeper strategic play or meaningful replay variance beyond memory skill differences. Not 3 because the game functioned well enough to survive decades of reprinting and compete successfully in the emerging American market.
Mastery (2): “One shot”
Three games in eighteen months, then no further game design for the remaining sixty-four years of her life. Dr. Busby is the only game with documented significance. Game of the Races and Master Rodbury are footnotes with unknown mechanics. The design career, measured by the methodology, is essentially one notable game. Abbott’s broader career — literary editing, criticism, a century of remarkable life — is impressive, but the game design portfolio is minimal. Not 3 because there is no promise-without-fulfillment arc — she designed one successful game and moved on to other work entirely. Not 1 because Dr. Busby was genuinely successful and demonstrates real if limited design competence.
Adjustments — +1
- ■ Longevity 10+ years (+0): Active game design career 1843–1844. Eighteen months. Does not approach the threshold.
- ■ Full-time career (+0): Game design was not her primary profession. She was a writer and editor who designed three games during a brief period.
- ■ Awards (+0): No formal game design awards existed in her era. Museum collections and modern scholarly recognition, but no industry awards, nominations, or Hall of Fame inductions.
- ■ Branded name (+0): Dr. Busby was widely known in the 1840s–1850s but is not recognized by modern non-gamers.
- ■ Cross-genre success (+1): Card game (Dr. Busby), racing game (Game of the Races), educational game (Master Rodbury and His Pupils). Three distinct game formats with published designs in each.
- ■ Commercial success (+0): Fifteen thousand copies in eighteen months was blockbuster performance for 1843. But at period retail pricing, lifetime revenue does not approach the $10M threshold in any currency or inflation adjustment.
- ■ Design propagation (+0): Dr. Busby’s commercial success catalyzed the American game publishing industry, but no documented evidence of specific mechanics or design approaches being adopted by other designers.
- ■ Field stewardship (+0): No documented mentorship, design writing, educational initiatives, or organizational contributions to game design beyond her published games.
The Hidden Pattern
Abbott’s contribution isn’t a mechanic. It’s a proof of concept.
Before Dr. Busby, the American game market was a morality play — games existed to teach virtue, and their entertainment value was incidental at best. Abbott demonstrated that the equation could reverse. Entertainment first. Moral instruction optional. The market responded immediately and overwhelmingly.
The Ives Brothers, emboldened by Dr. Busby’s success, expanded their game publishing. The firms that followed — Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley — built on the commercial template Abbott had validated: games Americans wanted to play, sold at prices American families could afford, marketed as entertainment rather than education. The entire American board game industry descends, in a real sense, from fifteen thousand copies of a memory card game sold in 1843.
Abbott didn’t stay to build on her success. She returned to literature, to editing, to the intellectual work that occupied the rest of her century-long life. The game industry she helped create grew without her. By the time Parker Brothers incorporated in 1883, Dr. Busby was a historical curiosity. By the time Milton Bradley died in 1911, three years after Abbott herself, the industry she had kickstarted was generating millions of dollars annually.
She proved the market existed. Then she walked away. The market didn’t need her anymore. It never forgot what she demonstrated.
What Remains
Dr. Busby (1843) — fifteen thousand copies, the first commercially successful American game, the proof that Americans would pay for entertainment rather than instruction, the inflection point for an entire industry.
A copy in the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation.
The New York Historical Society’s “Created by A Lady” project, recovering the hidden history of women game designers.
A hundred years of life. Eighteen months of game design. One game that changed what games in America could be.
Total: 12 points. Year: 1843.
12 points. 1843. The woman who proved Americans would play.
A hundred years of life. Eighteen months of game design. One game that changed what games in America could be.